December 3, 2024 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, fantasy football is a 13-billion-dollar empire and 29 million Americans play it—but it wasn't always this way. Here to tell the story about its origins is Peter Funt, author of Inside Fantasy Football.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories up next to
a story about America's favorite non contact sport, talking about
fantasy football. For the uninformed or uninitiated, fantasy football has
nothing to do with sorcery or magic spells, unless you
count cutting a league winner off of the waiver wire
as a particular form of sorcery. It's a game where
(00:30):
you serve as the general manager of a football team
by drafting real life players and receiving points for how
well they did in their real life game that week.
Here to tell the story of the first Fantasy football
league is Peter Funt, author of Inside Fantasy Football and
the host of Candid Camera. Let's get into the story.
(00:52):
We start it with football going from Bush League to
the big time because of a merger. The Oakland Raiders
were third in the Western Division with as dictate records.
Don Florrie was ranked sect and mating in the AFL.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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 franchise and were, for one
(01:33):
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
(01:56):
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
(02:16):
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. They won a
few games their first year in nineteen sixty, they won
(02:37):
I believe two in their second season, and by the
third season, the nineteen sixty two season, their pathetic record
was one and thirteen and a minority owner of this
Oakland Raider franchise was a Bay Area resident named Bill Winkenbach.
(02:58):
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,
(03:18):
and he decided to invest a chunk of it in
this terrible Oakland Raider team. The interesting thing about Winkenbach
is that ten years earlier, in the mid early nineteen fifties,
he actually invented an early form of fantasy sports. First,
(03:43):
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
(04:05):
a game out of it. They never used the word
fantasy sports. That came in way later, but they were
playing essentially a form of the game. It became interested
to the point where they tried it with baseball. So
again in the mid fifties, Wincnbach was playing a very
(04:26):
crude early form of fantasy 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
(04:46):
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'
(05:10):
front office staff, 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. Don't
forget the other league. The successful NFL had big stars
like Jim Brown and Mike Ditka and Frank Gifford, and
(05:35):
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 could 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
(05:57):
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 made their way into the bar,
and the more they drank, the more the idea for this. Again,
(06:17):
they didn't call it fantasy game, but 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,
(06:38):
and they waited until the following summer, the nineteen sixty
three football season, and they had a draft in August
in wink and Box Basement in Oakland, and there were
eight guys and they each had a helper, so there
was a grand total of sixteen guys. And they formed
(07:02):
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 Pig Skin Prognosticators League GOPPEL,
(07:22):
and that, FOLKS, was the first fantasy football league. Interesting
thing is the rules that they came up with for
the GOPPEL League were quite similar to what we play today,
at least in so called seasonal redraft recreational fantasy football competition.
(07:45):
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 in newspapers, and in
(08:06):
order to keep track of the results for the fantasy
football games, wincon Bach 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
(08:29):
the term fantasy football. In fact, that term didn't even
enter the lexicon until some decades later. What did they
call it? A Winkenbach called his game the draft. That's
what he called it, because they knew then, as many
(08:50):
of us know now, that perhaps the most exciting part
of a fantasy football competition is the draft getting together.
They're taking turns picking players, forming relationships that in some
cases carry on for decades. And so they called it
(09:11):
the draft. But the rules were similar to what we
think of today. They played for pennies and they have
a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
And a special thanks to Peter Funt his book Inside
Fantasy Football. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and
pick it up. And by the way, the draft is
now a mega event and large part of it has
to do with these guys drinking in New York and
the next thing you know, you have the Greater Oakland
Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League. Gobbel in the beginning the birth
(09:50):
of fantasy football, the story of the first fantasy football team.
Here on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories up next to
a story about America's favorite non contact sport, talking about
fantasy football. For the uninformed or uninitiated, fantasy football has
nothing to do with sorcery or magic spells, unless you
count cutting a league winner off of the waiver wire
as a particular form of sorcery. It's a game where
(00:30):
you serve as the general manager of a football team
by drafting real life players and receiving points for how
well they did in their real life game that week.
Here to tell the story of the first Fantasy football
league is Peter Funt, author of Inside Fantasy Football and
the host of Candid Camera. Let's get into the story.
(00:52):
We start it with football going from Bush League to
the big time because of a merger. The Oakland Raiders
were third in the Western Division with as dictate records.
Don Florrie was ranked sect and mating in the AFL.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
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 franchise and were, for one
(01:33):
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
(01:56):
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
(02:16):
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. They won a
few games their first year in nineteen sixty, they won
(02:37):
I believe two in their second season, and by the
third season, the nineteen sixty two season, their pathetic record
was one and thirteen and a minority owner of this
Oakland Raider franchise was a Bay Area resident named Bill Winkenbach.
(02:58):
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,
(03:18):
and he decided to invest a chunk of it in
this terrible Oakland Raider team. The interesting thing about Winkenbach
is that ten years earlier, in the mid early nineteen fifties,
he actually invented an early form of fantasy sports. First,
(03:43):
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
(04:05):
a game out of it. They never used the word
fantasy sports. That came in way later, but they were
playing essentially a form of the game. It became interested
to the point where they tried it with baseball. So
again in the mid fifties, Wincnbach was playing a very
(04:26):
crude early form of fantasy 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
(04:46):
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'
(05:10):
front office staff, 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. Don't
forget the other league. The successful NFL had big stars
like Jim Brown and Mike Ditka and Frank Gifford, and
(05:35):
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 could 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
(05:57):
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 made their way into the bar,
and the more they drank, the more the idea for this. Again,
(06:17):
they didn't call it fantasy game, but 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,
(06:38):
and they waited until the following summer, the nineteen sixty
three football season, and they had a draft in August
in wink and Box Basement in Oakland, and there were
eight guys and they each had a helper, so there
was a grand total of sixteen guys. And they formed
(07:02):
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 Pig Skin Prognosticators League GOPPEL,
(07:22):
and that, FOLKS, was the first fantasy football league. Interesting
thing is the rules that they came up with for
the GOPPEL League were quite similar to what we play today,
at least in so called seasonal redraft recreational fantasy football competition.
(07:45):
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 in newspapers, and in
(08:06):
order to keep track of the results for the fantasy
football games, wincon Bach 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
(08:29):
the term fantasy football. In fact, that term didn't even
enter the lexicon until some decades later. What did they
call it? A Winkenbach called his game the draft. That's
what he called it, because they knew then, as many
(08:50):
of us know now, that perhaps the most exciting part
of a fantasy football competition is the draft getting together.
They're taking turns picking players, forming relationships that in some
cases carry on for decades. And so they called it
(09:11):
the draft. But the rules were similar to what we
think of today. They played for pennies and they have
a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
And a special thanks to Peter Funt his book Inside
Fantasy Football. Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and
pick it up. And by the way, the draft is
now a mega event and large part of it has
to do with these guys drinking in New York and
the next thing you know, you have the Greater Oakland
Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League. Gobbel in the beginning the birth
(09:50):
of fantasy football, the story of the first fantasy football team.
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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