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

by Matthew Berry

  Fantasy spelling bee: Always popular. You pick kids for the National Spelling Bee, which ESPN broadcasts every year, with points for how long your kid lasts. I always go for the kid with the longest last name.

  Fantasy World Series of Poker, fantasy WWE wrestling, fantasy X-games, fantasy Street League (skaters), fantasy beer pong (yes, there is a World Series of Beer Pong), fantasy Tour de France, fantasy Iditarod, and fantasy Corn Hole (based on players in the Midwest): These are among the sports versions of fantasy that showed up more than I would have thought.

  Lent Madness: A faith-based learning game in which 32 saints are placed in a tournament-like single elimination bracket. Each pairing remains open for a set period of time, and people vote for their favorite saint. Sixteen saints make it to the Round of the Saintly Sixteen; eight advance to the Round of the Elate Eight; four make it to the Faithful Four; two to the Championship; and the winner is awarded the coveted Golden Halo. I wonder if the “12 seeds always beat a 5” thing holds true here too?

  Celebrity death pool: Many people are in on this one. Too depressing for me, though.

  Fantasy TV: Pick TV shows, with standings based on ratings.

  Fantasy fashion: Draft designers of things like runway shows, handbags, jewelry, and get points for magazine and online press.

  Celebrity fantasy: Same idea—you choose celebs and get points based on press mentions of breakups, rehab, babies, being part of a celeb couple, etc.

  And of course, Oscar pick ’em pools: Among the more popular ones from pop culture that aren’t based on a specific show.

  Fantasy executive: Participants can pick their teams from more than 90 of the world’s top executives representing nine different corporate functions. In this fantasy game launched by Fortune magazine, you earn points by how closely your team ends up matching the teams formed by top execs, headhunters, and management professors. Now you can complain “they picked the wrong guy for the job!” in real life and in fantasy.

  10.

  Innocent People Get Sucked Into Fantasy Madness

  or

  “How the #!&$ Did You Get My Number?”

  Sunday mornings during football season, Texas A&M University student Adam has a very simple ritual. It starts with a nice bowl of Cheerios, continues with a comfortable couch, and finishes with fixing his fantasy roster about an hour before kickoff.

  In the semifinals of his league’s playoffs in 2011, he’s just about to start when he gets what can only be described as a very disturbing text from his resident adviser.

  “We are having some difficulties with our Internet services. Internet will be down until further notice.”

  And with a hurt Ahmad Bradshaw needing to be replaced, Adam freaked. Using the app on his iPhone is not an option—he dropped the phone two weeks prior, and college budgets being what they are, Adam can’t afford to fix the screen. All his apps have been rendered useless.

  There’s no point in going to a neighbor’s place—they are all without Internet as well. And on a Sunday morning after a party-filled Saturday night, he’s not about to knock on college kids’ doors asking if they have a smartphone with the fantasy app. He also can’t drive to somewhere with Internet because he doesn’t have a car. And he doesn’t live within walking distance of somewhere that might have Internet either.

  But, my friends, if there is one benefit to being a broke college student, it’s that you become pretty damn resourceful. No car. No smartphone. No Internet. But what does he have?

  A bus. That’s right. Adam’s dorm is on a bus route. A bus route that goes by the library. A library . . . that has Internet!

  Adam runs outside and hops on the campus bus. By this time, he’s got 30 minutes until kickoff, and the bus, not surprisingly, is moving fairly slow. There’s five more stops until the library, and Adam is getting antsy. So he walks up to the bus driver and tells him the situation. Adam relays, “He simply laughed at me.”

  DRIVER: We’ll get there when we get there.

  But desperate measures call for desperate times. So, broke or not, Adam whips out his wallet.

  ADAM: I got 20 bucks. What can you do?

  DRIVER: I see a 50.

  Now this is all the money Adam has in his wallet right now, $70 is a lot to him, but it’s the playoffs, time is ticking away, and he’s come this far.

  ADAM: Fine. Here’s 70 bucks. But you skip the rest of the stops and head straight for the bus stop at the library.

  The driver takes one look at Adam.

  DRIVER: Deal.

  And the driver does just that! Blowing by five different bus stops, passing by waiting students, he drops Adam off with time to spare. Adam gets into the library, puts Brandon Jacobs in for the now-ruled-out Ahmad Bradshaw . . . Jacobs winds up with double-digit points and Adam wins his matchup by 10 points, a game he would have lost if he’d left Bradshaw in.

  So all’s well that ends well until a few days later, when he gets a call from the dean. The dean, well, he’d like a word.

  The next day Adam walks into the dean’s office only to find his bus driver from Sunday already sitting there. The dean wastes no time. “Did you pay our driver $70 to ignore his route so you could fix your fantasy football roster?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m truly sorry—”

  That was all he needed to hear. The driver, sadly, was let go. Adam was fined $100 and had his bus-riding privileges suspended for the rest of the year.

  But Adam got to stay in school, and as he was walking out of the office the dean addresses him. “Young man. Consider yourself lucky.” Adam turns and looks back at him. “I drafted Vick and Charles this year.”

  Back in 2005, I didn’t need to bribe a bus driver, but in many ways I was in a very similar situation as Adam. Like Adam, I was very limited in my budget, and I had a big problem with no obvious solution and not a lot of time left to fix it.

  RotoPass.

  The charter websites that made up RotoPass were starting to get antsy. They had all signed on with my fledgling little website, but in order to get these established companies to go along with unproven me, I had given them all nonbinding contracts. “Hey,” I said, “if you don’t want to be in it, I don’t want to force you. Join up, and if you hate it, leave whenever you want.”

  So not only had the “how can I start promoting this?” issue not been solved, there was now mounting pressure to do so. Because if one site left, they all would.

  Back at another lunch with my Internet-savvy friend, the same guy who had told me about the adult age check site, I asked him to help me brainstorm ways to get the word out.

  Especially since I had no clue about any of those Internet tricks. Search engine optimi-what? Really? Meta-tags? What’s a meta-tag? Uh, no, I don’t have a link exchange program on the site. Do you need one? Seriously, I had no technical background, no Internet experience; I only had enough smarts to hire people who knew what they were doing and get out of their way. Beyond some simple Internet tricks, we were spitballing ideas on how best to promote the site. He suggested getting an athlete or coach to endorse it, but I didn’t think it would work. The professional leagues and their athletes have gotten the message now, but back then most professional athletes hated fantasy and fantasy players. Getting one of them to promote would come off as phony, especially because it’s not like I could have afforded a really famous athlete. I didn’t think “Hi, for RotoPass.com, I’m F. P. Santangelo” was gonna move the needle.

  Plus, real fantasy players knew that professional athletes looked down on fantasy and had no expertise when it came to playing it. So I posed the question differently. How could I get the word out on a budget?

  Then my friend, who was very smart in lots of areas but knew nothing about fantasy sports, asked a very simple and obvious question. One that, frankly, had never occurred to me.

  He said, “Well, who is The Guy?” When I looked at him quizzically, he expl
ained further. “Who is the, you know . . .” (searching for a name), “‘Martha Stewart’ of fantasy sports? The one person that when you say fantasy sports everyone thinks of? Who is most associated with it? See if you can get that person to endorse it.”

  And I said, well . . . no one.

  There were a couple of guys who were known to longtime fantasy players. . . . Brandon Funston, first of ESPN and then Yahoo, Eric Karabell of ESPN, and Ron Shandler of BaseballHQ.com were the first folks who popped into my mind, all of them good friends.

  But, much as I like and respect them personally, I didn’t think any of them had popped in a way that when you thought of fantasy sports you immediately thought of that person, the way you think of Mel Kiper Jr. when someone mentions NFL draft day.

  With no one obvious to hire to help promote the website, my buddy suggested I do it. Why didn’t I become my own spokesperson?

  ME: Me?

  HIM: You’ve played long enough, right?

  ME: Yeah, since 1984.

  HIM: And how long have you been writing about fantasy sports for a website?

  ME: Since late ’99.

  HIM: And doing national radio?

  ME: Since ’02.

  HIM: So you’ve got credibility. And the nickname . . .

  ME: Talented Mr. Roto?

  HIM: Yeah, I like that. It’s memorable. Good brand name. You could build that up.

  Hmmmm.

  TalentedMrRoto.com was growing faster than RotoPass, and thanks to all my radio experience plus years of pitch meetings in Hollywood, I was comfortable speaking in front of a microphone or to large groups of strangers. If I could develop more of my personality and make myself more of a brand name, well . . . then . . . hell, maybe I could be my own spokesman for RotoPass. That was the idea at any rate. When you want to be successful, a good place to start is to find a very successful person you admire and try to emulate them. Which is exactly what I did. But for someone who was trying to make it in the fantasy sports business, you might be surprised to learn that I chose Howard Stern.

  I am a huge Stern fan and a listener of more than 20 years. But even if you are not a fan of his edgy brand of humor, he is an unbelievably smart businessman and a pioneer. The number of things that he created or was the first to accomplish is staggering and too long to list here, but he’s among the most influential and creative minds in the history of entertainment. But even with that, you might think what Howard did would not be relatable to me.

  But I disagree. One thing that often gets overlooked about Howard is that, among all the things he’s done, he redefined what it means to be a morning DJ. Because he is now the “King of All Media,” people forget that, before the books, movie, TV shows, celebrity friends, and huge national radio show, he was, like thousands of others, just a local morning DJ. Playing songs, introducing traffic and weather, reacting to the day’s news. A morning DJ. There’s a million of them.

  But Howard said, I don’t care what everyone else says a morning DJ is supposed to be, I’m gonna do it how I want. And the way Howard did it was by, among other things, being totally honest and making everything he could all about himself. Brilliantly.

  The fans of Howard’s—and there are many millions—are not just fans of Howard. They are passionate fans. Because they feel like they know him. It’s not just that he’s funny or smart or is a good interviewer or says outrageous things. When you listen to him, you feel as if you know him. Better than you know some of your closest friends.

  So if Howard could do it, why did I have to be like every other fantasy sports analyst? There were many good analysts out there, but there’s only so many ways you can say, “Start this guy, sit that guy,” you know? At the time, every writer I was aware of was fairly serious, used tons of statistics, and kept it all about the advice.

  I’m pretty good with stats, but I’m not Bill James. And I’ve watched tons of sports over my lifetime, but I never played professionally and was never a professional scout or anything, so there are people who can watch game tape with a more experienced eye than me. But the one thing I know I can do better than any person in the world?

  Talk about me.

  So in addition to the analysis, I wrote about my life, my friends, my wife, my brother, my leagues . . . everything was fair game. I didn’t want to be a stereotypical fantasy nerd. So I talked about all the things guys like—pop culture, movies, and hot girls—and I wrote long egocentric stories that seemed random but ended up being a lesson about fantasy analysis.

  Instead of three long, stat-filled paragraphs about one player, I tried to keep it quick, make my point, make it funny, and move on. I tried to always give readers “an actionable item.” In other words, instead of saying “Well, if this happens, then maybe this will happen, but if it doesn’t, you don’t want him,” I’d say “I would trade for this guy, I would drop that guy, I like this player more than that one.” Too many analysts wavered, I felt. So I would be strong in my opinions and I told the columnists that wrote for me the same thing. “Hey, predicting the future is impossible,” I would say. So say what you think will happen, say what an owner should specifically do with that information, and have a good, well-researched reason behind the analysis. You’ll get some right and you’ll get some wrong, but as long as you have a valid reason for feeling the way you do and you communicate that research, that’s all that matters. Ultimately, it’s on the readers to decide if they agree with you.

  Back then, the unwritten rule of fantasy was to only print email praising you and your correct predictions. I decided to go the other way and printed all the angry hate mail that came in. I pointed out my mistakes and my wrong predictions. I was as open and honest as I could be with everything in my life, good and bad. In addition to my weekly columns and radio hits, I started a blog called “The TRUM (Thoughts, Ramblings, Useless info, and Musings),” which I wrote almost every day and emailed to every single member. A mixture of fantasy sports observations and whatever else was going on in my mind.

  As you might imagine, my self-centered, strong-willed, and different approach would rub a lot of folks the wrong way (and still does!). Back in the day, Rotoworld had a distribution deal with FoxSports.com to run all of its fantasy content. Mine was the only column they refused to run.

  But I loved the scene in the movie Private Parts where the disbelieving program director, “Pig Vomit,” is being told by a researcher that Howard Stern has hit number one in the ratings.

  RESEARCHER: The average radio listener listens for 18 minutes. The average Howard Stern fan listens for—are you ready for this?—an hour and 20 minutes.

  PIG VOMIT: How can that be?

  RESEARCHER: Answer most commonly given? “I want to see what he’ll say next.”

  PIG VOMIT: Okay, fine. But what about the people who hate Stern?

  RESEARCHER: Good point. The average Stern hater listens for two and a half hours a day.

  PIG VOMIT: But . . . if they hate him, why do they listen?

  RESEARCHER: Most common answer? “I want to see what he’ll say next.”

  There were a lot of lessons in that little scene. And it gave me the confidence to hang tough as many other people in the fantasy sports industry had no idea what to make of me. Howard’s struggles were something I clung to tightly as I would lie awake at night and doubt myself. I had no idea if I had the talent, the appeal, the luck, the ability, and everything else that goes into making it full-time in this or any other industry. And in the dark places of my mind, the small crevices of my psyche that I held tight and never let anyone see, my honest feeling was . . . no way.

  Other people had been in the business longer, had more of a track record, had more successful websites, had more of a head start. I wasn’t a terrible writer, and I had some solid predictions. That was pretty much it. It couldn’t possibly be enough, right?

  I realized there was a very go
od chance I was going to fail. But I knew that the one thing I could control—frankly, the only thing—was work. I vowed to myself that no one was going to outwork me. I might fall flat on my face, but it damn sure wasn’t going to be because I was lazy.

  If I was ignoring my wife, my writing career, and my friends before, now it was like I had never met them.

  Every night, while my wife was asleep, I was writing “The TRUM.” And chatting on the site. And posting on the message board. I was promoting the TMR site at every opportunity. In short, by the end of 2005 nothing else mattered.

  If I may throw out a generic stereotype about fantasy players here, it’s that this behavior isn’t unique. Or at least, my approach to the issue wasn’t unique. Because, as a whole, we are an obsessive group. Poring over stats and box scores, studying the waiver wire so much we can recite it from memory, and, if one Internet study is to be believed, thinking about our fantasy team more often than sex.

  I hear more tales of fantasy obsession than any other category. And when you think about it, almost every story in this book is, in some way, about obsession. Whether it’s throwing yourself into a brand-new website with a few thousand members instead of your well-paying actual career, being a pastor who cheats, or bribing a bus driver with your last $70, there is no end to the lengths people will go to for fantasy glory. And these are the people who go above and beyond the people who go above and beyond.

  Like Cousin Sal from The Jimmy Kimmel Show. Sal was running two fantasy leagues in the early ’90s, and with no Internet to compile the stats, he had to gather stats manually through newspapers. If you lived on the East Coast, the box score for the Monday night game wouldn’t even appear until Wednesday morning, an excruciatingly long time to wait, especially if it was a close game. Sal remembers, “I’d typically phone sports editors from various newspapers for stats. I annoyed them all so much. Eventually none of them would take my calls. Somehow I got the New York Daily News sports editor’s home number, and in efforts to get stats to determine a hotly contested fantasy game, I called him. It was a Tuesday about 7:00 AM.”