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

by Matthew Berry

  Exactly. The more fun people are having at work, the more they like and talk to their coworkers, the more productive they are. The more positive feelings employees have toward an employer, the more likely they are to work harder, stay later, and go the extra mile to get something done, and the less likely they are to leave or complain to others.

  The report added:

  In a 2006 Ipsos Survey, 40 percent of respondents said fantasy sports participation was a positive influence in the workplace. Another 40 percent said it increases camaraderie among employees. One in five said their involvement in fantasy sports enabled them to make a valuable business contact.

  They finally realized what many of us have known for a long time. Nothing brings people—and coworkers—together like fantasy.

  Remember Cameron Pettigrew, the guy who was fired by Fidelity? He ended up being out of work for a year and a half! His firing made news in papers across the country, and he did a lot of TV interviews, including on ESPN. He said that while he didn’t love being unemployed for that long, there were some definite positives that came from it. “I enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame. And it opened up a lot of dialogue. A friend who works at Chase Bank told me, ‘We’ve been going through meetings because of you.’ The incident spurred a lot of discussion on a real line in the sand about whether companies would allow fantasy football or not. And ultimately, that became a real positive for fantasy because, when companies started looking, they realized a lot of their best, most productive employees were also fantasy football players.”

  As a result, especially in the financial industry, many workplaces changed their policies. While there are still places that don’t allow it, those are fewer and farther between. Cameron now works at a different financial firm, loves his new company much more than his previous one, and was able to complain to his coworkers without repercussion when Matthew Stafford’s 2012 season went in the tank, taking Cameron’s team along with him.

  A great real-life example of how far fantasy has come in the office is Shaun Kernahan’s Thousand Oaks, California–based work league. This company of 150 employees has divided the office into a 10-team league, with each team consisting of one department with a designated captain.

  As Shaun says, “Every Tuesday morning the office is buzzing about who scored how many points for that week, and there is great friendly trash talk throughout the company. We have a large corkboard, covered in green construction paper and company logos, that tracks the progress of each team. Discussions over starters and waiver pickups build a comfort level for employees with their managers, making it much easier to go to a manager when they have a problem. And because everyone’s playing, everyone’s interacting with different departments. IT is talking trash to marketing. Underwriting’s doing a trade with operations. It’s helped us learn more about the company. The week before the Super Bowl, we have a chili cook-off where we present the winning teams with gift cards and a trophy.”

  In short, “it creates a 17-week company party that keeps morale up for everyone.”

  And every day more and more offices are like Shaun’s. As well they should be.

  Because fantasy helps people in their job. All the time.

  Even if it’s not immediately obvious how.

  “Christina” is a perfect example. As she explains, “One of the most important aspects of being a sex worker is the ability to create intimacy, often in a relatively short period of time.”

  Wait. What? That’s right. “Christina” is a webcam and fetish model.

  And when you are a webcam model, the idea is to keep the guy online for as long as possible. “Talking about fantasy football is an easy way to do that, at least for me,” Christina says. She’s been in a 12-team league for three years now and loves it. “I’ve grown up a sports fan, and it’s become an increasingly large part of my life throughout my adulthood. I’ll have games on in the background, so while I’m dancing around, my eyes can be on the TV. Occasionally, I’ll live-tweet a game that I’m watching to interact with my own fans while I’m away from the computer. Or be on webcam with the fantasy app open next to me so I don’t miss anything. And everyone gets to share my happiness or frustration during the games.”

  But don’t they just want you to, uh, just get naked?

  “People confide in sex workers every day. In a lot of ways we’re like friends and therapists as much as sex objects. They confide their most intimate secrets, fears, and loves. Particularly as I currently work in the fetish industry, I am privy to information that people are scared to even share with their spouses. So I’ve found that many of my clients can relate to fantasy football on some level. I don’t just have the joy and heartbreak that comes with being a fan, I share it with my community. Whether that community is a group of other fans in a bar or strangers over the Internet, it’s the sharing of the experience that counts.”

  If you’re surprised that someone would do fantasy football while performing as a webcam model, you’re not going to believe what other people do while they also play fantasy sports.

  Matt Holliday, the St. Louis Cardinals All-Star outfielder, and I have a mutual friend. So when the friend said Matt wanted my number to occasionally ask fantasy football advice, I said sure. We text every once in a while, but there’s one exchange in 2010 that I’ll never forget. “I need to pick up a running back,” Matt texted. “Which one of these guys do you like more?” And he listed three guys.

  I texted back. “Dude, we’re an hour away from Game 3 of the World Series!” Which, you know, Matt was playing in.

  “Hey, it’s how I relax,” Matt said. “And I really need a running back. So who ya got?”

  Speaking of playing fantasy sports as a way to relax before professional sports events, here’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. “I’m in a fantasy football league with my NASCAR road crew, which consists of about 12 mechanics and engineers who work on my race car 38 weekends a year. We are a cohesive bunch, but during football season we get extremely competitive and rightly so. Winning our league comes with great reward—the opportunity to end any debate with ‘Yeah, but I whipped your ass in fantasy.’ To my knowledge, there’s no good comeback for that. It’s a discussion-ender. So with that at stake, we’ll do anything to win. Me? I’m the guy who offers trade proposals the morning of a race—you know, the time when crew members are their busiest. You’d be surprised at the trades they’ll accept during the hyper-intense moments on race day morning.”

  Sure, you may have checked on your fantasy team when stopped at a red light or something, but you ever discuss it while driving 200 miles an hour?

  Dale explains: “My spotter knows that there are two easy solutions to improving my attitude during a race should it go south. ‘You’re killin’ ’em in the league today,’ or ‘The Skins are up big so far.’ Those two comments, whether they are factual at the time or not, will light a fire under me any day.”

  The Big Hurt Fan Club league started in the Oakland A’s front office in 2006 (when Frank “Big Hurt” Thomas joined the team), but General Manager Billy Beane didn’t join until 2009. It’s a 12-team auction league and you ready for this? Billy Beane, Mr. Moneyball himself, is actually a “stars and scrubs” guy when it comes to the auction.

  “I like to blow my money on three studs early, talk a bunch of trash and then hand over the reins to my assistant coach Otto. Otto Draft.”

  Seems to work for Billy—he works the wire hard, he’s (not surprisingly) a master at the trade and has finished second in the league for three straight seasons, each time losing in the Super Bowl. “I’m the Marv Levy of fantasy,” says Billy ruefully.

  They have some fun rules. There’s no standard amount for the auction, as the budget amount is randomly generated just before the auction to throw off values (last year, they played with a $649 cap). And there’s a punishment for doing poorly in the league—the bottom six have to be “Jamba Juice” slaves during the inte
nse period leading up to and during draft week. Each of the top six finishers get one slave from the bottom six that has to take their specific Jamba Juice orders and go fetch them at all times throughout the week.

  But most important, the league has proven to be a great source of bonding for the group. Lots of trash talk, between message board posts, emails, and the fact that one league member was portrayed in a movie by Brad Pitt. Billy dishes it out pretty hard but, Director of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi says, Billy takes more than his fair share of abuse, often in the form of cruelly photoshopped pictures. “The liability of having a bunch of different images pop up in Google search results.” Which explains why the staff is so close. Nothing brings a group of co-workers together better than a digitally altered photo of the boss. . . .

  Seriously, if your workplace doesn’t let you play fantasy, show them this chapter. Because it’s not just happening in cubicles across the country. It’s professional athletes, it’s priests, it’s CEO’s who do fantasy sports during work. It’s . . . candidates for president of the United States of America.

  In addition to serving in the US Senate for 12 years, plus running for president in 2012 as one of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination, Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum is a hard-core fantasy baseball player, having been in the same 12-team AL-only keeper league since 1995. The Keystone League was formed when Rick first took office as a senator. “I didn’t know what it was. Some guys in the office were forming a league, and I joined because I thought it would be good for camaraderie.”

  Was it ever. The senator got really into it. And has proven to be pretty good too, as his team, For the Glory, has won the title in 8 of the 18 years they’ve played. Many people with high-profile jobs will claim to play fantasy, but in reality they send a flunky to draft their team. Not the senator. Drafts have been rearranged according to the congressional calendar. They’ve drafted in his Capitol Hill office at 5:30 AM so he could make both the draft and a congressional vote later that day.

  How passionate is the senator about fantasy? Longtime Santorum staffer and Keystone League commissioner Jay French remembers a time in 2006 when Pittsburgh was hosting the MLB All-Star Game. Just before the game, the senator was to make a big public appearance at a fund-raiser with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Santorum is a sitting senator at the time, running for reelection, and this is a big event. But Giuliani is running late. So people are running around, trying to rearrange everything, it’s intense, and there’s total chaos as the crowd is getting restless. When Jay approaches the senator, Santorum puts down his BlackBerry and has just one question: “How can you approve this trade?? Ichiro for DeRosa and draft picks? Terrible trade.”

  Oh yeah, he’s a player all right. Jay explains: “I want to stress that at no point did public service ever take a backseat to fantasy. But this is his way of getting some normalcy during an intense campaign or the rigors of politics.” And the next time you think you haven’t had enough time to prep for a draft, consider the senator, who did his 2012 draft by phone, while being driven, just after he had dropped out of the presidential race!

  The same day he announced he was dropping out of the race, he also had to do a deep, 12-team, AL-only keeper draft. Said the senator, “I’d been so focused on the campaign, I hadn’t had much time to prep. It was the first time there were a few minor leaguers I hadn’t heard of. To be honest, it sort of added to the misery of the day.”

  Now that’s a tough draft day. To his credit, the senator battled back from a less than stellar draft to finish second in the league that year. Has fantasy helped his job? Absolutely, the senator says. In addition to bringing the staff closer together, “everyone always says in politics you don’t want a staff of yes men. I’ve got no worries about that, they’re all trying to pull outrageous trades on me!”

  Finally, take “S.D.,” who was transferred to Zurich, Switzerland, only a few days before his Ironman Fantasy Football League draft. Since he had just moved, he had no Internet at his home, and since the draft was at 2:00 AM Swiss time, there was no chance of finding an Internet café open.

  So he decided to “work” late and draft from his office computer. Works like a charm, draft ends at 4:00 AM, and he decides to head home. Just one problem.

  “Unbeknownst to me, my work badge was a temporary one and thus had very limited security clearance. I walked through the lobby and through two sliding-glass doors, which automatically closed behind me. However, when I attempted to open a second set of doors leading outside, they would not budge! And when I tried to walk back into the office, the sliding doors were locked as well!”

  So S.D. was now stuck in this small glass entrance area. At his brand-new job. At 4:00 AM. In a foreign country where he knew no one. “It was not until 6:00 AM that a security guard spotted me. As I started to stammer in broken German, the CEO of the company came striding in to find his new American employee standing in a rumpled suit, conversing with security at six in the morning.”

  But by going to all that effort to make his draft, S.D. was rewarded with good fantasy karma, only the most powerful karma known to man. “The CEO decided the whole fiasco was caused by my incredible work ethic, burning the midnight oil late into the night.”

  S.D. smartly didn’t correct him. S.D. discovered what a lot of people in business learn. That it’s important to work hard and be good at what you do, but it also helps to be in the right place at the right time. A lesson I was about to learn.

  15.

  The Five Biggest, Craziest, Most Game-Changing Plays in Fantasy Football History

  or

  “That Knee Cost Me $600,000”

  “I’ve got the guy.”

  My old friend Steve Mason, from Fox Sports Radio, had since moved to 710 ESPN Radio in Los Angeles to do afternoon drive with his former radio cohost, John Ireland. And as the 2004 fantasy football season approached, Steve’s then program director, Ray Kalusa, wanted to do a fantasy football show. Steve and I had stayed in touch, and Steve mentioned me as the man for the job.

  When I was in college hoping to write for sitcoms, I managed to score a meeting with a big-time sitcom writer. He gave me some unexpected advice that was as good as any I’ve ever received.

  He explained that there was no conspiracy to keep good people out. “When we open a script, we want it to be great. We are rooting for it. But most times it isn’t. So we pass. And because we get so many submissions, we have limited time. So if I see another script from someone I’ve already read and passed on, I’m not reading a second one. Life’s too short.”

  He continued with me. “Look, you’ll get your shot. Everyone who’s persistent enough always does. But when you get your shot, make sure you’re ready. Because you only get one.”

  He offered to read a script of mine whenever I wanted. And of course, I was so excited I immediately ignored his advice and gave him my script. Which in retrospect wasn’t anywhere close to being good enough to show. He passed, and I never heard from him again. I had my one shot. And I wasn’t ready.

  That advice has always stayed with me. Along with “face to face is always better,” and “when a webcam model starts talking fantasy football, it’s time to log off,” it’s as important a piece of advice as I can give. Most people are nice. Most people remember what it was like when they were starting out and how someone helped them along. So most people will give an aspiring person a shot. Not many shots. One.

  So when Steve and I had lunch in the summer of ’04 and he said he wanted to introduce me to Ray, I was ready. I had a CD “air check” of my best appearances, both with Steve and on other radio shows. I had copies of a few newspaper articles about me, research about the popularity of fantasy sports, and a professional bio about my two websites. When opportunity knocked, I not only opened the door, I was holding a plate of cookies.

  I was hired to do Fantasy Football Friday Night, a two-h
our weekly show from 10:00 PM to midnight during the football season. Second show was better than the first, third show was better than the second, and we grew. Fan reaction was good.

  Getting into 710 ESPN was huge for me, because I wanted to be in at ESPN somewhere, somehow. And it was two hours, unlike my much shorter segments on Fox Sports Radio. I loved my time at 710 ESPN. But I didn’t want to lose Fox, since that was also great promotion. So I convinced Fox Sports Radio to replace me with one of my Talented MrRoto.com columnists, a guy I’d discovered named Brad Evans. Brad did a good job for them, and now we got double promotion—on both ESPN in LA and Fox Sports nationally.

  One of my best friends from college, Abbey Nayor, was working in sports publicity at the time. She suggested I hire a publicist. “But I’m not famous,” I said. “That’s why you need one,” Abbey replied. She had heard good things about a guy named Doug Drotman, so after telling him my goals, we decided to work together. One of the first things Doug ever did for me was the most important.

  Doug knew a producer at Cold Pizza, then ESPN2’s version of Good Morning America. Doug got me a meeting with ESPN2’s talent coordinator, a woman named Ivy Abrams. I pitched Ivy on doing a weekly segment on fantasy baseball, which at the time was in season. It was the lesson I learned with the NBA: no one wants to be the first to take a chance on you, but everyone wants to be the second. So I made sure to mention how much I was doing at 710 ESPN in every meeting I had. Not everyone at Cold Pizza was convinced fantasy would work on TV. But Ivy, bless her, fought for me, and Mike McQuade, a guy who is willing to take chances and was running the show, gave me a shot. McQuade wanted to pair me with a baseball reporter they had found who was also just starting to do some TV. The reporter would give some baseball news, I’d give the fantasy spin to it, and they’d call it “Fantasy Meets Reality,” which was at least semi-original back then. Who knew if it would be any good, but they’d try it out for a week or two and see. And I loved the new reporter they paired me with, a guy named Buster Olney.