Mojo D shares the GMs' view of NFFA Media Days in this selfie from the end of his Sunday Brunch.
"This will be our new tradition," he said afterwards. "That sh*t was epic!"
By Soren Bernyn
FSN
It was hyped as "The Ballers' Media Daze Sunday Brunch," and the venue was packed with fantasy-sports media and legends of the game. Mojo D came rolling in a few minutes late, dressed to the nines, eschewing the hoodie and shades vibe of recent years in favor of a tailored Italian look. He dispatched a platoon of busty servers with pitchers of Bloody Mary’s, mimosas and bottles of Clase Azul tequila, pouring liberally for the “pixel-stained wretches” of the NFFA media horde. Vape girls with Baller-branded cartridges circulated, and the vibe was getting cozy.
He strolled to the mic and said calmly "hey, bitches, it's on." The lights dropped, and a twice-life-size Beyoncé appeared at the back of the room, glittering on her holographic horse, belting her current hit "Break My Soul" with enough soul-shaking bass to cause veteran writer Woody Larry to lose control of his bowels. By the last chorus, Mojo D was singing the hypnotic "You won't break my soul" refrain all by himself, illuminated by a single blue spotlight, as Beyoncé dissolved into the blue, her projection kissing Mojo D on the cheek.
When the lights slowly came up, Mojo D tilted his head back, laughed silently, then said "Everybody good? Nothing like the Queen B to get you loosened up, eh, Woody?" The next hour was a remarkably cogent and civil conversation with the mercurial bitcoin billionaire "Baller-in-Chief," who held forth on many topics, from other owners of NFFA franchises to his newly discovered extra-planetary origin story.
But he began with a lengthy exposition about his team's “Odyssey-like” migrations to many locations through the years, and what "led my heart" to move from Midtown ("you can have it, Fred Brown - if that's even your real name") to Downtown ("it's a f*cking hillbilly Bourbon Street now") to Pie Town ("Jack [White] made me an offer I couldn't refuse and it was a cool if turbulent few years") to Buena Vista ("thought we were making a difference, but ended up just making more white-people trouble for those good folks").
Starting last season, the Ballers dropped any location name at all - the only NFFA team not to be so identified ("the merch started flying off the shelves in China after that"), and have located their headquarters in The Bitcoin Bunker, an out-of-the-way section of Club Gitmo, the sovereign indigenous nation and playground of the NFFA. Mojo D leaned forward at the mention of the team’s HQ and stated plainly "I am profoundly grateful to Meta World Death, Saddam, Barris, and of course Dr Linardo -- the whole Gitmo crew have made me feel safe in probably the least safe place on the planet. In particular, Saddam’s advice helped me launch the Bitcoin-to-Bullion pipeline, which turned my crypto holdings into house money - and since the house is burning down right now, that was prescient."
Mojo D further surprised the media horde with praise for another NFFA luminary: "Sir Q Curl Sharif is a hero - his actions and support of the Ukrainian resistance are inspiring. We have adopted the blue and gold as our team colors, and are actively involved in making sure Ukraine remains free." Pressed for details, Mojo D softly said “the kinds of things that might make Russia wonder why sh*t keeps blowing up in Crimea.”
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued attacks on one of their own appears to have galvanized the NFFA ownership like never before: "Indeed it has - we can f*ck with Q Curl, but make damn sure nobody else f*cks with Q Curl. And his recent public comments about more love and oneness and opening up to the universe through psychedelics are nothing new in this league, but are hitting the mainstream in a different way - the rest of the world may be about ready to catch up to us. Which means the NFFA needs to get busy on the next iteration."
THE CHINA CARD
The Ballers and Mojo D have had long relationships - both business and personal - in China, particularly with communist party chairman Xi Jinping and Ant Group founder Jack Ma, but those days are over. Asked to comment on China-Ballers relations by R.E. Porter, the Baller-in-Chief said “we spent our season at sea a few years back, playing our home games on Xi’s aircraft carrier, and that’s what really built our fan base over there. Chairman Xi loved that sh*t, but the Party establishment saw the game as a Western bourgeois invasion.
"Now, they weren’t wrong — but that made it tough to operate there successfully. I got to know the great humanitarian Jack Ma (billionaire founder of fintech giant Ant Group and the Chinese Amazon, Alibaba) on the boat and he offered his resources to get a higher profile for the Ballers - but once he got sideways with the Chairman, I literally had to escape out of town on my last trip to the Wuhan wet market in November 2019.” (Ed. Note: after which he likely brought Covid-19 to the US; it is rumored Covid-19 still lives in a deep sub-basement of Club Gitmo. No one will comment on this rumor.)
It’s a shame because the Chinese market is huge - never mind the bootlegs: they’ve got 5 times the people the US has, so we sell everything we make, and probably 3 times that through the black market. Either way, there are a helluva lot of good Chinese citizens sporting Baller logos.”
Mojo D then directed his team to “make sure everybody has a full glass - Imma turn this bitch into ‘Media DAZE’.” And the media horde delivered with some atypically probing questions.
"It's on."
BITCOIN
After a long shot of Clase Azul, intrepid NFFA reporter Ariel Mutha-Tafoya went next: “You’ve been clear about your fortune in bitcoin, and there are rumors about how early you got into crypto: so, are you Satoshi Nakamoto? Did you create Bitcoin?”
The audience gasped and Mojo D looked momentarily grim, then smiled placidly and delivered a lengthy response in Japanese - we are still translating it, but apparently much of it was the haikai no renga poetry of Basho, with references to the love of butterflies, the beauty of people working together and the destructive power of the sun. More to come on this later.
CELEBRITY COACHES
The Ballers have featured a revolving door of celebrity coaches through the years - Cee-Lo Green, Jack White, Mike Tyson - and Village Green GM Dave Goodrow recently derided Mojo D’s coach decisions “as an unnecessary distraction by a pathetic fame-whore.” Asked for comment, Mojo D said “he’s not wrong… about that.
"But I brought Goodrow into this league: he’s still the whipped puppy he has always been, trying desperately to crawl up to position himself as my nemesis. But you know what? He’s done it - I used to care about only defeating the Black Dogs, but he's pissed on my leg enough now that the Green games are circled on the locker room calendar this season. Goodrow needs to tend to his own knitting - they have back-to-back cellar-dweller seasons, the #1 draft pick for the second year in a row, and a milquetoast, D-lister coach. He keeps whining about other priorities, so it’s time for him to sh*t or get off the pot.”
CHANGES AFOOT IN THE NFFA?
When asked about potential changes to the league, the Baller-in-Chief started upbeat: “in the many years since the NFFA has been operating, it has become a near-perfect machine, largely because of the tireless work of the Commish and the gals in the NFFA office.
“However, we started something awful last year that I want to overturn: the 15th game. Although I embrace the NFFA motto ‘In chaos, veritas’, there is enough chaos without breaking the easy symmetry of everybody plays everybody twice. It’s fair and balanced - in the good way. The argument that ‘it’s more fun’ is incorrect — playing the 15th game last season caused unnecessary drama and an uneven result. The juice is not worth the squeeze there.”
R.E. Porter asked for clarification on the rumor that Mojo D was advocating for a division re-alignment, and he opined “there are now five NFFA owners living in the Hillsboro-West End neighborhood of Nashvegas, and I just wondered if there’s a new criteria to re-align based on geospatial location. You’d wind up with one Villager tossed back into the Jorge, and I bet Money would raise his hand not to change; so we’re really just swapping the Daddies and the Bakers. Not a huge change, and as Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us in Self-Reliance: ‘a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’”
THE EXTRA-PLANETARY ORIGINS OF MOJO D
And because it’s Mojo D at the Ballers’ NFFA Media Daze, the thing had to take a turn for the weird. A recent thread on the NFFA owners’ Telegram channel contained a surprising revelation from Mojo D: “during off-season psychonautical experiences, I learned that Earth is not my home planet. I have had inklings about that my whole life, but insight into my true origins has been humbling, liberating and utterly frightening.” Asked to elaborate, Mojo D turned philosophical: “An intergalactic perspective has given me a deeper appreciation for my fellow sentient beings regardless of planetary origin, corporeal form or psychic existence — it has opened my heart and completely blown my mind in ways I cannot fully comprehend. Honestly, I am still trying to assimilate all of it. It has brought on a sense of calm that is totally foreign to me, but I think I can live like this.”
With that, he stood up, toasted the assembled crowd, knocked back whatever was in his glass and shouted “let’s have a great season!”
Beyoncé re-materialized, the music came back up loud, drinks flowed and everyone there knew: it was on.
