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10 14 24 Fantasy Sports Champion Larry Schechter on The History of Fantasy Sports
- Fantasy sports have really grown and developed in the years that we've seen. You can pretty much bet on anything nowadays. You can have your players be on any team nowadays and people are very invested in their fantasy sports teams. Now, me personally, I don't really know anything about it, nor do I really participate, but I know a lot of people that do, and it's a big deal for them in their fantasy sports teams. - And joining us now to talk about fantasy leagues, he wrote the book on the subject entitled "The History of Fantasy Sports" and the stories of the people who made it happen on the KOA Common Spirit Health Hotline. We welcome to Colorado's Morning News, Larry Schechter. Larry, good morning. I know you are a huge fantasy sports. Tell us about your journey and what compelled you to write this book. - Hi, how are ya? Well, I've played fantasy sports for years and years and it's grown into this huge industry. It's a $25 billion a year industry. It's there millions and millions of people playing fantasy sports worldwide. Everything from fantasy football, fantasy baseball to fantasy. I did a ride, wakeboarding, I mean, it's crazy. So for a long time, I've wondered how did this happen? How did we go from some ideas people had years ago for games to this huge industry? And I've known for several years. Somebody should write this book 'cause I've never been a book explaining anything about how this happened, so I decided to do it. And what happened is, I started a little over a few years ago researching and interviewing dozens and dozens of people. I thought it was something I could knock out within a couple of months and that was completely wrong. It took me 18 months as basically a full-time job of researching and talking to people. But what happened is, I started out with the idea of I'll write the history, like who did what happened when, but as I started researching and talking to people, I started hearing these fascinating stories of what people did. And the book started out as the history of fantasy sports, but then I added a subtitle and the stories of the people who made it happen. Because the stories of the people is what has made it a fascinating, easy-to-read book. And I'm not just saying that myself. I'm going to reviews have been fantastic. People are saying it's fascinating. It's easy to read the stories are inspirational or humorous, et cetera, et cetera. - So Larry, let's dive a little bit into those who helped make it happen. Who do we have to thank for the creation of fantasy sports? Because this goes back probably further than a lot of people assume. - Yeah. Well, the person who has really started fantasy football, I mean, I'm making this very simple. There's a lot more to the story, but a guy named Bill Winkenbach from Oakland, who was actually 10% owner of the Oakland Raiders, he started fantasy football in 1963. Fantasy baseball is kind of like a whole long story with precursors and primitive versions of the game. The guy who was primarily created for creating modern fantasy baseball is a guy named Dan Ocrant. And that was in 1980. But his version, what he created in '80 is kind of like chess compared to some people previously him were playing checkers. The other thing about Ocrant though, he was in the, he was a journalist and he got a bunch of other media people in his league. And that is what allowed fantasy baseball to spread. Most people who had been playing primitive games before that didn't know, they played just by themselves. And it didn't spread other people and find out about it. - Larry, I'm proud. Oh, go ahead, sorry, I'm sorry. - No, I just say that Winkenbach invented fantasy football, but the guy who spread it is a guy named Andy Mussolimus. And Mussolimus owned a bar in Oakland and he decided to make the game available to his patrons. And that's what started fantasy football as spread. And one thing about Mussolimus, he was a war hero. When he was 17 years old, Pearl Harbor happened and he volunteered for a unit that was going behind enemy lines and they said 97% of you aren't gonna return but he volunteered anyway. So it's the kind of stories of the people who did all this stuff that's really interesting. Like in Denver there, the first fantasy football magazine was started two brothers who lived in Denver, Dan and Kelly Grogan. And I think it was about '86. There were no fantasy football magazines and they said, "Let's do a magazine." They put together some staple together, some pieces of paper basically made copies of them and put together this sort of like a magazine. And they took it to the local newsstand, Johnny's newsstand in Denver. And he didn't know what fantasy football was. Most people didn't know what fantasy football was but they got them to take 10 copies of it. Johnny said, "All right, I'll give you guys a call "in a couple of weeks, tell you how it did." By the time they even drove home an hour later, Johnny called them and said, "It's sold out, bring me some more copies." And this later became like a full-fledged magazine. Like five years later, they were selling 100,000 copies or something like that. And then later on, they sold it to Athlon. Athlon sports now owns what was the Grogan's magazine. - Larry, I don't know, was this, and maybe I'm wrong in combining these two things, but when I think of fantasy sports, right now in this current iteration, I can't separate it out from gambling. Was fantasy sports set up to some degree to have gambling and have risk taken on these? - Well, that's a whole other thing. I mean, my book covers like everything from the beginning through everything that's happened in the last 50 years or whatever it's been. And there's two things about gambling. When fantasy sports started, a lot of, some people don't play for any money, but some leagues, everybody chips in some money and the winner gets some of the money. And ever since the beginning, there was a question, "Is it legal or is it gambling?" And even going way back to the beginning in 1963, when Andy Mussolimus made this game available to his patrons at his bar, they kept it very low key because they didn't know if the base squad would come in one day and arrest them for gambling. And there are some situations, I know it don't have a lot of timers, I can't go into depth, but there are some examples where people were arrested for gambling and then there were legal cases. And it took years and years to really sort out because it is legal or not. And now most states it's legal, but even in some states now it's not considered legal. And when daily fantasy sports started with draft kings and fandal, that was a whole other thing where that kind of really raised the question again of, "Is it gambling?" And there's a whole chapter in the book about daily fantasy sports. There's a chapter in the book about the legal issues. There's another big legal issue that happened years ago where Major League Baseball was suing a company saying you can't use the players' names and statistics without paying it so licensing fee. So the whole legal thing has been a big aspect of the industry and there were a couple of places where if they had lost legal battles, the industry wouldn't look anywhere near what it looks like today. The book is titled "The History of Fantasy Sports" and the stories of the people who made it happen. It's Larry Schechter.