Being a JAG means fans ignore you unless you tell them you play a professional sport, at which point they will do a thorough Google search to verify your claim. Refs use you as a foil for their outrageous calls in favor of superstars. The only groupies you score are ones that have something egregiously wrong with at least one part of their body.
ROLE PLAYER. You excel at one particular aspect of your game and one aspect only: things like shooting, returning kicks, baserunning, or making flagrant elbows look innocuous. You have a particular knack for doing this one thing, but are terrible at everything else. Being a role player also means knowing your role, and never venturing from it. Steve Kerr tried posting up once. Michael Jordan had his pinkie toe snipped off with garden shears as punishment. You may also be known as a “specialist,” which is really just a condescending euphemism. I’m good at packing a car trunk. You don’t see anyone calling me an automotive compartmentalization specialist. Only die-hard fans know you. Commercial sponsors will only use you if your talent has some kind of clever alternative usage (“Morten Andersen can kick a football. But can he kick EL Fudge cookies?”). Refs cannot actually see you. And the only groupies you score are the ones who are themselves role players: dominatrices, girls dressed as Little Bo Peep, etc. Depending on your tastes, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
GRITTY (WHITE) OVERACHIEVER. Subset of the role players. As an overachiever, you are notorious for your tireless work ethic. You are the first one to the practice facility and the last one to leave. You watch hours of film every night. You go hard on every play and treat practice like games. Your coach loves you and holds you up as an example to the team, saying, “The rest of you need to be more like little Ruettiger here,” which will in turn force your teammates to do more work than is necessary. Within a month, they’ll hate your fucking guts. I guarantee it. The gritty overachiever is often labeled by announcers as “scrappy,” or “tenacious,” or “a grinder,” or “our last one true white hope before the physically superior black man finally crushes us in the Great Racial Holy War.” Enjoy the extra attention. You worked hard for it, you annoying little white man.
PROJECT. You are raw (Note: All human beings are raw in their natural state). You have a huge body that you have not yet grown into, or you excel at some sort of basic athletic ability but possess no way to apply it practically. Your team will spend millions upon millions of dollars trying to make you into the all-star they envision you to be. They may even continue to try to develop you long after their plans have gone awry. But, chances are, you will end up remaining the same as you are now: a physical freak of nature who happens to be shitty. That’s the way it goes sometimes. But hey, at least you suckered a few people along the way.
SCRUB. You suck. Stop reading this book. If a fan sees you out on the field, he will become visibly angry at your presence. You are a blown assignment waiting to happen. Enjoy playing semi-pro ball in the Quad Cities a week from now.
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DID YOU KNOW?
Former NFL player Tom Tupa lasted eighteen years in the league by being a rare double role player. Tupa played both third-string quarterback and punter. He also played the bugle, making him the most versatile useless player in league history.
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Your playbook, now with 80 percent more confusion!
Upon being drafted by your team, you will immediately be presented with your team playbook. It will be six hundred pages long, single-spaced, with writing on both sides of the paper and copious notes in the margins. Do not lose your playbook. An unpaid assistant coach spent more than one hundred hours copying, laminating, collating, and color-coding that thing. If you lose it, you will make him cry. And you will be fined $25.
You will be expected to have your playbook committed to memory by the second week of training camp. By the third week, you’ll need to have memorized all the plays for everyone else’s position as well. By the end of the month, all of the plays should be second nature to you and you should be able to school others in how to interpret the detailed workings of your coach’s brain. Coaches and fans alike will expect you to never make a single mental error. Ever. But don’t worry. All it takes to master a playbook is a photographic memory and the Kasparovian ability to anticipate all probabilities for multiple scenarios and plan an endgame by instantly recalling similar plays throughout history and their statistical success rate, then calculating the correct move based upon all you’ve absorbed. Surely you picked up a similar skill while studying the History of UPN at Ball State. Consider this sample play: