I’ve retired once.  I worked for more than 40 years and retired.  Once.  One time.  It wasn’t my idea, the retirement thing, but when they stop paying you, it’s time to cobble together the shreds of your remaining dignity and declare retirement.  (The phrase you’re racking your brain over and trying to recall is “olly olly oxen free” or more colloquially, “ally ally alls in free” as sort of a do-over for the rest of your life.)

Little did I know at the time that the proper term for what I did was “tirement”  not “retirement.”  Now, today, with The Dairy Queen announcing, through his agent (another failing on my part, i.e., no agent), that’s he’s retiring again, or re-retiring if not re-re-retiring, I realize my one and done disappearance from the work-a-day world was nothing more than a tirement, and a paltry one at that.

It is possible, however, that this is a geographical retirement, effective only on the East Coast or in a specific time zone, and that there are still games to be played and interceptions to be thrown in the Midwest, Southwest and Left Coast, or in the Central or Mountain or Fantasy Time Zones.  It’s become harder and harder to tell about such things with The Dairy Queen.  It’s good to be able to make one’s own reality.

I will miss him, though.  Rather, I’ll miss the Brett Farve of the 90’s and early 2000’s, in his pre-Dairy Queen phase.  I believe football will miss him, too.  It’s not like a Steve Young or Troy Aikman retiring, terrific quarterbacks who took their teams as far as they could go, winning the whole pot.  The Good Brett did that as well, but he was more than that.  As I’ve heard others say, he feels like a guy who could have played this game 40 years ago as well as he played it six to ten years ago.  He played a lot better than he retired, but that’s setting the bar pretty low, and I can forgive him for that.

I remember going to a handful of Texas Rangers games back when Nolan Ryan was pitching for them.  The games never turned out this way for me, but each time I went, I knew and felt that I had a chance to witness and feel a part of something special with Ryan.  I knew and felt that this night might be the night of his next no-hitter.  He had it in him.  He always had it in him.  Brett Favre had  the same element in him ~ that on a given Sunday afternoon, he could be special.  He could make it special, with his team but also above and beyond his teammates.  He wasn’t unique, but he was rare ~ a special player.  I’ll miss him.

How lucky we are to have a handy little, tip ladened column on do’s and don’t’s for the tryouts for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders!  Just the thing to pick you up from that numbing sameness and boredom of college and pro hoops, college and pro hockey, soccer, boxing, golf, tennis, curling, the luge, wrestling and other excruciatingly witless and mindless attempts to take our attention away from the fact that no f’ball is being played.

http://www.dallascowboyscheerleaders.com/news/news_detail.cfm?id=4D92A0FF-D2EC-1F63-C99A88B54DF42424

Again, it’s not necessary for you to thank me.

According to a story in the February 16th Time Magazine, the payoff on Fantasy Fishing is up to a cool, smooth running million smackers with a handful of hundred grand stops along the way.

Here’s what it says ~ ~

Fantasy Fishing

It’s crazy enough that someone can get paid $1 million for catching a fish–the angler who wins the championship tournament on the largest professional bass-fishing circuit in the country takes that awfully sweet bait. But it’s certifiably insane that someone else can sit on his or her butt and win a million bucks by predicting (actually, more like guessing) which fisherman will hook the biggest bass.

All the fantasy baseball leagues that give $1,000 to the winner are small fry compared with the high-stakes world of fantasy fishing. That’s right, fishing. The fantasy-sports craze has grown so large–it’s now an $800 million industry, with 30 million players in the U.S. and Canada–that folks are picking dream fishing teams. And if pisces don’t pump you up, there’s also fantasy surfing, fantasy motocross, even fantasy politics and fashion to satisfy your fix. (See the best and worst Super Bowl commercials of 2009.)

So how does fantasy fishing work? The company that runs the pro tour, FLW Outdoors–named after Forrest L. Wood, developer of the modern bass-fishing boat–also administers the free fantasy version at fantasyfishing.com The setup is simple. Before each of the six regular-season FLW tournaments (the first one starts Feb. 12 on Lake Guntersville in Huntsville, Ala.), players pick 10 anglers from the 155 pros who enter each tourney, in the order they believe the fishermen will finish. The better your picks do, the more points you rack up. And there’s a hefty bonus for an exacta–if your pick for first or second or third, etc., matches the tournament rankings. The player with the most points at the end of each competition gets $100,000. Whoever piles up the most points over all six tournaments wins the million, a record fantasy-sports payout.

FLW is also giving away boats, trucks and gift cards as part of the game. Overall, it’s distributing $10 million in cash and prizes to its top fantasy performers. During fantasy fishing’s ‘08 debut, many winners got lucky. Shellee Kuykendall, a stay-at-home mother of two in Little Rock, Ark., didn’t know fishing even had a pro circuit until she heard about the fantasy tournament from her husband and won $100,000. The million-dollar winner, a Minnesota man named Michael Thompson, had been out of work for more than a year before fishing saved him. Now he’s the face of fantasy fishing: Thompson says he just saw a cardboard cutout of himself at a boat show.

Despite such heartwarming stories, fantasy fishing does have detractors: the dozens of pros who would like to earn more than the few thousand bucks they’ve been reeling in. “Guys are struggling,” says Ken Wick, an FLW pro. “If anything, can’t the [fantasy] prizes be maybe $50,000 for the tournaments, and $250,000 for the big one? That’s still a good amount of money for playing around on your computer.”

FLW argues that the mondo prizes will draw new fans to fishing and thus are a long-term investment in the health of the sport. The strategy might just work. Why wouldn’t fans spend hours watching a guy fish if they knew they could catch a cool million?

You can check it all out at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/sports/othersports/07luge.html?_r=1&ref=sports

This reminds me of the best luge story I can remember.  Admittedly not a big population, best luge stories, but nevertheless, this was the best:

Maybe two winter Olympics ago, someone asked the winning luger or lugeist what his strategy was.  He said his strategy was simple ~ ~ lay back and pray he doesn’t die.

And it’s short.  And it doesn’t involve not making the playoffs.  And it doesn’t involve going one and done when making the playoffs.  And it doesn’t involve T.O.  And it doesn’t involve Pacman Jones.  And it doesn’t involve Jerry Jones, who, though negotiating against no one, couldn’t make a deal with Dan Reeves.