BLITZ Magazine Demo

their team. The only problem was that Cain died in practice two weeks before the draft. We still make fun of them for that one.” As the years passed, the GOPPPL slowly established its prominence among the underground football community in the East Bay. The annual draft moved from Wink’s home to restaurants and banquet halls in the area. The 1967 draft even offered its attendees the option of top sirloin steak, lobster thermidor or prime rib for a meager 11 bones per couple (including tax and tip). No strangers to fault lines, the crew had a breakup of sorts in the late sixties. In 1968, Mousalimas opened the famous Kings X sports bar in downtown Oakland. He and Wink soon had a philosophical split. Andy and some other members sought to modernize the rules of the pursuit, compensating players for yards instead of only touchdowns as a means to quantify the game, “O.J. Simpson was just running wild for Buffalo those days but wasn’t putting up the touchdowns, so he wasn’t putting up points for your team. You’d have guys getting 100 yards or so with no TD and it was a bad day for your team. It didn’t matter if it was a 4 yard or a 40 yard touchdown, the scoring was all the same.” Despite his innocent intentions to tune the league settings, Wink saw the move as a potential threat to his legacy, and in a letter informed Mousalimas he was no longer a GOPPPL affiliate. Mousalimas to this day doesn’t really understand what inspired the bad blood. In the wake of the divide, the Kings X proved to be a more inviting home, with Mousalimas becoming the game’s caretaker despite Wink’s disapproval. As the cult obsession was expanding with each passing year, Mousalimas had to create more divisions to accommodate the growth, each with its own unique name and story. There was the “Taxi Division,” named for the Cleveland Browns created in 1974 after Safeway manager and X regular Al Santini lobbied for its creation, to put an end to his wife’s complaining. The game would flourish in the ensuing years. In the early seventies, Andy and the Kings X crew would regularly write Sports Illustrated, CBS, NBC and the like, asking them to better recognize the sport and include statistics in their sparse football coverage. At the time, the bigs balked, viewing fantasy as a marginal subculture of “stat heads,” all part of their refusal to recognize pro football as anything more than a regionally viable sport. Now those same networks tailor their whole broadcasts to the ravenous fantasy fan, sports publications devote entire sections to the hobby, major brands are now in bed with the once parochial pursuit. Mousalimas would eventually sell the X in 1991, ending its run as the official home of the once isolated fantasy. By that time though, the game was ready for the big time, thanks to people like Andy and to this internet thingy that Al Gore invented. Today it has become the “normal” man’s Dungeons & Dragons. A hobby ideally suited for the internet, yet born 30 years prior to its mainstream inception. “It is the perfect marriage,” as Mousalimas put it. It all started somewhere. Jim McCormick covers fantasy football for espn.com and blitzmagonline.com Photos courtesy of Sportspics franchise whose owner at the time ran the city’s major cab company and employed the players in order to supplement their income, another re m i n d e r o f t h e s p o r t ’s m o d e s t beginnings. The “Queens Division” was the first female-friendly fantasy league, We took Blanda because he threw every down”” 56 Full All Out BLITZ http://espn.com http://blitzmagonline.com

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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