Illustration: Kevin Howdeshell/kevincredible.com
I’m always amazed by how many of my ski and snowboard buddies play fantasy football. They watch all the NFL games each weekend like a spread sheet, tracking how many yards their draft picks have run and thrown for, and how many touchdowns they’ve scored. Really?
It’s like some sort of secret society the way these “fantasites” reveal themselves, finally confessing their addiction while out on the uptrack, riding a barstool or dangling near the summit on a stalled chair. I’m still kind of shocked by how emotionally charged a hardcore turn-earning backcountry buddy recently got while we were out for a skin and he suddenly stopped to turn and blurt, “Aaron Rodgers (quarterback for the Super Bowl defending Green Bay Packers, for those of you not blessed with at least one perpetually self-deprecating Wisconsin friend) was why I won my ‘league’ last year.”
To be honest, I didn’t know he even had cable, let alone Internet access, before he uttered those words. The guy’s a vegetarian, Libertarian, open-space occupying Rastafarian from Pecos, New Mexico, and suddenly he wants to start talking to me about Fantasy Football?! I would have been less surprised if he’d gone off on a tangent about the necessity of fracking, or how much he likes eating Slim Jims and Kentucky Fried Chicken bacon bowls.
But when it comes to Fantasy Football, I’m rapidly realizing that for some hardcore stat-crunching NFL geeks, there is a comforting level of Dungeons and Dragons dorkiness to it all—of dudes conjuring up their perfect pantheon of personal helmeted heroes to help them dominate the unreal world.
Not that I’m hating, because I used to play a lot of D&D back in the day myself. I just get worked up enough watching the game right now. So much so that I can hardly sit still on the couch longer than five minutes at a time, let alone hit the Internet long enough to track the constantly accruing minutiae of yards per catch, yards after catch, yards after contact, etc., along with all of the other associated sidebar wagers, junk talking and one-upmanship that comes with the deal.
Which kind of reminds me of what Ernest Hemingway’s friend Mike Ward told him in A Moveable Feast, “Anything you have to bet on to get a kick isn’t worth seeing.” Or how even back in 7th grade when I was a student pretending to be an 11th level paladin, about to chug a CherryBerry Slurpee, slay the dragon and score the palantir, I still always sensed that any game built on statistics and spreadsheets could never be nearly as much fun as simply being outdoors.
And there are plenty of imaginary friends to find out there. Like skiing, for example, where a lot of my imagination seems to go—dreaming about the next powder day, big open bowl, or perfect morning at Winter Park/Mary Jane when snow control closes Berthoud Pass and it’s just a handful of us out there with the mountain all to ourselves.
I think about skiing all winter long, and most of the summer, too. From October to May, as soon as I wake up in the morning, I immediately look out my window for any sign of fresh snow. I think about the cold across my cheeks when I should be working, unable to stop checking out live webcams for flurries and hardcore powder videos and thinking, “that should be me right now.” Every day, I talk about it and dream about it, then talk about it and dream about it some more. If I’ve ever had a better imaginary friend than skiing, I can’t think of it right now.
Not that it’s any idea I can claim for my own. The first time I ever realized that most sports other than hunting for food (“for food” being the term that mixes the sense of sport with the reality of subsistence) are just intricate athletic challenges we’ve invented to define ourselves, was at my buddy Graham’s wedding at Devil’s Thumb Ranch two years ago.
In his speech, Graham’s best man Ben confessed that for the longest time, he didn’t think that telemark skiing was real. Ben said that when Graham—one of the most committed free-heel flag flyers I’ve ever known—first started talking about the sport (almost to the exclusion of anything else) he thought he was making it up, creating a whole pretend pastime of terms and techniques, equipment and heroes, and magazines and websites that didn’t really exist in this world.
Ben said, “I thought he was just creating it all in his head, until I found out that it really is a sport. I had no idea.”
If it weren’t for Graham being such a fan of telemark, Ben still might not know. Which is at the heart of the imaginary-friend twist to the things we do—how if we didn’t do them, then they may never exist at all. Which is one of the things I like most about skiing, that sense that it is always waiting for me somewhere, with its promise of snow and gravity and speed and hills. It’s the same way with hiking or climbing or kayaking, or maybe even playing fantasy football, how all it requires is for us to enter the game, and then all of the possibilities can begin to be fulfilled.
Anticipation. Imagination. And all fueled by an exhilarating sense of familiarity. It feels like someone is planning a reunion every evening that the snowflakes come streaming wildly by the window. So much so that when I go to bed it’s with that happy sense that I’ll get to see old friends tomorrow. Even more so if it’s been awhile.
Peter Kray is an East High School graduate who married a Cherry Creek girl. He keeps a framed copy of John Elway’s Broncos rookie card next to his wedding photo. You can read more of his writing, including excerpts of his upcoming novel, The God of Skiing, at shredwhiteandblue.com.
