Sports Standings, Real and Imaginary

Ever since the late 1960s, from about the time I was eleven, I have been fascinated by sports standings. I became pretty fanatical with them as a boy, as a matter of fact, poring over the newspaper sports section daily to see how the various teams in the different leagues were doing. And it mattered not whether the featured team or even the sport was one that I was following: I took it all in, be it ABA and NBA basketball, NHL hockey, NFL and AFL football, or AL, NL, and Florida League baseball. Eventually, my impatience with waiting daily to see how various standings changed led me to research the history of the various leagues and how their teams fished in seasons gone by. But even that wasn't enough, and I actually made up imaginary "leagues", the sports they represented being irrelevant, and went gradually through complete "fantasy" seasons, observing the standings as they developed. The teams I would designate by picking out various towns from maps. One league was comprised of twelve Florida cities; another by some obscure Texas towns. For one league, during a particular personally boring period during the summer of 1970, I set up an eight-team league based on cities distributed nationally, the final standings and general course of the "season" I still remember to this day, more so than many "real" seasons. How would I determine who won or lost a game? Simply by shuffling a deck of cards and dealing a pair at a time to determine winners and losers. Although my parents at the time thought that I was slipping too far into the world of the unreal while I did this, I was very much aware that this was pure entertainment for me, nothing more. And even today, I don't see it as that much removed from following the standings of "real" leagues. Besides, look at how seriously engaged people are nowadays with "official" fantasy sports, not to mention the video game craze that seems to dominate so much of their enthusiasts' free time.

So why should I care that the NBA New Jersey Nets team this year, which will probably avoid finishing with the league's all-time worst regular season record because of a late-season "surge", is real or just a figment of my imagination? Of course, I wouldn't be able to actually watch an imagined Nets team play a game, but I'm not talking about that per se. I'm talking about the feeling derived from observing different teams rise and decline over the course of a season, and how far apart they are from other in the standings at any particular time. I bet some people get off in the same way by looking at the stock prices from day to day (or even hour to hour)!

No, I don't make up "pretend" leagues any more; that was more an element of my distant past. But instead of wondering to myself about the propriety of having engaged in such fantasy, perhaps I should be asking myself how far removed from reality I am nowadays when I so closely and passionately follow "real" sports vicariously!