October 13, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Peter Funt shares the enthralling growth of a billion-dollar business. Hear the journey from the early GOPPPL days to an integral part of the NFL marketing plan. Peter's book is Inside Fantasy Football: America's Favorite Non-Contact Sport
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Up next a story.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
About one of America's favorite pass times. And I'm not
just talking about football, which it is. It's the pre
eminent 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.
(00:42):
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
(01:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
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're 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
(01:38):
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
(02:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
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
(02:39):
the end wants to be an athlete. Talk about sports
and American culture, because it's a book about that.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
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,
(03:09):
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
(03:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
He was so happy about.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
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
(04:17):
onto a professional field or court or gridiron, and so
somewhere along the lines are 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
(04:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
We take for granted.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
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 nineteen fifties 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 described the
(05:27):
league for folks, because I think it's going to be
harder for believe that the modern NFL was nothing like
the NFL when fantasy football well got its start in
nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yeah, the turning point really was in nineteen sixty 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 from franchise and were,
(06:01):
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 nineteen sixty there were eight teams in the AFL,
and one of them, in fact, the last to join
(06:23):
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,
(06:49):
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 nineteen sixty the
Raiders were a mess. They won a few games their
first year in nineteen sixty a one I believe two
(07:10):
in their second season, and by the third season, the
nineteen sixty two season, their pathetic record was one and thirteen.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
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
(07:40):
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 our American Stories dot com, give a little, give
a lot. That's our American Stories dot com. And we
(08:09):
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 his 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
(08:32):
pick up now where we last left.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Off, and a minority owner of this Oakland Raider 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
(08:54):
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 Raider team. Now, the interesting thing about Winkenbach
(09:16):
is that ten years earlier, in the mid early nineteen fifties,
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
(09:36):
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
(09:57):
playing essentially a.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Form of the game.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
They became interested to the point where they tried it
with baseball. All they counted was home runs and certain
pitching statistics. But that was in the back of his
mind in nineteen sixty two when Winkenbach accompanied the Raiders
on a road trip to the East Coast. By the
(10:22):
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,
(10:44):
they were all miserable, not only because the team was
doing so poorly, but because as fans, they wish they
had some superstars to root for.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Don't forget the other league.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
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
(11:18):
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
nineteen sixty two. 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
(11:41):
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
(12:02):
in the season to start this game, and they waited
until the following summer, and they had a draft in
August in Winken Box 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,
(12:23):
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 least a little bit shorter, they called it goppel
(12:45):
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
(13:06):
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,
(13:30):
and in order to keep track of the results for
the fantasy football games, winkin Box 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
(13:53):
not use the term fantasy football. In fact, that term
didn't even entered 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
(14:15):
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.
(14:38):
But the rules were similar to what we think of today.
They played for pennies and they had a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
And let's talk about the fact that this founder, as
fantasy football took hold, never actually.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Made money from this. I mean, he didn't profit from it.
Talk about that.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
He was a wealthy man and he didn't need the money.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
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
(15:41):
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's too many different forms,
too many different applications, and so they gave up.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
So wink inbox billion dollar idea.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
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
(16:30):
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 Draft Kings and FanDuel Underdog, and of course
(16:54):
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,
(17:17):
now the money is just pouring in.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
And it's feeding on each other.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
The organized legal betting is helping fantasy sports, and the
popularity of fantasy sports is helping legal online betting.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
And you're listening to Peter Funt.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
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 winkinback 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
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and the story of
fantasy football it's origins to its present status. And we're
talking to Peter Funt, the author of Inside Fantasy Football,
America's favorite non contact sport.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
We've just been talking about.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
The integration or the merging of gambling, sports, gambling, and
fantasy football itself.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Let's pick up what we last left off.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
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
(18:55):
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 twenty eighteen with the
Supreme Court decision that essentially legalized gambling and allowed it
to be outside of Nevada where it was legal, and
(19:17):
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
(19:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Let's cover the NFL players, the actual players, not the
fantasy players.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
The NFL players.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Talk about that and why Romo?
Speaker 4 (20:23):
You'd have to ask Tony Romo. Why Romo?
Speaker 3 (20:26):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:10):
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 forbid the
(21:36):
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
(22:01):
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,
(22:22):
he tried it in I believe the Dallas Fort Worth area,
and it did go off without much of a hitch.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
It just wasn't very interesting.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Unlike Romo, I don't.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
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
(23:23):
perfect synergy there. And this Fantasy Football Expo has gotten
bigger and bigger, and the people who go that include fans,
but also some players and a lot of so called
experts analysts who write and report about fantasy football all
say this Fantasy Football Expo is a wonderful thing and
(23:48):
a lot of fun.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
So that's good.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
As for the NFL players like Tony Romo, well, Romo
has bigger fit to fry out as a broadcaster, and
I think a very good one. I love listening to
Tony Romo. But the fantasy game is kind of a
(24:15):
mixed blessing for current NFL players. The guys who are
still active, some of them embrace it, and in fact,
the NFL allows them to play in recreational fantasy football
leagues as long as the top prize is not more
than two hundred and fifty dollars. So the NFL wants
(24:38):
to be sure that it's not gambling and not high stakes,
not enough money where any player would be inspired to
throw a game or or do something wrong on the field.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
That's crazy. That's good stuff. And let's talk about the
richest two percent. That's the title of a chapter. Who's
Michael kohmbe Well?
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Michael Kohn is among the richest two percent. The richest
two percent refers to the fact that in daily fantasy sports,
less than two percent of the players win more than
ninety eight percent of the money, and that should be
(25:20):
more frustrating to the general public than it is. And
yet the general public keeps throwing their money at this
because it's more like a lottery. You buy a ticket,
maybe one hundred tickets, not really expecting to win, but
dreaming that you might and thinking that it would.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Change your life.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
For the less than two percent who are good at
this and more importantly, have the computer power and proprietary
software to help them be good at it. For those guys,
it's a big, big business. Michael Cone is one such person.
(26:05):
By day, he's a stockbroker living in Texas. On weekends
and evenings, he's a daily fantasy football player. He goes
with the handle two gun, as in two firearms, two guns,
and he has won the million dollar prize at least
(26:29):
that I know of, five different times. That's amazing considering
that he's competing in fields where there's often one hundred
and eighty thousand people in the field, and he's come
out first for the million dollars more than five times,
(26:50):
at least five times. So, Michael Cone, what do you
do with all this money?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And we're talking to Peter Funt, he's the author of
Inside Fantasy Football. What does Michael Cone do with all
this money? When we come back more of the story
of fantasy football, its origins, how it came to be
the two percent who wager fortunes to win fortunes back
and the rest of us who just like playing for
the fun of it and maybe win a few bucks
(27:20):
on the side. The story of fantasy football continues here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
stories and with Peter Funt. His book is Inside Fantasy Football,
(27:42):
America's favorite.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Non contact sport.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
And let's pick up where we last left off talking
about Michael Cohne, one of the members of the two
percent of Fantasy Football daily betting.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
He already was doing well as a stockbroker. He's got
all this fantasy money.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Well.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
The first thing he did was he bought the street
in suburban Houston, Texas, where he lives. He actually bought
the street. It has five or six homes on it.
He decided he would live in one of them, but
his friends and relatives would live in the other homes.
And he hired a lawyer and got the name of
(28:25):
the street changed to two gun Way. And that's where
Michael Cohne now lives on the street that he literally
made with his winnings from daily Fantasy Sports. But as
I was researching my book, I became increasingly intrigued.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
With these stories.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Among these big winners, there's not a lot of them,
but there are several. And besides Michael Khan, there is,
for example, a professor at the University of Connecticut, a
gentleman named David Bergmann. He won't say exactly how much
money he's won in daily Fantasy but I was able
(29:13):
to do some back of the envelope math and I'm
certain that he has won more than twenty million dollars. Now,
what I don't know for sure is how much he
spent to enter these contests, but I'm confident in saying
it's a big, big number. But the interesting thing about
(29:34):
David Bergman is he continues to teach at Yukon in
the business department, and one of his classes uses the
concepts that he's employed in daily fantasy sports to teach
business and economics to his students, and the payoff at
(29:55):
the end of each semester is that the class gets
to play against him in a daily fantasy competition. I
just find that remarkable. But he's an example of a brainiac.
He's a guy who has figured this out and manages
to win simply because he's so smart. Now, as I
(30:20):
looked further, I thought, are there any women involved in this?
Because we know statistically women are the fastest growing segment
of both NFL viewership and fantasy football participation. The figures
(30:41):
now show that of the roughly fifty to fifty five
million Americans who play fantasy football, and estimated twenty five
percent of them, one out of every four is a woman.
And that's a remarkably big number. So I tried to
go looking for the big winners among women, and I
(31:06):
finally found one. And her name is Alisha Hunt, and
she lives in a suburb of Chicago. She's always been
a football fan and she plays daily fantasy on Draft Kings,
but she doesn't put in the maximum number of roster
(31:29):
lineups the way the big guys do. Guys like David
Bergman and Michael Kohne play the max, which is one
hundred and fifty different lineups in each contest. One week,
Alisha Hunt went with three, just three lineups, and she
didn't use a computer or something she learned in a
(31:53):
class at Yukon to figure it out. She just went
with her gut and she came up with a lineup
and lo and behold, she won one point one million
dollars that afternoon on DraftKings, the so called Millimaker contest.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
And she quit her job.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
She was working at Amazon, and she decided to just
invest her money and take it easy. She continues to
play daily fantasy sports and does some blogging on websites
about tips and tricks, but as of today, Alicia Hunt
(32:33):
is the only woman to have ever won a million
dollar prize in fantasy football.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Well more to come. I hope that's all we can say.
The growth is remarkable.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
As you said, let's talk about AI because it's affecting
every part of our lives. I know a lot of
people who write for a living. They're worried. But yet
maybe it'll make their life easier. Maybe the good writers
will thrive. Maybe some of the poorer writers won't.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Talk about it.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
AI is going to affect fantasy football for better and
for worse, maybe a mix of both. And make some
predictions about it too, if you wouldn't mind. After all
the studying you've done.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
You know, AI is already a confusing term because artificial
intelligence really represents so many different things that a computer
can or can't do. We sometimes look at simple word
processing or spell check and we leap to call it AI. Well,
(33:36):
you can call it AI, but it's not what others
think of when they use the term. And I say
that because in fantasy sports there's a wide range of
computerization and computer tools that are unquestionably making the game
easier for those who have mastered it, especially in daily
(33:58):
fantasy sports. Computers are now a tremendous part of the game.
You could even say a requisite for winning in a
regular seasonal redraft computerization and AI is a tiny, tiny
part of it.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
I went and interviewed a number of.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
People at ESPN, which is the largest platform for seasonal
fantasy sports. They have over twelve million players each season.
And I also went to IBM because they have partnered
with ESPN and put out press releases about how they
(34:41):
are using AI to change the game and improve the game.
And the more I talk to these folks, the more
frustrated I became, because they.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
Really haven't figured out very much at all.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
ESPN is working on an app aspect of computerization that
might help you know if a trade you were making
in your league was a smart trade or perhaps a
bad trade.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
There's nothing new about.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
That, and you don't need a zillion dollar IBM computer
to figure that out. But for marketing purposes, it sounds
good for ESPN to say we're incorporating IBM AI into
your fantasy experience. And similarly, at IBM they're getting something
(35:36):
from their relationship with ESPN. They're certainly getting publicity. Don't
forget they were the people who many years ago built
the computer that beat the champion chess player, and really
revolutionized chess by proving once and for all that no
human could beat a computer at chess. And when I
(35:59):
went to IBM, I expected them to say, and now
we've figured out how to do that with fantasy football.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
We've got the.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Machine over there that nobody can beat. Well, either they
don't have it, or if they do, they're still hiding
it in the back room because nobody was willing to
tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
And I don't think they do have it.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
I think fantasy football in the seasonal league form is
not really suited to playing against a computer. And may
I say the fact that some of us are more
interested in the fantasy aspect of this than the real
game that's going on on the field, and the fact
(36:47):
that we now tend to follow players even more than
we follow teams. It may not be exactly what the
founders had in mind, but it's definitely what the NFL
has in mind, because for the NFL, fantasy football has
become the glue that holds everything together, holds viewers attention
(37:11):
during frankly boring games, lopsided games, games with mismatched teams.
And yet if you're a fantasy player and you've got
just one player in that game who you're really depending on.
You're riveted to the screen and you're not going away.
And that's what the NFL is counting on because it
(37:35):
makes the entire game bigger than anyone team, anyone's city,
anyone franchise.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
And we've been listening to Peter Funt inside Fantasy Football,
America's favorite non contact sport. Does the book go to
Amazon or the usual suspects and pick it up? We
learn how Peter got interested in football, and of course
that's because his dad, Allen Funk, the famous Allen Funk,
And that's how Peter Fund learned about fantasy football from
his son. That's why so many Americans play it, some
(38:06):
to gamble, but some to just enjoy the camaraderie. The
story of fantasy football as told by Peter Funt. Here
on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Up next a story.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
About one of America's favorite pass times. And I'm not
just talking about football, which it is. It's the pre
eminent 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.
(00:42):
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
(01:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
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're 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
(01:38):
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
(02:00):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
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
(02:39):
the end wants to be an athlete. Talk about sports
and American culture, because it's a book about that.
Speaker 3 (02:45):
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,
(03:09):
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
(03:30):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:51):
He was so happy about.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
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
(04:17):
onto a professional field or court or gridiron, and so
somewhere along the lines are 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
(04:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
We take for granted.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
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 nineteen fifties 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 described the
(05:27):
league for folks, because I think it's going to be
harder for believe that the modern NFL was nothing like
the NFL when fantasy football well got its start in
nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Yeah, the turning point really was in nineteen sixty 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 from franchise and were,
(06:01):
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 nineteen sixty there were eight teams in the AFL,
and one of them, in fact, the last to join
(06:23):
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,
(06:49):
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 nineteen sixty the
Raiders were a mess. They won a few games their
first year in nineteen sixty a one I believe two
(07:10):
in their second season, and by the third season, the
nineteen sixty two season, their pathetic record was one and thirteen.
Speaker 1 (07:20):
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
(07:40):
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 our American Stories dot com, give a little, give
a lot. That's our American Stories dot com. And we
(08:09):
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 his 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
(08:32):
pick up now where we last left.
Speaker 3 (08:33):
Off, and a minority owner of this Oakland Raider 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
(08:54):
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 Raider team. Now, the interesting thing about Winkenbach
(09:16):
is that ten years earlier, in the mid early nineteen fifties,
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
(09:36):
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
(09:57):
playing essentially a.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Form of the game.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
They became interested to the point where they tried it
with baseball. All they counted was home runs and certain
pitching statistics. But that was in the back of his
mind in nineteen sixty two when Winkenbach accompanied the Raiders
on a road trip to the East Coast. By the
(10:22):
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,
(10:44):
they were all miserable, not only because the team was
doing so poorly, but because as fans, they wish they
had some superstars to root for.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
Don't forget the other league.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
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
(11:18):
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
nineteen sixty two. 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
(11:41):
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
(12:02):
in the season to start this game, and they waited
until the following summer, and they had a draft in
August in Winken Box 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,
(12:23):
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 least a little bit shorter, they called it goppel
(12:45):
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
(13:06):
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,
(13:30):
and in order to keep track of the results for
the fantasy football games, winkin Box 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
(13:53):
not use the term fantasy football. In fact, that term
didn't even entered 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
(14:15):
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.
(14:38):
But the rules were similar to what we think of today.
They played for pennies and they had a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
And let's talk about the fact that this founder, as
fantasy football took hold, never actually.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Made money from this. I mean, he didn't profit from it.
Talk about that.
Speaker 3 (15:01):
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.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
He was a wealthy man and he didn't need the money.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
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
(15:41):
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's too many different forms,
too many different applications, and so they gave up.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
So wink inbox billion dollar idea.
Speaker 3 (16:08):
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
(16:30):
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 Draft Kings and FanDuel Underdog, and of course
(16:54):
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,
(17:17):
now the money is just pouring in.
Speaker 4 (17:19):
And it's feeding on each other.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
The organized legal betting is helping fantasy sports, and the
popularity of fantasy sports is helping legal online betting.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
And you're listening to Peter Funt.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
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 winkinback 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
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and the story of
fantasy football it's origins to its present status. And we're
talking to Peter Funt, the author of Inside Fantasy Football,
America's favorite non contact sport.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
We've just been talking about.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
The integration or the merging of gambling, sports, gambling, and
fantasy football itself.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Let's pick up what we last left off.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
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
(18:55):
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 twenty eighteen with the
Supreme Court decision that essentially legalized gambling and allowed it
to be outside of Nevada where it was legal, and
(19:17):
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
(19:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Let's cover the NFL players, the actual players, not the
fantasy players.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
The NFL players.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Talk about that and why Romo?
Speaker 4 (20:23):
You'd have to ask Tony Romo. Why Romo?
Speaker 3 (20:26):
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
(20:47):
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
(21:10):
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 forbid the
(21:36):
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
(22:01):
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,
(22:22):
he tried it in I believe the Dallas Fort Worth area,
and it did go off without much of a hitch.
Speaker 4 (22:31):
It just wasn't very interesting.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
Unlike Romo, I don't.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
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
(23:23):
perfect synergy there. And this Fantasy Football Expo has gotten
bigger and bigger, and the people who go that include fans,
but also some players and a lot of so called
experts analysts who write and report about fantasy football all
say this Fantasy Football Expo is a wonderful thing and
(23:48):
a lot of fun.
Speaker 4 (23:50):
So that's good.
Speaker 3 (23:53):
As for the NFL players like Tony Romo, well, Romo
has bigger fit to fry out as a broadcaster, and
I think a very good one. I love listening to
Tony Romo. But the fantasy game is kind of a
(24:15):
mixed blessing for current NFL players. The guys who are
still active, some of them embrace it, and in fact,
the NFL allows them to play in recreational fantasy football
leagues as long as the top prize is not more
than two hundred and fifty dollars. So the NFL wants
(24:38):
to be sure that it's not gambling and not high stakes,
not enough money where any player would be inspired to
throw a game or or do something wrong on the field.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
That's crazy. That's good stuff. And let's talk about the
richest two percent. That's the title of a chapter. Who's
Michael kohmbe Well?
Speaker 3 (24:59):
Michael Kohn is among the richest two percent. The richest
two percent refers to the fact that in daily fantasy sports,
less than two percent of the players win more than
ninety eight percent of the money, and that should be
(25:20):
more frustrating to the general public than it is. And
yet the general public keeps throwing their money at this
because it's more like a lottery. You buy a ticket,
maybe one hundred tickets, not really expecting to win, but
dreaming that you might and thinking that it would.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Change your life.
Speaker 3 (25:44):
For the less than two percent who are good at
this and more importantly, have the computer power and proprietary
software to help them be good at it. For those guys,
it's a big, big business. Michael Cone is one such person.
(26:05):
By day, he's a stockbroker living in Texas. On weekends
and evenings, he's a daily fantasy football player. He goes
with the handle two gun, as in two firearms, two guns,
and he has won the million dollar prize at least
(26:29):
that I know of, five different times. That's amazing considering
that he's competing in fields where there's often one hundred
and eighty thousand people in the field, and he's come
out first for the million dollars more than five times,
(26:50):
at least five times. So, Michael Cone, what do you
do with all this money?
Speaker 1 (26:59):
And we're talking to Peter Funt, he's the author of
Inside Fantasy Football. What does Michael Cone do with all
this money? When we come back more of the story
of fantasy football, its origins, how it came to be
the two percent who wager fortunes to win fortunes back
and the rest of us who just like playing for
the fun of it and maybe win a few bucks
(27:20):
on the side. The story of fantasy football continues here
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
stories and with Peter Funt. His book is Inside Fantasy Football,
(27:42):
America's favorite.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
Non contact sport.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
And let's pick up where we last left off talking
about Michael Cohne, one of the members of the two
percent of Fantasy Football daily betting.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
He already was doing well as a stockbroker. He's got
all this fantasy money.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
Well.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
The first thing he did was he bought the street
in suburban Houston, Texas, where he lives. He actually bought
the street. It has five or six homes on it.
He decided he would live in one of them, but
his friends and relatives would live in the other homes.
And he hired a lawyer and got the name of
(28:25):
the street changed to two gun Way. And that's where
Michael Cohne now lives on the street that he literally
made with his winnings from daily Fantasy Sports. But as
I was researching my book, I became increasingly intrigued.
Speaker 4 (28:47):
With these stories.
Speaker 3 (28:49):
Among these big winners, there's not a lot of them,
but there are several. And besides Michael Khan, there is,
for example, a professor at the University of Connecticut, a
gentleman named David Bergmann. He won't say exactly how much
money he's won in daily Fantasy but I was able
(29:13):
to do some back of the envelope math and I'm
certain that he has won more than twenty million dollars. Now,
what I don't know for sure is how much he
spent to enter these contests, but I'm confident in saying
it's a big, big number. But the interesting thing about
(29:34):
David Bergman is he continues to teach at Yukon in
the business department, and one of his classes uses the
concepts that he's employed in daily fantasy sports to teach
business and economics to his students, and the payoff at
(29:55):
the end of each semester is that the class gets
to play against him in a daily fantasy competition. I
just find that remarkable. But he's an example of a brainiac.
He's a guy who has figured this out and manages
to win simply because he's so smart. Now, as I
(30:20):
looked further, I thought, are there any women involved in this?
Because we know statistically women are the fastest growing segment
of both NFL viewership and fantasy football participation. The figures
(30:41):
now show that of the roughly fifty to fifty five
million Americans who play fantasy football, and estimated twenty five
percent of them, one out of every four is a woman.
And that's a remarkably big number. So I tried to
go looking for the big winners among women, and I
(31:06):
finally found one. And her name is Alisha Hunt, and
she lives in a suburb of Chicago. She's always been
a football fan and she plays daily fantasy on Draft Kings,
but she doesn't put in the maximum number of roster
(31:29):
lineups the way the big guys do. Guys like David
Bergman and Michael Kohne play the max, which is one
hundred and fifty different lineups in each contest. One week,
Alisha Hunt went with three, just three lineups, and she
didn't use a computer or something she learned in a
(31:53):
class at Yukon to figure it out. She just went
with her gut and she came up with a lineup
and lo and behold, she won one point one million
dollars that afternoon on DraftKings, the so called Millimaker contest.
Speaker 4 (32:11):
And she quit her job.
Speaker 3 (32:13):
She was working at Amazon, and she decided to just
invest her money and take it easy. She continues to
play daily fantasy sports and does some blogging on websites
about tips and tricks, but as of today, Alicia Hunt
(32:33):
is the only woman to have ever won a million
dollar prize in fantasy football.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
Well more to come. I hope that's all we can say.
The growth is remarkable.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
As you said, let's talk about AI because it's affecting
every part of our lives. I know a lot of
people who write for a living. They're worried. But yet
maybe it'll make their life easier. Maybe the good writers
will thrive. Maybe some of the poorer writers won't.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
Talk about it.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
AI is going to affect fantasy football for better and
for worse, maybe a mix of both. And make some
predictions about it too, if you wouldn't mind. After all
the studying you've done.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
You know, AI is already a confusing term because artificial
intelligence really represents so many different things that a computer
can or can't do. We sometimes look at simple word
processing or spell check and we leap to call it AI. Well,
(33:36):
you can call it AI, but it's not what others
think of when they use the term. And I say
that because in fantasy sports there's a wide range of
computerization and computer tools that are unquestionably making the game
easier for those who have mastered it, especially in daily
(33:58):
fantasy sports. Computers are now a tremendous part of the game.
You could even say a requisite for winning in a
regular seasonal redraft computerization and AI is a tiny, tiny
part of it.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
I went and interviewed a number of.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
People at ESPN, which is the largest platform for seasonal
fantasy sports. They have over twelve million players each season.
And I also went to IBM because they have partnered
with ESPN and put out press releases about how they
(34:41):
are using AI to change the game and improve the game.
And the more I talk to these folks, the more
frustrated I became, because they.
Speaker 4 (34:53):
Really haven't figured out very much at all.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
ESPN is working on an app aspect of computerization that
might help you know if a trade you were making
in your league was a smart trade or perhaps a
bad trade.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
There's nothing new about.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
That, and you don't need a zillion dollar IBM computer
to figure that out. But for marketing purposes, it sounds
good for ESPN to say we're incorporating IBM AI into
your fantasy experience. And similarly, at IBM they're getting something
(35:36):
from their relationship with ESPN. They're certainly getting publicity. Don't
forget they were the people who many years ago built
the computer that beat the champion chess player, and really
revolutionized chess by proving once and for all that no
human could beat a computer at chess. And when I
(35:59):
went to IBM, I expected them to say, and now
we've figured out how to do that with fantasy football.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
We've got the.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
Machine over there that nobody can beat. Well, either they
don't have it, or if they do, they're still hiding
it in the back room because nobody was willing to
tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
And I don't think they do have it.
Speaker 3 (36:24):
I think fantasy football in the seasonal league form is
not really suited to playing against a computer. And may
I say the fact that some of us are more
interested in the fantasy aspect of this than the real
game that's going on on the field, and the fact
(36:47):
that we now tend to follow players even more than
we follow teams. It may not be exactly what the
founders had in mind, but it's definitely what the NFL
has in mind, because for the NFL, fantasy football has
become the glue that holds everything together, holds viewers attention
(37:11):
during frankly boring games, lopsided games, games with mismatched teams.
And yet if you're a fantasy player and you've got
just one player in that game who you're really depending on.
You're riveted to the screen and you're not going away.
And that's what the NFL is counting on because it
(37:35):
makes the entire game bigger than anyone team, anyone's city,
anyone franchise.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
And we've been listening to Peter Funt inside Fantasy Football,
America's favorite non contact sport. Does the book go to
Amazon or the usual suspects and pick it up? We
learn how Peter got interested in football, and of course
that's because his dad, Allen Funk, the famous Allen Funk,
And that's how Peter Fund learned about fantasy football from
his son. That's why so many Americans play it, some
(38:06):
to gamble, but some to just enjoy the camaraderie. The
story of fantasy football as told by Peter Funt. Here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!