BLITZ Magazine Demo

[ Halftime ] From Cult to Culture: T H E H I S T O R Y O F FA N TA S Y F O O T B A L L ver wonder how hobbies are born? How a cultural obsession can be created on a whim amongst friends trying to pass the minutes? By Jim McCormick E Perhaps a group of nerds invented the basis for Dungeons and Dragons behind a 7-11 in ‘71 outside Des Moines, only to see it evolve into an enduring subculture, reaching millions of people across the planet. Maybe some opiated Chinese scholar put together chess one afternoon to avoid talking to his wife. Who knows? Wikipedia probably does, but that’s not the point. The idea here is that some of our most celebrated leisure activities, seemingly shared communal properties like reality television, fast food and internet porn, all have an individual genesis. Everything starts somewhere. On an unseasonably cold night in late October of 1962, as the rain beat on the windows of the Manhattan Hotel, the Cuban Missile crisis looming large in the consciousness of the East Coast, Bill Winkenbach and his boys sat in their room, throwing ‘em back and shooting the shit about football. Today this isn’t a rarity, a group of guys aggressively imbibing, bantering about the modern American pastime. But remember, this was ‘62. Football was truly in its dark ages, condemned to the back of the sports section, even in the few cities that hosted professional teams. Horseracing, boxing and of course baseball captivated the public’s consciousness, while only the hardcore few truly followed pro football. On that rained-out New York night, “It was euphoric. frugal ownership for these ridiculously long trips, they only had to look as far as Wink himself, who owned a minority stake in the young AFL franchise. Scotty Stirling, who would later hold down general manager gigs with the Raiders and Knicks, was at the time the lone man on the Raiders’ beat for the Oakland Tribune. The third member of the caucus was Bill Tunnell, the team’s P.R. man. The trio created a game that would some 40 years later become, among other things, a legitimate cultural phenomenon. The game was fairly simple: several guys comprise teams that draft a collection of offensive football players and compete for the best statistics each week. Just another dorky night in the history of hobbies. Three friends sitting around a hotel room on a crappy fall night, probably preferring to be on the town, and they end up creating what is today known as fantasy football. Who’d have thought that the “fantasy” league they concocted that night, the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League, better known as the GOPPPL (for obvious reasons), would evolve into a Billion dollar industry? Simply magical, you could just tell was gonna it was something that be big.”” as the scotch evaporated and the football theories flowed, Winkenbach, ostensibly known as Wink, suggested that they create a game to help pass the time on these long business trips. Wink and his friends weren’t just your average pigskin junkies, they were real football men. The three of them were traveling with the Oakland Raiders on the tail-end of the brutal 16-day northeast bus swing they endured each season. If anyone wanted to blame the 54 Full All Out BLITZ

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of BLITZ Magazine Demo

BLITZ Magazine Demo Publisher’s Letter Legends of the Fall: Jim Brown Pre-Game Safety Warning The History of Fantasy Football Phoenix Rising Miracle Worker The Real Jerry Maguire: How Leigh Steinberg Revolutionized the Role of Football Agents Who Is the Big Kid? Post Game

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