Inside Fantasy Football: America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport

00:00:10 Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

00:00:17 Speaker 2: Up next, a story.

00:00:19 Speaker 1: About one of America’s favorite pastimes. And I’m not just talking about football, which it is. It’s the preeminent sport. Like it or not, it’s the number one sport in this country. By the way, it’s our own sport, not the European kind. And there’s a book called Inside Fantasy Football, America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport. That’s what we’re talking about for the next hour with author Peter Funt. He’s the host of TV’s Candid Camera. His father was Allen Funt. He has also written tremendous stories for The Wall Street Journal and others about American pastimes and hobbies. But today we’re here to talk about fantasy football. Talk about how you came to follow this sport. Most times you indicated it comes from a father introducing it to his son to keep the relationship going in the end, like fishing or hunting or golf. Talk about how you caught on to fantasy football.

00:01:16 Speaker 3: It was exactly the opposite with me. My son Danny and a few of his friends were just out of college. And they got into fantasy football. And for a couple of years I had no idea what they were even talking about. They were using a language that I was not familiar with, and I’m quite a sports fan, but this fantasy stuff has its own lexicon, and I really didn’t understand it. They persuaded me to jump in and give it a try, and I became immediately hooked. I won’t say addicted, but close to being a fanatic. And after roughly ten years of that, I thought, you know, there might be a book in here somewhere, and maybe there are folks who know a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but they don’t know how this whole thing got started. They don’t know the backstory, so what the heck.

00:02:15 Speaker 1: Well, you know, it’s interesting you write in the book about the fact that we’ve all played fantasy sports in some way or another. I was a point guard of my high school basketball team, and Walt Clyde Fraser was the person I was always pretending to be, or Jerry West, which of course dates me. Talk about that aspect of sports and the American public, because in many ways, we’re all athletes. Even celebrities want to be athletes. Everybody in the end wants to be an athlete. Talk about sports and American culture, because it’s a book about that.

00:02:45 Speaker 3: So many of us at the earliest age, I think it does begin with a fantasy. Why wouldn’t we project a fantasy in which we are on the field? I must have been three years years old, possibly even younger, when I watched my dad watching sports on TV, and honestly, my fondest memory of that is that it was arguably the one or very few times during the week when I saw him genuinely happy and disdetached from what was going on around him. My dad was a great guy, but he worked very hard, and it wore him out and sometimes, to be honest, made him a bit grouchy. But when he was watching sports, he was in another world, and I got so much joy out of watching him smile, and I began, like he, to project myself into the game and this wonderful thing that.

00:03:51 Speaker 4: He was so happy about.

00:03:54 Speaker 3: I would place myself in front of the bedroom mirror with a baseball bat and pretend I was Mickey Mantle. It was genuinely fantasizing about being on the field. Most of us—I don’t know the percentage, but let’s let’s guess it’s ninety-nine point something percent—never make it onto a professional field or court or gridiron, and so somewhere along the line our fantasy shifts, and it’s no longer realistic to say I could someday play shortstop for the New York Yankees, so I have to shift it into well, I could create this team, this dream team of fantasy players and have fun with that and project things in a different way. And that’s actually how the guys who invented fantasy football came at it initially.

00:04:56 Speaker 1: Let’s talk about the league a bit and its growth. We’ve done a couple of stories on the early NFL and its rise, also the early NBA.

00:05:04 Speaker 2: We take for granted.

00:05:05 Speaker 1: Now that the Super Bowl is well attended and one hundred and thirty million people watch it, the first Super Bowl wasn’t a sellout, and the athletes who played in the NFL in the 1950s needed part-time jobs on top of playing in the NFL. So, talk about the league and talk about the one gentleman who is a part-time owner of the Oakland Raiders who described the league for folks, because I think it’s going to be harder to believe that the modern NFL was nothing like the NFL when fantasy football, well, got its start in 1962.

00:05:38 Speaker 3: Yeah, the turning point really was in 1960 when the AFL was formed, and this was a rival to the NFL as we know it now. And some of the teams in the AFL were owned by guys who tried hard to get an NFL franchise and were, for one reason or another, rejected. So there were these wealthy individuals who wanted to invest in football. The NFL wouldn’t let them in, and so they formed the AFL. Originally, in 1960, there were eight teams in the AFL, and one of them—in fact, the last to join the list—was the Oakland Raiders. They were last because they weren’t even supposed to be in. That spot was intended for the Minnesota Vikings, but at the last minute, the Vikings jumped into the NFL, and these AFL upstarts had one vacancy, so they hurriedly formed the Oakland Raiders, and right from the start it was a mess. And I don’t want to insult Raider fans today—it’s a long time later—but back then, in 1960, the Raiders were a mess. They won a few games their first year in 1960—a one, I believe—two in their second season, and by the third season, the 1962 season, their pathetic record was one and thirteen.

00:07:20 Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Peter Funt talking about the NFL and the birth of fantasy football. When we come back, we’ll continue the story here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, and we do it all from the heart of the South—Oxford, Mississippi. But we truly can’t do this show without you. Consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com, give a little, give a lot. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we returned to Our American Stories and the story of how fantasy football came to be. When we last left off, we’d learned that the AFL, well, was just starting to compete with the NFL, and there was this team called the Oakland Raiders, where they had cobbled together a team and they were in a desperate situation. The team just kept losing and there were a few co-owners. Let’s pick up now where we last left.

00:08:33 Speaker 3: Off, and a minority owner of this Oakland Raiders franchise was a Bay Area resident named Bill Winkenbach. His friends called him Wink. He was a big sports fan. He was interested, like many of us, in playing sports, but quickly found he wasn’t good enough at it. What he was good at was business, and he was in the ceramic tile business. He made a lot of money and he decided to invest a chunk of it in this terrible Oakland Raiders team. Now, the interesting thing about Winkenbach is that ten years earlier, in the mid-early 1950s, he actually invented an early form of fantasy sports. First, he did it with PGA Tour golf, and he had this idea that if he and his friends each divided up the field at a PGA Tour event and then kept track of the individual scores of the players and translated it somehow into small monetary bets, they could make a game out of it. They never used the word ‘fantasy sports’; that came in way later, but they were playing essentially a.

00:09:58 Speaker 4: Form of the game.

00:10:01 Speaker 3: They became interested to the point where they tried it with baseball. All they counted were home runs and certain pitching statistics. But that was in the back of his mind in 1962 when Winkenbach accompanied the Raiders on a road trip to the East Coast. By the time they landed in New York City, their record for the season was zero to seven, and really things were headed in the wrong direction. Winkenbach and his pals who traveled with the team, and that included a writer for the Oakland Tribune, some members of the Raiders’ front office staff, they were all miserable, not only because the team was doing so poorly, but because, as fans, they wished they had some superstars to root for.

00:10:55 Speaker 4: Don’t forget the other league.

00:10:57 Speaker 3: The successful NFL had big stars like Jim Brown and Mike Ditka and Frank Gifford, and they’re kind of moaning over the fact that they don’t have anybody in their league of that caliber, and they certainly don’t have anybody that good on the Raiders. So here they are in New York and they’re going to play the team called the New York Titans, and they later became, as we know, the New York Jets, but this was the Titans in 1962. It was a rainy, miserable night when they showed up in New York in advance of the game. They went to a hotel in mid-Manhattan and quickly made their way into the bar, and the more they drank, the more the idea for this game, this pretend football game, took shape, and by morning they had essentially invented fantasy football. They flew home to Oakland, and it was too late in the season to start this game, and they waited until the following summer, and they had a draft in August in Winkenbach’s basement, and there were eight guys and they each had a helper, so there was a grand total of sixteen guys. And they formed this league, the very first fantasy football league in history. And they gave it a very unusual, cumbersome name. They called it the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League, and for short, or at least a little bit shorter, they called it Goppel, GOPPPL. And that, folks, was the first fantasy football league. The interesting thing is the rules that they came up with for the Goppele League were quite similar to what we play today, at least in so-called seasonal redraft recreational fantasy football competition. It’s quite similar to what they did, but it was much, much more difficult for these guys, primarily because there were no computers. The only source of information about the football games was the box scores and newspapers, and in order to keep track of the results for the fantasy football games, Winkenbach spent hours and hours each week, late into the night looking at the box score in the early edition of the newspaper and carefully tabulating how everybody was doing. And I repeat, they did not use the term fantasy football. In fact, that term didn’t even enter the lexicon until some decades later. What did they call it? Winkenbach called his game ‘the draft’. That’s what he called it, because they knew then, as many of us know now, that perhaps the most exciting part of a fantasy football competition is the draft, getting together, taking turns picking players, forming relationships that in some cases carry on for decades. And so they called it the draft. But the rules were similar to what we think of today. They played for pennies and they had a lot of fun.

00:14:50 Speaker 1: And let’s talk about the fact that this founder, as fantasy football took hold, never actually.

00:14:57 Speaker 2: Made money from this. I mean, he didn’t profit from it. Talk about that.

00:15:01 Speaker 3: Yeah, Winkenbach had really a billion-dollar idea, but he never got a nickel from his idea, in part because he wasn’t interested in the money.

00:15:15 Speaker 4: He was a wealthy man and he didn’t need the money.

00:15:20 Speaker 3: But he also thought this was a fun enterprise, recreational, fraternal, but definitely not financial, so he never tried to protect his idea. Decades later, his relatives told me how they tried after Winkenbach’s death to see if there was some way they could back up and cash in on this fantasy football idea, and lawyers told them it’s almost impossible. You can’t protect something like that. There are too many different forms, too many different applications, and so they gave up.

00:16:05 Speaker 4: So Winkenbach’s billion-dollar idea.

00:16:08 Speaker 3: And I am using a ‘B’ because this is a billion-dollar proposition. The NFL, as we know, is a multi, multi-billion-dollar sport. The worst NFL franchises, the least valuable, are now valued at over five billion dollars each, and the most valuable NFL franchises are now over ten billion dollars in value, so fantasy football is a smaller but essential part of that. And today the giant companies like DraftKings and FanDuel, Underdog, and of course ESPN and Yahoo, they’re all into fantasy gaming and they’re managing to conflate it with actual sports wagering, which is a separate but related enterprise. Some people like myself are not happy to see the way that’s going, but monetarily, now, the money is just pouring in.

00:17:19 Speaker 4: And it’s feeding on each other.

00:17:22 Speaker 3: The organized legal betting is helping fantasy sports, and the popularity of fantasy sports is helping legal online betting.

00:17:34 Speaker 2: And you’re listening to Peter Funt.

00:17:35 Speaker 1: He’s the author of Inside Fantasy Football, America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport. And we find out who the originator of fantasy football was, and it was Bill Winkenbach. A lot of good ideas happened just like this one did in a bar with some guys and gals drinking. More of this multi-billion-dollar idea on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and the story of fantasy football, its origins to its present status. And we’re talking to Peter Funt, the author of Inside Fantasy Football, America’s Favorite Non-Contact Sport.

00:18:21 Speaker 2: We’ve just been talking about.

00:18:23 Speaker 1: The integration or the merging of gambling, sports, gambling, and fantasy football itself.

00:18:30 Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:32 Speaker 3: The professional sports leagues that, certainly the NFL, NBA, NBL, were always very nervous about gambling. And as you say, in the earliest days, with the Black Sox scandal or the Pete Rose incident, and quite a few other examples of bad behavior, why would the leagues want to get anywhere near that? And the big reason they didn’t want to get it was there was no way to monetize it. But of course that changed in 2018 with the Supreme Court decision that essentially legalized gambling and allowed it to be outside of Nevada where it was legal, and basically in any state in the Union where local state government decided it was okay. Once those floodgates opened, not only did gambling spread to a much, much larger proportion of the population, but immediately the professional leagues recognized, now, there’s a lot of money to be made here. Almost overnight, they changed their entire position about gambling to the point where twenty-eight of the thirty-two NFL teams are somehow contractually connected to fantasy football enterprises.

00:20:02 Speaker 1: Let’s cover the NFL players, the actual players, not the fantasy players.

00:20:06 Speaker 2: The NFL players.

00:20:08 Speaker 1: You talked a little bit about Tony Romo, and I was stunned that he was one of the first pro athletes that far along with the knowledge of fantasy football to really put his arms around it.

00:20:19 Speaker 2: Talk about that and why Romo?

00:20:23 Speaker 4: You’d have to ask Tony Romo. Why Romo?

00:20:26 Speaker 3: Except, a lot of guys at the end of their playing career—and that’s where he was—are starting to think about other ways to monetize their name and their connections. Now, for many of them, Romo included, that ultimately turned out to be the broadcast booth, and that’s where Tony Romo shines today. But back ten years ago or more, he was looking for an angle, and fantasy football seemed like a good one, and he thought if he could just bring together a lot of his buddies from the NFL and call it a fantasy football conference or convention or exhibition or something like that, there’d be money to be made, and his guys would sign things and charge for it and everybody would be happy. They tried to do it, they picked the wrong spot to do it. They tried to do it first in Las Vegas, and when the NFL learned of this plan, they forbade the players from taking part. He stuck with it, tried to do it the following year in Los Angeles, and that too didn’t work out for different and complicated reasons. He had hooked up with Madden NFL Football, the video game, to make money, but Madden games, it was a form of the NFL logo as their logo. When Romo brought this in to his exhibition, the NFL again jumped in and said, no, no, no, you can’t use our logo, and they shut the thing down again. Now, the third year, he tried it in, I believe, the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and it did go off without much of a hitch.

00:22:31 Speaker 4: It just wasn’t very interesting.

00:22:34 Speaker 3: You basically had a lot of players charging exorbitant prices for autographs, and those who did attend didn’t feel they were getting much out of it, and so that thing kind of flopped. A very, very nice man named Bob Lung started a competing annual event called the Fantasy Football Expo.

00:23:00 Speaker 4: Unlike Romo, I don’t.

00:23:02 Speaker 3: Think Bob is in it for the money, and if he is, more power to him. Because it’s a very homespun event. It’s held in Canton, Ohio, each August, in connection—or at least proximity—to the induction ceremony for the NFL Hall of Fame in Canton, and so there’s a