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

by Matthew Berry

  Troy then pulled off a move that has never been done before or since in fantasy history. “I reached into my pocket to pull out the ring with one hand while accepting the trade with the other.”

  Troy would like me to refer to his friend who got married with the fake name “Lawrence” because, frankly, “it’s still a sore point with him.”

  I’m amazed he still talks to you. Troy understands the disbelief. “I had held up the entire wedding, but . . . I did get Megatron, and a couple of months later I had the league title.”

  Being distracted from something important by fantasy sports is nothing new. In my world, it had been going on a long time. Going back to early 2005, I had a big problem. Two, in fact. The first I had been dealing with in therapy, specifically, the guilt I felt that I was blowing off my wife, my movie-writing career, and everything else to focus on two websites that weren’t even profitable.

  My other big problem was the two websites. Specifically, they were creating a real conflict. Back in the summer of 2002, a guy named Steve Mason had contacted me. He hosted a national sports talk show on the Fox Sports Radio Network and was a fan of my column. Would I want to call in and do a segment on fantasy football? And once again I somehow managed to ask a smart question.

  ME: Wouldn’t you rather I come in?

  PRODUCER: What?

  ME: Don’t interviews sound better in person?

  PRODUCER: Well, yeah . . .

  ME: I live like five minutes away. I can just come in instead of calling in. I don’t mind.

  PRODUCER: Uh, sure, I guess. Okay.

  No one had ever offered to drive to the studio before, especially for a five-minute segment. But sure, if you want to, knock yourself out, he said.

  Here’s why I did that, and it goes back to a Lesterism. “Face to face is always better.” It wasn’t until very late in life that my Uncle Lester ever started doing contracts, and only then because other companies insisted on it. For him, a handshake was always enough. His attitude was, a man’s word should mean something. And it’s also why Lester didn’t believe in email.

  We see this in fantasy leagues all the time. Email or text trade offers that arrive out of the blue get turned down just as quickly. With technology today, it’s too easy to get lost, to be just a name at the end of an email. Whether it’s romance, business, friendship, or fantasy sports, evrything comes back to relationships. Which is why I wanted to come in.

  I didn’t care about the clarity of the audio. I wanted it to be as good a segment as it could be, of course, but more important, I wanted to meet them. Once I met them, I wasn’t just some voice at the end of a phone. Now I’m a guy they’ve shaken hands with. BS-ed with before and after the segment. Now I have a relationship with these guys, as opposed to being some faceless email saying, “Hey, how about next week?”

  The first segment went well, the guys were all nice, and I was invited back for the following week. And the week after. Steve eventually asked me to do two segments, which eventually turned into doing an hour and then guest hosting over the holidays to all the way to (after lots of meetings and proposals to the Fox Sports Radio bosses) a job in 2004 and 2005, when I became the official Fox Sports Radio fantasy “expert,” doing hits on the air throughout the week and doing fantasy updates every hour on NFL Sundays.

  I bring this whole look back/sidebar up for a few reasons. First, it’s as good a fantasy (and life) lesson as there is. Talk to people. Face-to-face. Whenever possible. And second, because it illustrates the issue I was having with the two websites.

  Every time I’d do a radio hit, Steve would say, “And here to talk fantasy football, the Talented Mr. Roto, Matthew Berry, from RotoPass .com.” A nightmare. Too many names, too hard to remember, and even when I asked them not to use my TMR nickname, the biggest issue was still there.

  If someone enjoyed my radio segment and wanted to read me, they’d go to RotoPass.com and find . . . not me. Same problem with the link in my Rotoworld column.

  I know what you’re saying. Wait, didn’t they fire you last chapter? Yes, they did. But as they told me in a follow-up phone call a few weeks later, they didn’t really mean it. After the quick growth of the Yahoo group, Rotoworld didn’t want to lose me. “Why don’t you come back, we’ll start a message board on Rotoworld, and you can tell all your followers to start posting messages here,” they helpfully suggested.

  But at that point plans were already under way for TalentedMrRoto .com to launch soon, and RotoPass.com was up and running, so I politely declined. But I did make them a counteroffer. Let me come back and write for you . . . for free. All you have to do is let me link back to RotoPass.

  Seems insane nowadays, since the traffic they would send me would ultimately be many times more valuable than the $100 a week (or even $25!) they were trying to save, but they really wanted to save that money. Also helping my cause was a guy named Rick Wolf, who was running Rotoworld for the owners. He liked me and fought for the deal with the owners. And so I returned to Rotoworld, without pay, but with the ability to promote and link my little heart out.

  But again, same issue. You read my column, liked me, wanted to read more of me, so you clicked on the RotoPass.com link and found that it was just a portal site where you bought the subscription and got taken to a bunch of other fantasy sites, none of which I wrote for.

  So it proved awkward to promote RotoPass in the column or on the radio. I had gotten all the established sites to join RotoPass in part because I had promised I was going to promote the RotoPass site all over, so even though TMR was growing, I really didn’t want to focus on TMR that much. RotoPass was supposed to be the moneymaker. How could I get the word out about that?

  Trying to solve that issue took up a lot of time in the summer of 2004, along with all the other issues that go with running two recently launched websites. Plus I had my day job, the movie writing, so I was really working like crazy. Lots of hours, long nights, and not a lot of attention paid to my wife. She understood and supported everything I was trying to do, but demanded that I relax and focus on us during a romantic, two-week vacation in Italy. I gave her my word. And it would be easy to turn my fantasy brain off.

  Remember, in 2004, technology was very limited. Cell phones didn’t have the Internet on them, you couldn’t get email while mobile and we were in deep, remote, nothing-around-for-miles-except-beautiful-countryside Italy.

  We were finishing up a long, leisurely lunch at a quaint Italian wine bistro when I went to the bathroom.

  I passed by the bar, where they had one lone TV showing CNN International. As I was walking past, the ticker scrolled by. Carlos Beltran, then one of the best players in baseball, had been traded. From the American League. To the Houston Astros, then in the National League.

  In my NL-only Fat Dog league, this was huge news. Players of this caliber rarely got traded into the league, and more than a month before the trade deadline too. I was in the hunt for the title that year . . . I had to make a bid. So, with my wife waiting in the other room to continue our romantic away-from-fantasy-sports vacation, I did what any self-respecting fantasy owner would do.

  I bribed the bartender with $50 American to let me make an international call and talked my brother Jonathan through the process of putting in a bid on Beltran. When I finally returned, my wife was puzzled. “What took you so long?” I smiled at her, not wanting to lie. “I got really sick in there.”

  Hey, I said I didn’t want to lie, not that I didn’t lie. The white lie to escape someone (or something) for a fantasy move is a time-honored tradition. When you are obsessed with fantasy sports, it can consume your life. And when it consumes your life, you’ll do fantasy wherever and whenever you need to.

  “Lewis” had a draft during a wedding, but didn’t want to use the frequent-trips-to-the-bathroom plan. You see, the reception was at the hotel. So a few hours into the party, he snuck away and did th
e draft in his room before rejoining the party later. When asked where he was all that time, Lewis told everyone that he hooked up with a girl from the wedding. But “she left for the night because she got sick from the booze.”

  And that, my friends, tells you everything you need to know. Fantasy owners would rather be thought of as a guy who left his cousin’s wedding to hook up with a girl so drunk she had to leave soon after than say he was doing a fantasy draft. Not sure what it says about Lewis, but apparently everyone bought the story with no questions asked.

  Speaking of no questions asked, remember Don Carlson from chapter 1? He’s a firefighter, playing in the 10-team Fire Station 1 League out of Los Angeles. “One year, before smartphones, etc., we had a brushfire in Malibu. Sometimes, during brushfires, a crew can be very busy. Constantly moving to new places and fighting fires with little time to rest. But other times there is a lot of down time, especially when you set up to protect a certain area.

  “And what I had been thinking for the last 24 hours while on this brushfire was, If this is gonna last another 48 hours, I’m not going to be able to set my lineup.”

  The fire did rage on, but during a patrol Don found a family standing outside their house. So Don approached them, wearing his fireman’s uniform, badge prominently displayed. Then, in his most official-sounding voice, said he needed access to their computer. “Of course, officer! Anything to help with the fire!” Request granted, lineup set, and the family never knew. Until now.

  Luckily for Don, he was able to make his moves in private. Tyler was not as lucky. One Sunday morning he realized he had forgotten to put Adrian Peterson and Brett Favre back in his starting lineup off a bye. No big deal. It happens. So he took out his iPhone to make the change. Only problem?

  “I was taking my SATs.”

  It’s been a while since I took my SATs, Tyler, but they frown upon that, right?

  “I got caught. I had to go before a group of people to prove I wasn’t cheating. My explanation was that I was editing my fantasy football lineup. They just laughed at me.”

  I would love to have been in that “hearing.”

  “My father understood why I did it because he’s in the league and a serious player. My mother, on the other hand, thought I was an idiot.”

  Kinda see both sides here, my friend.

  Tyler continued: “In addition, I wasn’t able to get the lineup change in. I ended up losing that week and missed the playoffs by one game.”

  There is one silver lining, though. Tell ’em, Tyler.

  “They knew I wasn’t cheating because I did so poorly on my SATs.”

  Tyler’s mother is a teacher in the county, and the school board tells the story to this day.

  You know, when I’m asked about fantasy, I always say it’s like a Springsteen concert. Like, you know Bruce Springsteen is popular and maybe you’ll even turn up the radio when a song of his comes on. But once you see him in concert, you finally understand the fanaticism, the devotion, the crazy obsession. Same with fantasy sports. Once you try it, you get it. And stories like this don’t surprise you. In fact, you have some of your own.

  Mark Halpern’s wife went into labor on a Friday. “Our Football for Fools league has a weekly free agent auction, and bids are due by noon on Friday,” Mark says. “As commish, I need to manually process the bids.” There was also a Saturday game that week, so the bids needed to be done ASAP so teams could set lineups, etc. Mark had his laptop, ran the auction, and made the moves for every single team from the delivery room. While his wife was sitting there. Screaming in pain.

  “My mistake was not waiting until she had the epidural.” Good hint for you future father/commish combos out there. Is Mark’s obsession extreme? Yes. But, as Mark points out, “This is our third kid. I only have one title.”

  From being in the hospital to on his way to one, David Harris wasn’t going to let something silly like excruciating pain and insane injury stand in the way of fantasy.

  In 2007, on the morning of his fantasy football draft, David was in what can only be described as a horrific motorcycle accident. With a broken pelvis and two broken hips, David was in the ambulance racing to the ER when he called his mom to ask her to pick up a few things for him on her way to the hospital. “One of those items was my handwritten player rankings. She arrived at the hospital with them at 11:00 AM, and my draft was scheduled for noon.”

  In case the whole “worrying about his fantasy draft after a motorcycle accident with a broken pelvis and two broken hips” thing didn’t tell you he was hard-core, the “handwritten player rankings” should have sealed it.

  David continues: “I was able to get admitted to the hospital and get nice and doped up on morphine about 10 minutes before the draft started. I used my cell phone to call in to the draft.”

  Totally drugged? How’d that go?

  “Apparently, I continually sang ‘Black Betty’ by Ram Jam during any free moment.”

  A very underrated song, incidentally.

  “My friends tell me that it was very funny. When you are in an accident like that, they put you on a self-controlled morphine drip, which allows you to hit a button every few minutes to get another shot through an IV. When I would first hit the button, I would go extremely incoherent for the first 30 to 45 seconds, and then would be good again until the next push of morphine. During those times, I would start to sing, or be distant.”

  His friends would alternate between annoyed and worried, which is what friends at a fantasy draft with one guy on the phone singing “Black Betty” should be. And let David’s story be a lesson to all you drafters out there.

  “After talking with my buddies for some reminders on that draft, I am proud to say that not once did I attempt to pick a player who had already been drafted.”

  Nice! You see that, people? There’s no excuse.

  “In the end, I limp a little bit, and am in pain every now and again with certain things that I just can’t do anymore. But I won the second of back-to-back championships that season, and I am thankful and lucky to be alive.”

  Amen, David.

  “And now, when someone tries to reschedule the draft due to a last-minute obligation, we remind him that I did the draft on morphine, lying in a hospital bed.”

  Damn right you did. And I hereby grant everyone reading this the right to use David’s story as well. The next time someone in your league is talking about flaking on the draft, you tell them the story of David Harris, who drafted hours after an accident with a broken pelvis, two broken hips, and just one handwritten cheat sheet.

  TIME-OUT:

  Different Kinds of Fantasy

  When someone gets obsessed with something, they want to do more of it. They join multiple leagues, they play multiple sports, and sometimes they invent new ways to play. I’ve always said, if you can find a way to keep score, you can play a fantasy version of anything. For years my friends have played fantasy summer movie league (at www.summermovieleague.com). You have a “fantasy studio,” and you win by how much money your movies make at the box office.

  Fantasy football, fantasy basketball, and fantasy baseball are the most popular fantasy games, of course, but pretty much every sport has a fantasy game. From fantasy NASCAR, fantasy golf, and fantasy college football to things like fantasy bass fishing, it runs the gamut. Daily fantasy games like DraftStreet.com, where you draft your team and win or lose in the same day, have become popular recently. Here at ESPN, many of the SportsCenter anchors do a fantasy umpire league, where they get points for ejections. And no pun intended, fantasy sumo wrestling is huge in Japan. There’s even reverse twists on sports, like Grantland’s Bad Quarterback League, where you play fantasy football but with terrible NFL QBs. The worse they do for their real NFL teams, the better they do for you.

  Frankly, I consider things like Super Bowl squares, NCAA basketball brackets, and office pool
pick ’ems to also be fantasy. Anytime you are selecting something, get some sort of reward for the performance of whatever you selected, and are competing with others, that’s fantasy. And the concept has been taken and molded into almost everything you can imagine. Here are some of the more, shall we say, offbeat fantasy leagues.

  Fantasy Congress: You pick both representatives and senators, and you get points when they introduce bills, have bills pass out of committee, and get bills passed in each of the houses of Congress. Extra points if the president signs the bill into law!

  Fantasy Supreme Court: Similar, but different. Predict how each of the nine justices will rule on each case: affirm, reverse, or recuse!

  Fantasy Top Chef, fantasy Survivor, fantasy American Idol, fantasy Big Brother, fantasy Bachelor, RuPaul’s Fantasy Drag Race: Pretty much every reality and elimination show has a fantasy game you can play where you select contestants and get points on how long they last or things they do in the show. And of course, there is Grantland’s Fantasy Reality League, a combination of many of these shows.

  Fantasy rodeo: Draft a fantasy team that will win the most money throughout the entire rodeo. Pick one header and one heeler in the team roping. Giddyup.

  PhantasyTour.com: A set-list prediction game about the band Phish. It’s a great community, and hey, (puff) if you don’t win, that’s (puff) um, it’s really o—— (puff), I’m sorry, what was the question again?

  Fantasy Wall Street: You buy and sell real stocks with fake money. Obviously, there’s no real consequences for mistakes. So you know, pretty much like the real thing.

  Fantasy weather: After being given a location on a map of the United States, you forecast high and low temps for the next five days, wind direction, speeds, and the always tricky precipitation amounts. Fantasy Snowfall is similar but simpler: Submit the four cities you think will get the most inches of snow during a given week. Having spent four years there, I can assure you Syracuse is always a safe pick.