When One Door Closes . . . Oh Shut the Fuck Up.

"Jesus, everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." - Brian Flanagan (Cocktail).

At this point, I'm not sure if that quote refers to just the 2015 fantasy golf season or the Fantasy Golf Report as we've come to know it. I've been cranking-out this drivel on a weekly basis since June of 2011 when I wrote about meeting Golf Channel personality Win McMurry at the U.S. Open and somehow failed to include a picture of her (learning curve). That's a lot of Google searches for cheerleaders, hot golf chicks and Selma Hayek and way too many references to Wall Street, Stripes and, of course, the entire Tom Cruise 1980's catalog.

Here is what I do know. There will be no weekly NFL entries this year. I've tried to maintain my interest in an enterprise that has dedicated more energy to annoying its customers than Comcast but I think I've finally reached my tipping point. Maybe it was the Patriots winning another Super Bowl or Deflategate keeping them in the news all freakin' summer. Maybe it's the Chinese water torture of never-ending disingenuous DraftKings and FanDuel ads that depict regular guys winning millions when it's really just a smaller scale version of the Ponzi scheme credit default swap market that took down the economy in 2008 (more on that later). Or maybe it's just that I've been a hardcore NFL fan for nearly forty years and now I'm just bored.* That's already about thirty-five years longer than I've maintained a continued interest in anything else.**     

Those, however, are but contributing factors. The primary reason for this direction shift is that I've fallen into a rut of formulaic writing (if you can even call it "writing") that depends on rankings, lists and other gimmicks. Other than the rant about the Orioles turning "Autograph Day" for my kids into the elementary school field trip equivalent of "How Hot Dogs Are Made," I can't remember writing one thing this year that I would actually want to read myself. Somewhere along the way I turned into Carmelo Anthony. A lazy uninspired writer resting on a bed of laurels harvested from a complete lack of achievement.  

Well that's all going to change. I want to stop writing like the hacks who pump-out content for the MSN homepage and start writing like Esquire's Charles Pierce*** or at least still be trying when I die (as opposed to "die trying" which is a subtle yet important distinction in this case as I don't plan to write myself to death . . . I've got plenty of other vices working to that end). I figure at the very least I'll come up short and still be the poor man's Charles Pierce a/k/a Norman Chad. 

From a practical standpoint, this means that there's gonna be a few changes round these parts. For one, I'm going to write whenever the fuck I feel like it and not write whenever the fuck I don't (God that felt good). And I'm going to being saying "fuck" a lot more because it is by far my favorite fucking word in the whole fucking English language. 

"Cause you're fuckin' fired!!!"

Also, no more gratuitous artwork inserted solely to increase web traffic. I'm not interested in visits from guys who find me via searches for "cheerleader boobs." And besides, the old posts aren't going anywhere so there's still plenty of "content" to satisfy that demographic. We'll reevaluate in December as we approach the 2016 golf season but we're not going to waste the fall dreaming about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly brie time baby. Step into my office . . . why? 

Footnotes

* It could also be because the team towards which I direct my affection on Sundays has started 0-3 but the fact is I started writing this when they were only 0-1. If anything, the Ravens' disastrous start has rekindled my interest a bit because everyone is writing them off and, on behalf of the city of Baltimore which has already had a rough year, fuck everyone.

** Except my marriage of course which is a constant source of inspiration and spiritual . . . I'm going to stop talking now. 

*** In his recent piece on the Deflategate ruling, Pierce wrote of Roger Goodell, "It has exposed him as a faithless and arbitrary jefe presiding over a banana republic of his own mind." And in The Swamp: The State of the NFL in Washington, D.C., he uncorked these two unhittable sliders, "Dan Snyder, the owner, is a walking, talking, meddling pile of failure" and "[t]his team should take the field to the music of a steam calliope. There should be jugglers and aerialists and bears that can dance and chickens that can do math. There obviously is no need to hire clowns." (By far the best use of the word "calliope" since Bruce Springsteen sang about one crashing to the ground).     

Email the Fantasy Golf Report at fgr@fantasygolfreport.com.