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Subject: OT: The Historical Roots of Fantasy Sports
Posted by: F GUMP
- [352161623] Sat, Sep 20, 2003, 10:27
The Dallas Morning News ran an article Friday (How Fantasy Baseball Began) that might be of great interest to everyone here. It was a long detailed account of the very first Rotisserie Baseball League, which became the trigger for today's fantasy sports world. It is a good historical and personal perspective, and there likely were activities recounted in there that we all have seen ourselves doing.
If you have an interest in reading it, and/or want to copy it, I suggest you do so promptly. The DMN only keeps their articles up for a few days to perhaps a week at most, and once it is gone you thereafter will have to pay them if you want to read the article online. |
| 1 | KTx
ID: 17711111
Sat, Sep 20, 2003, 12:37
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asks for registration so I didn't bother...
but I remember about 7-8 (maybe more?) years ago, where fantasy sports were run through newspapers. A friend of mine was picking players and he said he'd receive points based on how his players did. Then he told me he could win some great prize (forgot what it was).
I thought it was interesting, but didn't think much of it afterwards. Now I'm a fantasy baseball addict...
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| 2 | Tree
Donor
ID: 448441914
Sat, Sep 20, 2003, 13:21
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This brought me back to my teenage years, when i bought the first edition of the book mentioned in the article.
i thought it was the coolest thing ever. i couldn't get one friend to agree.
and then it reminded me of my mid 20s, playing fantasy baseball through USA Today, where i got a book to fill in the stats and such, to track things. it was pretty cool.
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| 3 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 113368
Sat, Sep 20, 2003, 14:18
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Although a bit off-topic here, this year's Fantasy Football Pro Forecast has a nice article on the origins of fantasy football.
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| 4 | F GUMP
ID: 352161623
Sat, Sep 20, 2003, 18:10
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KTx, if I remember correctly, "registration" is a one-time thing that only requires an email addy. No name, no address, no money. I registered long ago, and dont have to do more than re-enter via bookmark now.
Sludge, although the article focuses on Rotisserie Baseball, they have info regarding the Fantasy Football origins within the article, also.
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| 5 | Skidazl
Leader
ID: 4039259
Sat, Sep 20, 2003, 20:50
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Actually, registration is much more invloved than just an email address...
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| 6 | blue hen
Leader
ID: 710321114
Sun, Sep 21, 2003, 13:48
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It began as a pastime among New York literati, but Rotisserie Baseball soon wound up being a world-wide phenomenon
10:35 AM CDT on Friday, September 19, 2003
By BRAD TOWNSEND / The Dallas Morning News
Few in his hometown of Dallas realize it, but Glen Waggoner is practically an icon, definitely a pioneer and a bona fide hall of famer.
He has a plaque to prove it.
Granted, it's the Fantasy Sports Hall of Fame, a distinction that makes Waggoner both proud and sheepish. On the other hand, how many others from Sunset High's Class of '58 can say they had a profound influence on the way fans view sports?
In 1980, Waggoner co-founded the original 10-team Rotisserie Baseball League in New York. Waggoner and franchise co-owner Peter Gethers were, in fact, the first Roto champions.
Although fantasy sports' genesis has been traced to the Oakland area in the early 1960s, no one disputes that Roto Baseball kindled the craze that has swelled into a phenomenon. By some estimates, fantasy leagues now constitute a $1 billion industry, and more than 30 million Americans participate.
"The whole notion that we went around the country with the express purpose of breaking up families by turning people into nerds and zombies is completely false," Waggoner says.
"It happened, of course, on our watch, but it was not something we set out to do."
He's only partly kidding. Now 62 and the deputy editor of ESPN The Magazine, he has a feel for words that sell, a trait he no doubt honed as sports editor of the Sunset Stampede.
Most of his fellow 1980 Rotisserie League owners were, and remain, noteworthy writers and publishing industry executives. Which makes for entertaining, if sometimes rhapsodic, tales about the birth of Rotisserie.
Here's how Daniel Okrent, who devised the concept and rules for Rotisserie and is reverently called "Beloved Founder" by Rotossarians, describes his creation and the ensuing fantasy boom: "Having done this, I now know how J. Robert Oppenheimer felt having invented the atomic bomb."
The Original Ten merely set out to have some goofy, albeit at times absurdly competitive, fun.
They could not have envisioned a future in which there would be not only baseball, football and basketball fantasy leagues, but hockey, golf, NASCAR and soccer.
It is a world in which there is monetary and emotional investment in every touchdown, at-bat, free throw, putt, slap shot and pit stop by some fan, somewhere. It's a world in which 10-minute tickers, pregame and postgame shows, newspapers and Internet sites cater to fantasy players.
It's a world in which traditional loyalties are tested by conflicting interests: The Cowboys lost, but, hey, my quarterback threw three TD passes against them!
Who knew that Roto would produce a Trekkie-like worship of Okrent and Waggoner? In March 2000, they became the Fantasy Hall's inaugural inductees during the Fantasy Sports Trade Association meeting in Orlando, Fla., albeit not without controversy.
"I'm furious!" exclaims, not altogether seriously, Harper's Bazaar magazine publisher Valerie Salembier, the only woman owner in the original Roto league.
"I'm utterly and absolutely perplexed as to why I'm not there. That they got this honor just drives me insane. And I hate them."
How Texas missed out
Although Texans can proudly claim a native among the Roto founders, it turns out that the state whiffed on a chance to be the birthplace of Okrent's league.
At the time, Okrent was a publishing consultant for Texas Monthly . It was during a winter 1979 trip from Hartford, Conn., to Austin that Okrent conceived the idea for a baseball league in which Ordinary Joes could draft and trade real players who had a predetermined monetary value.
After arriving in Austin, he took the notes he'd scribbled and typed the basic rules and parameters of the league. The next day, at a barbecue restaurant called The Pit, he showed the rules to four Texas Monthly executives.
"They basically said, 'Ehh, I don't get it,' " Okrent recalls.
Several weeks later, Okrent pitched his league to five friends over lunch at a French restaurant in Manhattan. The name of the joint was La Rotisserie Francaise. And that's how the league derived that name instead of, say, The Pit League.
Actually, says Okrent, it wasn't until January or February 1980, at P.J. Moriarity's in Manhattan, that seven of the charter members formally hatched the league.
"You know how many meetings there were at La Rotisserie?" asks Waggoner. "One. You know who was there? Not me. All these years, I've been describing it lyrically as if I'd been there.
"Of course, something like this, it's like The Odyssey, like any great tale from history. It's hard to separate myth from reality."
What Salembier, then an associate publisher at Ms. magazine, remembers is getting a call at 10 one morning and being asked to come to a "sleazy bar" at 11. After arriving, she stood for an hour while league creators grilled her on her baseball expertise.
The next day, she received a phone call: "You're in, kid."
"I am very competitive," says Salembier, who stayed in the league four years but remains an avid Astros fan and is friends with franchise owner Drayton McLane. "But I am like Ghandi compared to those guys. They did everything they could to intimidate me, such as driving up the price of a rookie I wanted."
Given the eclectic circle of owners, it's no wonder the league was, at various times, bawdy, intense, excessive and plain weird.
The owners included Viking editor Cork Smith; film and TV critic Bob Sklar; Esquire magazine editor Rob Fleder; and Esquire writer Lee Eisenberg.
The franchise entry fee was $250. Waggoner, at the time an assistant vice president at Columbia University, says he and Gethers shared a franchise because neither could afford it alone. Now Gethers is a novelist, screenwriter and editor-at-large at Random House.
Waggoner had been a teaching colleague of Sklar's at the University of Michigan. Okrent was one of Sklar's students, but Okrent and Waggoner didn't meet until the 1976 or '77 baseball playoffs.
"We did a bunch of dopey things that first year," Waggoner says. "Fake press releases, yearbooks, a lot of it profane and semi-pornographic.
"Okrent and Eisenberg apparently said, 'This [Waggoner] guy, we ought to let him write some stuff for us."
That's how Waggoner in 1984, at age 43, was able to "chuck" the academic field and take a reporting job at Esquire. He likes to say that Rotisserie literally changed his life.
Father of fantasy sports
According to a 1994 article in Fantasy Football Index, and apparently refuted by no one since, former Oakland Raiders limited partner Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach is the father of fantasy sports.
Winkenbach, who died in 1993, recounted in a 1991 interview that during the 1950s he developed golf and baseball leagues in which players' statistics were matched against their opponents'.
In the fall of 1962, during the throes of a 1-13 Raiders season, Winkenbach, Oakland Tribune sports editor George Ross and beat reporter Scotty Stirling started the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League in a New York hotel room.
Fantasy leagues popped up around the country. Okrent remembered that while he was at Michigan during the late '60s, Sklar formed preseason pools in which professors would guess which major league players would lead each statistical category.
"Yeah, there's nothing new under the sun," says Okrent, who went on to become editor at Sports Illustrated, then Life magazine. He's also served as editor-at-large at Time, written several books and appeared briefly in the Woody Allen movie Sweet and Lowdown .
"So far as I know, ours was the first one in which the rules and the math were as refined as they were. And we had the great advantage in that I think eight of us were in the media. So we knew people in the media and they wrote about it."
If there was a seminal day for fantasy sports leagues, it may have been July 8, 1980, when The New York Times ran a story about the fledgling Rotisserie League. A few weeks later, the CBS Morning News did a piece.
Okrent believes newspaper baseball writers also helped spread the fever, particularly during the 1981 major league strike. With nothing else to write about, writers penned stories mourning the absence of their Roto teams.
Then there was the 1984 debut of the official how-to Rotisserie Baseball book, written by the original league members and edited by Waggoner, who also edited the next 10 annual releases.
"It's terrifically gratifying to have helped start" the phenomenon, Waggoner says. "And it better be gratifying because it certainly hasn't made us much money."
By 1991, an estimated 2 million people played fantasy sports, which gives an idea of how large a role the Internet has played in the ensuing growth. But it amazes Okrent that strangers still approach him and start talking Roto.
There were the twin dentists from Indianapolis who stopped him at spring training to thank him for fulfilling their lives. "And you did it without wanting to make money," one of them said. "You gave it to people."
"Oh, if you only knew," Okrent remembers thinking.
Once, a guy followed Okrent into a bathroom and yakked about Roto through a stall. There was the letter from the woman in Owings Mills, Md.: "Dear Mr. Okrent, I thought you ought to know that because of your stupid game my husband and I have just gotten divorced."
And during much of the famous Game 6 of the 1986 World Series (the Bill Buckner game), a sports writer sitting behind Okrent in the press box bent his ear with questions such as: "Will John Candalaria win 20 games next season, or should I trade him for Omar Moreno?"
"I think one difference between Trekkies and Rotosarrians is that all Trekkies have common interest in Star Trek stuff and can discuss it," Okrent says. "Whereas in Rotisserie, there's nothing more interesting than your own team and nothing less interesting than someone else's team."
Okrent quit Rotisserie in 1995 because of the time demands. But last year he returned to the league, which has six of its original members (including Waggoner), in a scaled-down version they've dubbed the AARP League, or Slow Pitch. There is only an opening day draft and one week of trading.
Long gone are the days when the owners would go to spring training in Florida to scout. And of calling major league P.R. directors at home after West Coast games to get box scores and injury updates.
Now Internet sites (for a fee) compile fantasy league statistics and standings.
But no matter how big the fantasy boom gets, there will always be only one original Rotisserie League, and one inaugural winner. At that year's season-ending banquet, champions Waggoner and Gethers started a tradition by having a bottle of Yoo-hoo poured over their heads.
For Waggoner's 50th birthday, his wife found a group photo from that banquet and had an oil painting made of it. "We never thought of it as fantasy," Waggoner explains. "We thought of it as ultra-reality."
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| 7 | blue hen
Leader
ID: 710321114
Sun, Sep 21, 2003, 13:51
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You can get in with a fake address.
I played my first "fantasy" baseball on Prodigy in 1992. It was a pretty lousy game, but I did manage to snag Edgar Martinez the year he won a batting title. You actually played a h2h game every day and you set your lineup for it. If someone from your lineup didn't play that night, they took another game from his season so far that hadn't been used already. Somehow, pitchers could throw a shutout in real life but give up runs if a player hit a homer.
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| 8 | Sludge
Sustainer
ID: 24914721
Sun, Sep 21, 2003, 14:03
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In fact, FFPF has a copy of Winkenbach's league's first draft sheet. Very cool to see just how little it's actually changed.
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| 9 | James K Polk
ID: 51010719
Sun, Sep 21, 2003, 14:31
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This appears to be a reprint of at least some of the article Sludge is talking about. Has the first round of the 1963 draft.
Tracing the roots of NFL fantasy leagues
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