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

by Matthew Berry

  Matthew continues: “Lopez ended up having a monster game that night. Kevin was so upset, he got into it the next day with Tom, who argued back just as hard.” The argument continued with neither guy backing down and no solution in sight. And so, eventually, it was decided: they would box for the rights to Felipe Lopez.

  Kevin ended up winning the fight, but the hilarious part to me is it all sounds so civilized. I bet, if you do the research far back enough, you’ll find the Burr-Hamilton duel started over who got to draft Cornelius Waxford-Chase in the Gentlemen’s Sporting Club Proprietary League.

  Look, violence has no place anywhere, let alone fantasy sports, but obviously it still crops up. Fantasy will do that to people. And when there’s violence, there are cops. . . .

  In late 2010, there was an altercation on the mean streets of West Terre Haute, Indiana. Written about by both MyWabashvalley.com and Tribstar.com, the reports state that 40-year-old Michael All was arrested for getting into a fight with his 66-year-old father—

  I’m gonna pause for a second to let a few keywords sink in. Words like “arrested,” “fight,” and “father.”

  According to the reports, the dispute arose over a payout from their fantasy football league. The dad suffered broken eye sockets, a broken nose, and several cuts and bruises. Michael was charged with battery resulting in serious bodily injury. Somehow this guy’s life led him to not only play in a fantasy football league with his father (normal) but then to get into a knockdown, drag-out brawl over the winnings with dad (not normal). And from the least surprising part of the story department, a blood test showed Michael All was twice the legal limit at the time of his arrest.

  Can you just imagine him being brought into the booking station? Wow. What was his one call? “Hey, uh, Mom . . . can you bail me out of jail? I, uh, kind of beat up Dad. . . .”

  Sometimes people use their fists to rectify a wrong, sometimes it’s their mind. After Kyle Benevides discovered that the commish of his Tiverton, Rhode Island, fantasy football league had cheated by changing the league settings midseason to benefit his own team, he decided he wasn’t going to take it. Kyle and his league-mate Kiefer wrote an email that had a keylogger virus secretly embedded in it. (A keylogger virus basically logs every keystroke, so you can see exactly what someone’s typing.)

  They sent the virus email to the cheating commish and used the program to extract the commish’s password. They then locked him out of his own email, changed the league settings back, and didn’t let him back into his own email until he admitted what he had done and apologized in person to everyone in the league.

  Yes, the advances in technology have made all sorts of new ways to cheat possible. Before Twitter and text alerts were the norm, Will Mullin created an entirely fake sports website that looked legit, wrote an article about how Drew Brees was missing the game, and sent his opponent the link Sunday morning. “It was working until he tuned in to the Fox pregame show, and Pam Oliver was doing an on-field interview with . . . Drew Brees.”

  I remember one time seeing a tweet from a guy that read like this: “RT @MatthewBerryTMR Arian Foster is Inactive!” Except I never wrote that tweet! Some guy had just written the whole thing, inserted my Twitter handle, pretended I wrote it, and sent it to his league-mate. I quickly tweeted the guy that this was incorrect, but still. Fairly clever on a Sunday morning when lots of info flies quickly.

  Of course, there’s technology and then there’s old school. “Zac” (not his real name) is most definitely old school. Zac, you see, was working for the Florida Marlins in 2007, and toward the end of the year the Marlins were well out of the race. Zac’s fantasy team, however, was very much alive. Playing for the title in a head-to-head fantasy baseball league during the last week of the season, Zac accompanied the Marlins on an end-of-the-year road trip to play the Mets in New York City.

  The night in question was Friday, September 28, 2007, and all Zac needed for his title was one last great starting pitching performance along with a win. From John Maine of the Mets. Who was pitching the next afternoon at 1:00 PM versus the Marlins. It was against this backdrop that Zac and his buddy arrived that Friday night at a bar with some of the team and shared a drink with a few Marlins players. And after they all hoisted a few, an interesting, if not exactly kosher, idea occurred to Zac.

  “All we need to do is get a few more of them drunk and my boy Maine should cruise through the lineup.”

  Fast-forward to midnight that night. “Some front-office staff, a lot of players, a couple of female sales interns, and myself meet up at a trendy bar called Whiskey Park. Drinks were flowing. The bullpen was buying . . .”

  (Note to self: make friends with more relievers.)

  “. . . but I was buying more to make sure they got extra rowdy.” After many shots of Patrón, lots of vodka Red Bulls, and, just to show how loaded they were getting, one drunken picture of a player licking salt off Zac’s nipple, everyone headed back to one of the players’ rooms at the hotel. Apparently, the party was just starting. . . .

  “We proceeded to play ‘Mexican Shotgun,’ which was a game I made up on the spot. It consisted of shotgunning a beer and chasing it with tequila (courtesy of the minibar).”

  Brilliant in its simplicity, Zac.

  “The next morning I felt like shit, but I also felt confident in unleashing Maine as my last starter to grab a title. I also called all my compulsive gambler friends and let them know the Mets’ money line was the play of the century.”

  Google the box score for the Mets-Marlins game on September 29, 2007. That day John Maine went seven and two-thirds, giving up just one hit and two walks, and the Mets cruised to a 13–0 win.

  The box score credits the win to John Maine, but deep inside I know that W was earned by “Zac Smith.” “I went on to win that final week of fantasy and the season, with the John Maine win and his sterling WHIP being the clincher.”

  And that, kids, is how you win a fantasy league!

  7.

  Crazy Things People Have Traded

  or

  “I Said I’d Take Stafford and Hernandez for Finley and Dibs on Amy”

  It was definitely a problem.

  And Tyler knew there was a solution.

  He just didn’t know what it was.

  It was the 2011 season, and Tyler’s team, “Can I get a B.J. . . . Raji?” needed a tight end. That was the problem. His good buddy had Rob Gronkowski and Jimmy Graham. That was the solution. In their Tuscaloosa, Alabama–based league you could play only one tight end, and with both Gronk and Graham having monster years, there was a valuable asset that Tyler could use and his league-mate could not.

  But try as he might, Tyler could not pry away one of the tight ends. Quarterbacks, running backs, two-for-ones, three-for-ones, Tyler offered it all and was either rejected or ignored. And worse yet, he couldn’t even get a counteroffer. What the hell did this guy want? “No offer was sticking,” Tyler remembers, until one day when the guy called Tyler and said, “You know what? I’ll trade you Graham for Scott Chandler and some of your clean piss.”

  Tyler rode Jimmy Graham to the championship, and Tyler’s friend passed his work drug test. And that, kids, is why you don’t do drugs. Someday you might need your urine to upgrade at tight end. Just think. If only Lance Armstrong played fantasy football, he’d still be a seven-time champion.

  It goes to show, you never know how, when, or in what form opportunity will knock. Sometimes it’s your clean living that brings an elite tight end, and sometimes it’s just having a random meal with a friend.

  In late 2003, I was having dinner with a friend who was a big Internet entrepreneur. He had successfully started and sold a famous website. And he had an opportunity. A different website was for sale and had been offered to him. A website that had, in the past year, made $60 million. Sixty million dollars in one year. And the asking price was just one year’s p
rofit—$60 million. Remember, this was when websites were selling for up to 10 times revenue, so it was an amazing price. The owners had apparently made so much crazy cash that they just wanted out—and quickly. My friend could easily get a bank to give him the money—it was a great price for a cash cow. There was just one issue.

  It was an adult website. Specifically, the site was one of those “age verification” sites that, at the time, solved the two biggest problems that porn sites had: proving someone was of legal age to view the content and credit card chargebacks. Too often some guy would call the credit card company and say, “What is this charge? My wife and I are outraged! You need to reverse this immediately! There’s no way I would ever watch teenage busty Asian cheerleaders!”

  Right.

  Anyway, this company had come up with a simple and ingenious solution. They went to all the adult websites and said, hey, we’ll handle that hassle for you, charge a decent fee to customers (like $30 a month), take a slice off the top, and send you the rest. And they did this for a lot of websites. So, for $30, a customer actually got access to tons of different adult websites. For the websites, it solved a major headache and got more customers to their site than they might have drawn otherwise. Plus, under the group business plan, they were making money even if a customer didn’t come to their specific website.

  And for the guys running the verification site, it was genius. They didn’t have to produce content. They didn’t have to hire models or directors or anything. All they had to do was make sure people were of legal age and occasionally handle some annoyances from the credit card companies. Everyone else was making the content, and all these guys were doing was skimming some money off a very large pile to take care of fairly simple issues. It basically ran itself. It was (and remains) a brilliant business model. And it occurred to me . . . what other business has a hard-core, passionate fan base willing to spend money on premium content?

  I called it RotoPass.com.

  I had been getting more and more into fantasy sports at that point, writing two columns a week for Rotoworld and doing three different sports for them (NFL, NBA, and MLB fantasy). I had even been the senior editor of Rotoworld’s first fantasy football magazine in 2003.

  I didn’t want to give up show business, especially when it seemed like things were finally moving in the right direction, but I saw an opportunity in the fantasy sports business space. Sure, I’d have to do a little work at the beginning to get it up and running, but once that happened, it would run itself. I could continue my movie-writing career, and I’d make some nice side money in fantasy.

  That was the idea anyway. I was starting to think outside the box, starting down a path that would eventually lead me to trade one life for another. Just like we do in fantasy when our player goes down with an injury or underperforms, or when we’re just bored and want to do something . . . there is no activity during the season that takes up more thought, discussion, time, and email than trade talk.

  Ever since fantasy was invented, trades have been a huge staple of fantasy sports, happening in every league, every day, all around the world. It’s a crucial way to improve your team, of course, but it’s also a lot of fun. Thinking about trades, staring at other teams’ rosters, negotiating back and forth . . . it’s an important skill in fantasy, and it’s a total blast.

  But sometimes your skill isn’t enough to pull off the deal you need. Or, more than likely, you don’t have players who are good enough for the other person to want. Other than the occasional future draft pick, very few leagues allow you to trade anything other than a fellow player for players in return. But just because there’s a rule against something doesn’t mean people follow it. Not everyone needs clean piss, but they all need something.

  In 2008, Dan was trying to trade with Dave for LaDainian Tomlinson at the deadline but couldn’t beat a competing offer from Jason. “In addition to draft picks, Jason agreed to redo Dave’s kitchen!” And in a work league, Jesse offered LeSean McCoy to his boss for a scrub and 20 hours of overtime. It was a part-time job for Jesse, and “the overtime was more money than the league prize.”

  Ryan Rummel told me a story from the early days of the Cincinnati Cactus League. “We had a late-season trade go down between one of the top teams and one of the bottom teams. The top team, just a QB shy of being unstoppable, got Brett Favre [circa 1998], and the other team got junk.” Ryan questioned both guys. The guy who gave up Favre, it turns out, was someone who filled in as the 12th guy at the last minute and didn’t really know football, so “I was convinced it was a case of a smart player taking advantage of a not-so-smart player. Not totally cool, but not against the rules.”

  Favre led his new team to a fantasy championship that year, and it was only later that Ryan learned the winner “may or may not have given the other guy a bag of weed” for Favre.

  Sounds like the 12th guy was smarter than you thought. It’s not like he had a shot at the title. . . .

  Ryan adds, “Needless to say, we have a rule that came out of the ‘pot-for-players’ scandal of ’98, a rule that stands today. I also give each year’s winner a shirt that has our former champions’ names printed on the back. 1998’s champion has an asterisk next to his name.”

  An asterisk? Or a pot leaf? Because that’s what I would have gone with. It’s not always illegal things that get thrown into trades. Sometimes it’s just . . . well, let Joe Kurczewski tell you.

  Joe is a member of the 10-team Peter J. Harris Memorial Stifler Football Association out of Buffalo, New York. In 2011, Joe needed a QB badly. Not related to his need of a QB was his crush on Amy, a bartender at a local bar. So one night Joe went to hang out at the bar and brought his buddy Jeff. They were having drinks and Joe noticed that, while Amy was friendly, she was really flirting with Jeff. Jeff dug Amy too, but refused to make any kind of move. As Joe explains it, “I had already called dibs on her, and Jeff refused to break ‘the bro code.’”

  Kudos to you, Jeff, but luckily Joe is a man who is both practical and an opportunist. He still needed a QB, Jeff needed a TE, and Amy was getting annoyed that Jeff was ignoring her obvious flirting. Trade talks resumed and, when it was all said and done, “Matthew Stafford and Aaron Hernandez were traded for Jermichael Finley and dibs on Amy.”

  Now that’s what you call a win-win-win trade.

  “I wouldn’t relinquish the rights to Amy until he accepted the trade. So, using our ESPN fantasy football mobile app, we completed the trade and he was free to flirt with Amy. He ended up getting her number that night, and I won my first championship thanks to Stafford.”

  Jeff and Amy ultimately didn’t work as a couple, but I’m not surprised by the attempt. Romance and fantasy sports trades interact more often than you’d think.

  Matt G. was a junior in college in 2007 when he had a shot at a fantasy football title. With surplus at running back, he needed a wideout and set his sights on Larry Fitzgerald, who had an easy schedule the rest of the way. One problem. Remembers Matt, “The guy who owned Fitz was an absentee owner who had checked out a few weeks into the season. It was tough to get him to remember his password, much less remember to set a lineup every week. I approached him with a few offers, but he couldn’t be bothered.”

  But then, out of the blue, the Fitz owner went to Matt’s room, sat down, and with no hesitation made an offer that has never before been uttered in fantasy football history.

  “I’ll give you Fitz if you let me borrow your video camera tonight so I can make a sex tape with my girlfriend.”

  Matt elaborates: “I was a video production major, so I had my own little handheld MiniDV for small projects. For a night’s rental and MiniDV-to-DVD conversion services, Fitz was all mine. I shrugged off my fantasy football ethics concerns and shook his hand.” Fitz crushed the rest of the way, and Matt won his league that year. Obviously, this was before flip cams and video recording on cell phones became prevalent. Turns out,
it was reported as two junk players for Fitz, which caused some chirping, but not enough to overturn. In fact, the league never knew this story until Matt came clean in anticipation of this book being published. (Typical reaction: “This is absolutely hilarious and . . . you bastard. Sneaky sneaky bastard.”)

  As for the video itself, Matt did have to convert the MiniDV tape to a DVD, so keep that in mind. Do you want to see your good buddy and his longtime girl doing all sorts of freaky stuff? Exactly. Say what you want, but he earned that title.

  And as crazy as that story is, it isn’t the nuttiest fantasy sports–related romantic triangle I’ve heard about. You see, Frank’s fantasy football league has a rule: the owner who finishes last buys a lap dance for the winner. For you young writers out there, this is called “foreshadowing.” Or, since it’s a strip club I’m talking about, “pandering.”

  At the trade deadline in 2010, the top two teams in this league were Frank and another guy named Brad. As Frank describes it, “Brad has a smoking hot girlfriend.” A hot girlfriend, it turns out, that another guy in the league named Steve had a crush on. Or, as I like to call him, “Out-of-Contention-with-Nothing-to-Play-For-and-Happens-to-Own-Michael-Vick Steve.”

  If you don’t remember, Vick was in the middle of a ridiculous run in 2010. So Steve trades Vick to Brad for a bunch of scrubs, and Brad ends up winning the league. Which means Brad enjoyed the victor’s lap dance. But then, about a week later, a picture of Brad getting the lap dance gets “accidentally” posted to Facebook. Suddenly Brad and his “smoking hot girlfriend” are no longer together. A week later, she’s dating someone else. You guessed it: Steve. Or as he is now known, “Smarter-Than-You-Think Steve.”