Living a Fantasy: Fantasy Sports and the Transcendence
By Matthew Romano
The following article is featured in the January 2020 special edition of The Campus, The Beaverbeat.
“Should I just drop Utley, he seemscontent with his .200 average”
How many jacks did Uggla hit lastyear? How many RBI’s?
“I offer a fair trade – he rejectsand counters with this!? It’s like here, just give me your best player’s forabsolute SH!T”
Want to do a mock draft and pizza tonight or not?
Mostchildren’s memories of sports probably involve some combination of littleleague, throwing a baseball with Dad in the front lawn, and going to theirfirst Yankee game. In my house, however, it was the exchanges above that formedmy love of sports. Even before the young age of ten, I played my first fantasybaseball season. These phrases seemed to roll off the tongue, ricochet aroundthe halls, down and upstairs, across rooms, between driver’s and passenger’sseats, while watching the game on TV, heck, even at the stadiums. This love ofsports predominated my relationship with my father and even my father’scoworkers, although, it never included my friends. My peers were much moreinterested in watching the New York teams that I had been taught to despise bymy Cowboy-watching, Red Sox-loving father. He despised the Yankees (and theirbroadcasters), was indifferent towards the struggling Mets (although, weirdlyenough, liked David Wright), and taught me that the basics of football lie inEli Manning’s genetic inferiority to his older brother Peyton (uncontestable,even to Giants fans).
What isfantasy sports, you ask? They are online games where you choose players fromdifferent sports teams (one fake team) and bet on real-life athletes to do wellso you can win the most points, matches, and money. Slump? Sub-par year?Un-timely injury (*holds breath*)? They could all devastate your chances, ruinyour entire fantasy season, rapidly humble your ego, and injure your wallet. Ifthis “sport” sounds like a fringe, weird, lazy, maybe somewhat sick game, youare probably in the majority. That is exactly the reputation that the fantasy sportsworld earned during its embryonic stages. Today, however, fantasy is no longeran embryo, but a fully-grown being with a Tom Ford briefcase of statisticalpapers and contracts. Fantasy is sabermetric for a baseball team, wearing apoker-face and rivaling Phil Ivey’s (at least that’s how I imagine it).
Fantasyfootball was first designed in 1962 by a disgruntled Raiders-fan and thebusinessman Bill Winkenbach in NYC. Needing an outlet to make the tankingRaiders watchable, he and his friends chose players from the American FootballLeague (AFL) and scored points for their team, commensurate and simultaneouswith the players’ scoring in the real game. This early form of fantasy becamethe Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticator League (GOPPPL forshort-ish), the following year. Though there is evidence of the earliest formsof fantasy baseball from early-mid 1900s by On the Road novelistJohn Kerouac and “Baseball Seminars,” most deem Daniel Okrent as the foundingfather of fantasy baseball and its “Rotisserie” (not the chicken) scoringsystem at the La Rotisserie Française (a restaurant, not a pricey Frenchcall-girl).
Fantasysports have since risen out of these humble beginnings and energized acommunity of what is now well over sixty million fantasy “managers” around theworld. Today, it is a multi-billion-dollar industry that has redefined sportsmedia on TV networks and internet sites such as Disney’s ESPN, DirecTV, theFantasy Sports Network, Yahoo, and CBS. It even inspired a sitcom on FX called“The League.” It is also constantly changing and evolving; FanDuel (started in2009) and Draft Kings (2012), two multi-million dollar daily fantasy sites,have taken the world (not just the fantasy one) and their wallets by storm,awarding 90% of their profits as daily prizes for fantasy performance.
Nolonger just another odd and confusing internet game for a few old men, lazyteens, and women who join “to impress their fantasy-playing husbands” as theysay, huh. Statistics taken from the Fantasy Sports Trade Association show thatof the now over 59.3 million people known to play fantasy sports in NorthAmerica alone, 71% are Men, 29% are women (such as many of my high-schoolteachers who formed fantasy leagues, discussed with me between classes, andsought my not-quite “professional” counsel), and 48% arebetween the ages of 18-34. All this activity reaps a 7.2-billion-dollareconomic impact.
Fantasysports have also transcended just the world of “sports,” pervading many realmsof popular culture. Reality TV such as The Bachelor (willyour prize-pick girl get the final rose?) and The Real Housewives (thefights, the drinks, the drinks thrown, oh, all the points!) now have fantasygames as well. You can even play one where you earn points for picking whichcelebrities will appear on the most tabloids (you lose points if they dosomething bad). Political science major? Well, the wide world of fantasy evenhas something for you: introducing, Fantasy Congress. Draft real-lifecongressmen and women and earn points for bills they draft, votes they cast, orspeeches they make (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has GOT to be winning somebody outthere a season, come on).
Whichfantasy game will you play? What will you ‘fantasize’ next? (see Fantasizr.com)How will it change your conversations? How will those conversations change theworld?
