Fantasy Life: The Outrageous, Uplifting, and Heartbreaking World of Fantasy Sports from the Guy Who's Lived It

by Matthew Berry

  So what made this lottery so special?

  The bride made the picks.

  Between the ceremony and the reception.

  In her wedding dress.

  Amy Chalfant, the bride, is in the league and her West Frisco Honey Badgers are former champions. But even still, why on earth would a woman interrupt the biggest day of her life to pick a draft order? Because draft day is that important. Because draft day is that special. Because, as Beloved (now Former) Commissioner for Life Don Smith has said to me every single time the Fat Dogs all get together for our draft, “It’s only the best day of the year.”

  4.

  Drafting by Any Means Necessary

  or

  “They Have Free Wi-Fi at the Krispy Kreme!”

  The first thing you should know is that we are witholding his last name.

  Because the second thing you should know is that everything here is very, very real.

  “Dan N.” you see, is a repo man. A repo man who works nights. A repo man who works nights who wants to keep his repo man job. Hence the first name only.

  The story starts one random night in August of 2011. “My fantasy league was drafting at 9:00 PM during my shift, which meant I was going to be drafting live from the repo truck. Not an ideal situation, but I figured I could make it work,” Dan tells me.

  “My partner knew I’d be drafting, so we agreed to go after a car we’d been trying to find for weeks but had never seen. We called it ‘The Loch Ness Monster.’ Obviously, we wouldn’t see it tonight either, and I could draft in peace and quiet.”

  Of course, if that’s what had happened, this story wouldn’t be in the book, now would it?

  “My draft is ready to begin, and the freakin’ car shows up. My partner decides to hook it, but we get seen, and the owners jump in the car, refusing to get out. Now I’m in a pickle, as my draft is starting, we’ve got a car hooked up, and we’ve got an irate woman and her husband trying to get us to put the car down.”

  Yeah, that’s a situation it’s hard to mock for.

  “I go back to the truck and start my draft. What else was I supposed to do? The husband comes to the truck to try and convince me to put the car down. But then he sees that I’ve got your rankings up on my computer and that I’m about to draft. ‘Draft Vick,’ he says. ‘I agree with Berry: he’s going to have a huge year.’ I take that as a sign and pull the trigger on Vick at eight.”

  Yeah. Sorry ’bout that.

  “So the wife sees the husband involved with our draft, and she is still sitting in her car, so now she’s really pissed. She decides to try a different tactic to get us to put the car down. She calls the cops.”

  Things are going smoothly, then?

  “The draft continues, the cops show up and demand to know what’s going on. My partner explains the situation. ‘I’m trying to repo the car,’ he says, ‘while that woman is trying to drive it off the flatbed and my partner is trying to draft his football team.’ The cop, doing his civic duty, demands that I tell him the round and scoring system, then proceeds to tell me my pick of Vick was a mistake and I need to grab Bradford as a backup. Sweet, now I have gotten advice from another repo man, a deadbeat, and a cop.”

  I love how fantasy can bring the most unlikely people with such diverse interests together. And that the cop was even more wrong on Bradford than I was on Vick. Anyways, back to Dan.

  “All of us finish the draft together, and now that it’s over, we get back to the repo and come to an agreement. We get the car, the cop writes it up as an amicably resolved civil disturbance, and I agree that if I win any money, I will send the husband half. Deal.”

  “Meanwhile, the woman realized that the four guys at the scene (two repo men, a cop, and her husband) cared more about my third-round pick than they did about her sitting in a car on my flatbed. So as we were leaving, she went inside and locked him out of the house.”

  Relationships are like car bills, you have to take care of them.

  “I’m not 100 percent sure, but showing more concern for the fantasy draft of a dude you’ve never met who is repo-ing your stuff ahead of the satisfaction of your wife is probably not going to win you Husband of the Year. And if it does, I’ve been doing this whole marriage thing wrong.

  “Epilogue—I went out of the playoffs in the first round, so the husband lost his car, my league, and quite possibly his wife, due to one bad fantasy draft.”

  So you’re saying Vick in the first round wasn’t his worst judgment of the night? Fair. Drafting while getting yelled at by an angry wife, dealing with a cop, and trying to tow a car is, shall we say, not optimal. But whatever. Dan found a way. For those of us obsessed with fantasy, there is no such thing as no. There are only challenges to be overcome.

  That’s always been my attitude. And when something important in my life and fantasy would intersect, well, I would always choose fantasy. Which meant making sure that my wedding day wouldn’t conflict with any fantasy sports. That’s right, wedding day. The girlfriend had recently turned into a fiancée who, in the summer of 1999, would become my wife.

  It was still a few weeks before my wedding and as usual I was reading every fantasy article I could find. I had read in a column somewhere that The Sporting News was starting up its own independent fantasy service. I emailed Matt Pitzer (SN’s lead fantasy guy at the time), asking for help, and he gave me the email address of a man named Mike Nahrstedt, who was starting the whole thing up.

  One of the reasons for fantasy’s appeal, of course, is proving how smart you are. And I think everyone who is human has some insecurity. Look, I’d been in Hollywood, and it’s a tough town. Between pounding the pavement for a few years to find a job and experiences like Kirk, I was getting mentally beat up a lot. So with those issues and a need to constantly prove myself, what could be better than getting my own column and having a legitimate sports website call me a “fantasy expert”?

  I was a reasonably successful Hollywood writer at that point, having sold movies and working steadily in TV, and yet, there I was, on my honeymoon, running from the beach to dial up to my email in my hotel room to see if Mike had responded. (There wasn’t even fast Internet, let alone email, on your phone in 1999.)

  When Mike said, sure, give him a call, he was amazed I would do it from my honeymoon. Frankly, I was amazed he was amazed. I was so into it and excited, I assumed tons of guys must have been banging down his door. My interview went well, and I convinced him of my passion. I wanted to be a columnist for him, a “fantasy expert.” How could I get in on the ground floor of this, I asked?

  Would I write news blurbs, like the ones on Rotonews? You bet. Would I work dirt cheap? You bet. (I wasn’t giving up my movie-writing jobs, I thought, so who cares what they pay? I just want to do this for fun on the side.) Could I move to St. Louis, because they needed me in the office?

  And that’s where I had to say no. My wife, who had a great job as an executive in show business, wasn’t moving to St. Louis, and I couldn’t ask her to.

  But just the idea, the mere possibility of writing about fantasy sports, of somehow having a national fantasy website declare me an analyst, got me more pumped than I had been in quite some time. So I started looking all over the Internet for another opportunity.

  There were two websites I used all the time back then. Rotonews .com (which later became Rotowire.com) and a similar site, a news gathering and commenting site called Rotoworld. One day in the fall I noticed Rotoworld was advertising for fantasy writers. My heart started racing. “Know fantasy sports? We’re looking for a few good writers! Email us!” the ad screamed, along with a link to do just that. So I wrote this long, impassioned email. How I was a professional writer in Hollywood. How I not only loved fantasy sports but lived and breathed them. That I’d do it for free. Please, I begged, is there any way I can try out?

  And after pouring my heart out in thi
s email, I quickly heard . . . absolutely nothing. Follow-up emails got no response. Emails asking to be turned down just so I knew someone had read me were also ignored.

  But whatever. That’s not a no, right? It’s just a challenge that needs to be overcome.

  I had read the site enough to know that its head writer was a guy named Matthew Pouliot. So I emailed him directly, saying I had a fantasy advice question, but not one he usually got. The advice I wanted was how could I get a job at Rotoworld?

  I mentioned the unanswered emails and that I was a sitcom and movie writer but obsessed with fantasy sports. Could he give me advice on how to get my foot in the door there? If I wrote a sample column, could he get someone to look at it? Or help me get an interview with someone? Anything?

  Matthew wrote me back the very next day, saying he was actually in charge of hiring. The jobs email had been so overflowed with applicants that he just hadn’t had the time to sift through everything.

  Anyways, because I sent my message directly to Matthew’s personal email, he had taken a look, and the professional writer thing intrigued him. He said he looked me up on IMDB.com to see if I was telling the truth. As it turns out, Married . . . With Children was his favorite show of all time. And just like that, I was hired.

  (Little known Rotoworld fact: in the early years, every update, on every player, was done . . . by Matthew Pouliot. All him. For multiple years. Others made a lot more money off that site than he did, but he’s the reason that site had early success. Truly an unsung hero of the fantasy sports industry.)

  Obviously, 1999 was a much different time. You still had to dial up to get online. People weren’t online all day like they are now . . . you checked your email maybe once a day. Nothing was mobile. It was much more prestigious in those days to write for a newspaper or magazine. And like I said, Rotoworld (it turned out) was really just a one-man shop in terms of the content. So the fact that I was a professional writer carried a decent amount of weight, given that few, if any, of the columnists on the site had any formal training. But still . . . no sample, no anything?

  I asked Matthew: Don’t you want to see what I can do? Prove I know something about fantasy? He wrote back something very smart that I later used when hiring my own writers. “The readers will tell us if you do,” he said. “If you don’t, they won’t read you. And that will be that. In the meantime, you’re hired.”

  Getting that “you’re hired” email was among the happiest days of my life. I literally pumped my fist in the air when I read the email. I called my wife. I called my parents. It was unreal. I was a 29-year-old man, I had a successful script-writing career, and yet I was doing backflips because I was getting to write for free for a website most people had never heard of.

  But, man, was I fired up. I would have done anything for that job. Which isn’t shocking behavior. Many of us who play fantasy are like that with our enthusiasm and focus: We do whatever we have to compete, to win, and especially . . . to draft.

  But it’s not just about funny or weird places. It’s about overcoming any obstacle. About not taking no for an answer. About finding a way to draft . . . by any means necessary.

  Just ask Zach. In March 2009, eight members of Zach’s 14-team fantasy baseball league, The Gentlemen’s Club, planned on doing their draft in Vegas. Scheduled for Saturday, they drove in from LA on Friday night. “We basically drank and gambled until about 5:00 AM,” Zach says, shocking absolutely no one.

  Like many college students in Vegas, they were hungover and very poor the next morning. Unlike many college students, however, they also had a draft. So, told by the concierge that there was free wi-fi at a coffee shop in Planet Hollywood, they headed out. Once there, they found no wi-fi, with only an hour until draft time.

  Zach continues: “Keep in mind, none of us had smart phones. We are now too far away to walk back to our hotel by draft time, and we have no money for cabs. It would be impossible to convey the enormity of our challenge. We had to find a place with Internet without using the Internet, assemble our crew of eight, and walk there while hungover within the next 60 minutes.”

  Actually, Zach, I think you conveyed it pretty well. Looks like you’re screwed. “Clutching our laptops, we cast about, calling everyone in our phone books to see if they knew where to find Internet within 45 minutes’ walking distance of Planet Hollywood.” They started assaulting passersby on the street like creepy zombies with bed head and bloodshot eyes. “Internet! Where can we get Internet?”

  Then Zach hears a rumor. “They have free wi-fi at the Krispy Kreme!” Now, time is getting short, and the store is located in the Excalibur, which is far down the road, but doable. “So,” Zach tells me, “we went for it, dodging traffic and throngs of people on the streets. What should have taken 30 minutes to walk took us 10. While hungover. But we made it, and true to the word, they had free wi-fi. We cracked open celebratory tall boys and began another glorious fantasy baseball season.”

  Hungover, sleep deprived, no money, no Internet, hauling laptops through Vegas an hour before the draft? Pretty sure this is what Rudy Tomjanovich meant when he said, “Don’t ever underestimate the heart of a champion.”

  And you know what else Zach told me? “It has now become tradition. Every year since, we make the pilgrimage to the Krispy Kreme. We bring tall boys, make stupid parlay bets on March Madness, and once again vie for the position of Gentlemen’s Club champion.”

  I applaud an entire league working together like that to make draft day happen. Like Tony Seidman’s Quebec-based Solly’s Fantasy Baseball League out of Quebec. In the year 2000, they had a problem with their auction. Normally done in person, a few guys in the league had moved away that year. Back then, long distance wasn’t cheap like it is today, and you couldn’t do a 10-way conversation via IM, video chat, or web messenger like you can now. So what were they to do? Eventually, they came up with a solution.

  “We all decided to log on to a porn site and hold our draft in one of their sex chat rooms. Needless to say, we had several visitors to our chat room who did not understand what ‘Barry Bonds for $8’ meant. Our auction, which normally takes about five hours, took us about ten as we would constantly be interrupted with ‘Are there any horny girls in here?’ or guys ‘yelling’ at us, saying we weren’t talking about sex enough.” Odd. Never an issue at any of my drafts. Tony continues: “Somehow we got the whole auction done.”

  There are endless stories of people going above and beyond to draft a fantasy team. Brendan Dennis drafted while driving a tugboat, veering off his charted course to steal wi-fi from an oil rig. His boat showed up three hours late to the dock, but he got his draft in. While he was at work, Brian Kleckner’s neighborhood was forced to evacuate because of a nearby wildfire. But it was draft day, so Brian snuck past police to break into his house, grab his computer, and sneak back out, past police again, to do his draft. And Drew’s auction draft was the day after Hurricane Irene and there was no power. So he used his parents’ small battery-powered generator to power his laptop and drain his folks’ generator. “With the generator useless, my parents had to just sit in the dark while I did my draft.”

  What proud parents they must be.

  Many great draft day stories, from what people have risked to what they’ve overcome. But the one I like the most might also be the simplest.

  Scott Warren had just moved to Atlanta and, wanting to socialize with league-mates in person, found a league with an opening on Craigslist.

  “It was an eight-team mixed keeper league that had been running for about 10 years. Fifty bucks to get in. Yeah, kind of small, but I just wanted to play. So I started looking over strategies for eight-team leagues and doing my homework to crush the competition.”

  Scott did more than that. Custom, in-depth spreadsheets, rankings, projections, depth charts . . . all loaded on his computer. As Scott says, “I love being the most prepared person at the table.”


  But when Scott gets there, there are only six other guys that will draft. Now it’s a seven-man league apparently. Great, he thinks. What a waste of my time. Scott continues: “The commissioner then says $150 would be going to the website they host the league on. Ouch! That left just $200 to win on a $50 investment. My hopes of enjoying this league at all were dwindling.”

  But then Scott learned that of the remaining $200, $100 would be taken out and put into a girl’s fund for college. He’s just about to leave when he learns why.

  “The league name was the George Braitsch Memorial League. This league first started with some work buddies, and Mr. Braitsch had dominated this league for years. Tragically, some years ago Mr. Braitsch unexpectedly passed away midseason, leaving behind a wife and young daughter. The members of the league decided to name the league in honor of their friend.”

  In fact, Scott learned, George was the eighth owner. “His team is filled with minor leaguers and benchwarmers, but he will always be a part of this league. The members decided that they would take $100 from the pool every year and put it in a trust for his daughter to have after she graduates high school to help buy books for college or whatever she needs. And before we drafted, the commissioner gave everyone an update on the young girl, how she was doing, and what extracurricular activities she was involved in.

  “I was amazed at how truly touching the whole story was. It reminded me that playing fantasy baseball wasn’t about winning money or proving who was the best, it was just about having a good time with good people. I could tell the rest of the guys were here for that reason. No one had a laptop, only a couple had a magazine, and most just had a few handwritten notes. So for the first time ever in a draft, I packed up my laptop, yanked a cheat sheet out of a magazine, and just started to scratch off names as they were called.

  “It wasn’t about proving anything. It was just about having a good time.”