The Oakland Raiders Stunk... So Fans Created Fantasy Football

On this episode of Our American Stories, fantasy football is now a $13 billion industry with over 29 million Americans playing every year, but it didn’t start that way. Peter Funt, author of Inside Fantasy Football, shares the surprising origin story of how a group of Oakland Raiders fans upset about how bad their team was invented a game in their basement that became a nationwide obsession.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we return 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.
You are 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 US dictate records.
Don Florries was ranked sect mathing 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

(01:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
His friends called him wink. He was a big sports fan.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
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. It made a lot of money,
and he decided to invest a chunk of it in
this terrible Oakland Raider team. The interesting thing about Winkenbach

(03:31):
is that ten years earlier, in the mid early nineteen fifties,
he actually invented an early form of fantasy sports.

Speaker 3 (03:43):
First, he did it with PGA Tour golf.

Speaker 2 (03:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
They never used the word fantasy sports.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
That came in way later, but they were playing essentially
a form of the game. They became interested to the
point where they tried it with baseball. So again in
the mid fifties, Wincnbach was playing a very crude early
form of fantasy baseball. All they counted was home runs

(04:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (04:45):
Trip to the East Coast.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Don't forget the other league.

Speaker 2 (05:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (05:46):
So here they are in New York and they're going
to play the team called the New York Titans.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
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 made their way
into the bar, and the more they drank, the more

(06:15):
the idea for this. Again, 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

(06:36):
season to start this game, 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

(06:56):
had a helper, so there was a grand total of
sixteen guys.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
And they formed this league, the very.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
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, and that, FOLKS,

(07:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:45):
It's quite similar to.

Speaker 2 (07:47):
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

(08:08):
of the results for the fantasy football games, Wincoln Boch
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.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
And I repeat, they did not use.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
The term fantasy football. In fact, that term didn't even
enter the lexicon until some decades later.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
What did they call it? A Winkenbach called his game
the draft.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
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.
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.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
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 a larger 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, Gobble and the beginning the

(09:49):
birth of fantasy football. The story of the first fantasy
football team. Here on our American Stories