The story below is an excerpt from our May/June 2015 issue. For the full story download our FREE iOS app or view our digital edition for FREE today!
Regardless of the sport that is part of your fantasy, there’s likely a league for it and there are a lot of players taking part. Sometimes for megabucks.
Jeri Warner Layne is talking smack from the opening kickoff: “I killed him … on our wedding weekend. Stomped his ass. Wedded bliss.”
That’s her husband, Steve, she’s talking about. She sent him to the cold showers playing fantasy football, a game the two play almost obsessively during the season – like nearly 40 million other Americans. They’re part of a growing cadre of sports fans who have re-defined “sports fans” to mean those who watch and play at the same time, but without the threat of crippling injury … unless Jeri is serious about the effects of defeating Steve.
Jeri, who lives in Boones Mill, can’t seem to stop, though: “It’s definitely, overall, a dude’s game,” she says, “but the chicks in our league are tomboys and we’re very competitive. Usually, all of the women in our league make it to the playoffs. We’ve had a few seasons where it was just me as the only female that made it. I’m that awesome. It’s true. When my husband and I play each other, I’m pretty relentless with the smack talking. I’ve made up some horribly awesome rhymes and puns to really [annoy him]. He takes it like a man, overall. ”
Wedded bliss, indeed.
Fantasy sports began with Rotisserie League baseball in 1979. Journalist Daniel Okrent is generally credited with its founding in a New York bar. Fantasy football had been around since 1963, started in Okland, Calif. By 1987 the first fantasy football guide had been published and in 1993, USAToday was publishing a weekly fantasy sports column. Today more people play fantasy sports than live in California.
Fantasy sports participation during work would likely be considered a problem on the scale of lost revenue from alcoholism ($220 billion a year), changing computer passwords ($16 billion) or watching the NCAA basketball tournament ($134 billion), except that the bosses are playing, too. A senior editor at Vox magazine, wrote that adding up the lost productivity variables of “vices, distractions and health problems” – including fantasy sports, costs American businesses $1.8 billion a year. But, hey, it’s fun.
Roland Lazenby of Salem, who has written about 60 books, mostly dealing with sports and sports figures, is not a fan of fantasy sports. He calls it “a low grade form of gambling” which “distorts the original purpose [of sports]. … My observation is that fantasy sports doesn’t contribute to the general sense of happiness. Most fantasy people are immensely unhappy. The fun, I think, is in the draft and in drinking beer. They fantasize that they have great insight. The [truth] is that they have none. Most have never played a down of football or an inning of baseball.”
However, says Lazenby: “The one great benefit is that fantasy sports has broken down the walls of one of the last bastions of male culture. A lot of women – most, I’d say – are better judges of athletic talent and many are better athletes, too. Fantasy sports gives women the access they richly deserve.”
So, it is a feminist thing. And even those who don’t take part talk smack.
Lance Greene, chief deputy clerk of the Roanoke City court, wouldn’t likely take issue with Lazenby’s view. He’s been playing various fantasy sports since college 10 years ago and he is the commissioner of one of his five leagues. “I kinda took on too much this year,” he admits. The leagues, the expertise, the payouts and the fees are all are different. You might pay $10 to play and win $100 at the end of the season. Big leagues can pay millions, but not in Roanoke.
Greene likes that “anyone can play.” He’s “in leagues with high school friends, college friends, friends from law school, co-workers. I have seen couples in multiple leagues … [and] have also seen the wives beat the husbands most of the time, which leads to a little family rivalry and in some cases side bets such as who will take the garbage out that week if he/she loses.”
In order to play, Greene says, “all you need is an e-mail address and you can get started with a couple of friends or family just for the fun of it.”
Todd Marcum and Jeremy Butterfield of Access in Roanoke (an ad, marketing, PR agency) play regularly, sometimes taking a break at work to catch up on statistics or the latest injuries. Marcum, who co-owns the agency, is Butterfield’s boss and understands the lure, since it first drew him when Rotisserie Baseball was the rage.
Marcum, who has always been an avid baseball fan, found fantasy baseball was “dull for me from a conversational standpoint. Stuff we talked about had very little relevance.” But that didn’t apply to football. “I don’t know why.” But, he says, he “needed to play fantasy to appreciate pro football, but I didn’t need it to appreciate baseball.” He wanted baseball to remain lofty for him, so he stopped playing. He still keeps his scorecard in the box seats behind home plate for home Salem Red Sox games.
“Fantasy football is easier to keep up with than baseball,” says Butterfield.
Butterfield has been married a short while and “I play in my wife’s work league [one of three leagues he plays],” which makes it a family activity. “The live drafts are a lot of fun. Before this year’s NFL season, we had a draft at Blue 5” restaurant and bar. Drafts can be elaborate. One Roanoker talked his middle-aged college fraternity brothers into taking their wives along to the draft: a Caribbean cruise, which made everybody happy.
And yes, there’s trash talking even among employer/employee. “Yahoo has a smack talk button,” for its fantasy leagues, says Marcum.
Marcum says the Internet revolutionized what had been a difficult hobby. “Stats used to be kept by hand, using the daily baseball box scores,” he says. “You plugged them into a stat sheet or you hired a stat company. When I had a baseball card shop, we had a guy who did stats, but he went broke and it was horrible. It got to be contentious.”
Automation is so common now, says Marcum, that a lot of it is free where “it used to cost several hundred dollars. You almost had to have an accountant” in days of yore.
Fantasy sports has created its own – enormously profitable – industry. Lindy’s, one of the magazine conglomerates for which Lazenby is pro basketball editor, has a 100,000 print run on its fantasy football mag, says editor Matt Lowe. And it’s not one of the larger magazines of the type. Fantasy sports publishing is “really big” for the industry, says Lowe.
Roanoke College grad Bill Pratt founded fanstat.net, which he says “is time saving, a convenience. Anybody who plays will benefit from having it.” The potential customer base is huge and so are payouts at the very top end: “One league I know of has seven million players and a $6.5 million payout.”
Ron Shandler of Roanoke County publishes one of the most popular fantasy baseball magazines and has been playing since 1984 and writing about it since 1986. “Fantasy sports is a way for fans to stay engaged in the game as more than just a spectator. Spectating is passive; becoming a make-believe general manager is active.”
Shandler has found “very little” fantasy baseball playing in this region because “the South is football country,” but those who play some type of fantasy sport “are insatiable when it comes to information. That’s the competitive life blood of the hobby. Since it’s a skills-based game, information is power.”
Salem sports lawyer Sam Lazarro has been one of those baseball players for more than 20 years and finds fantasy sports “is big everywhere, including here. … The bars and restaurants with the NFL package have benefitted tremendously from fantasy football (Mac & Bob’s, Brambleton Deli, All Sports Café, etc.). Many leagues have gatherings every Sunday at these sites. The spending by the participants every weekend is enormous and may be keeping some of these bars afloat during the tough economic times.”
The young staff members of the Salem Red Sox, the Boston Class A affiliate of the Carolina League, play “everything: football, basketball, baseball, hockey and we even tried the English Premier [soccer] League, but the format was too difficult,” says General Manager Ryan Shelton.
The fantasy leagues, which involve 10 to 15 staffers, depending on the season and the availability, “is great for team building,” says Shelton. He says the Red Sox players likely don’t play fantasy sports “because they hope to be one of those in the major leagues eventually,” says Shelton, “though I can’t speak for all of them.”
The Red Sox have even found a way to make fantasy baseball pay for them. They rent out club level spaces to Roanoke Valley groups who hold drafts there during the early spring, with the baseball field as the backdrop.
Shelton says there is no conflict with pro sports’ sensitivity to sports gambling because “this is for bragging rights and nothing else.”
Sportswriter Mike Ashley, a Roanoke native who regularly works and plays in the Star City, though he lives in D.C., used to write a fantasy sports newsletter, which was funny. So funny, in fact that it led him to do standup comedy for five years at Roanoke’s Comedy Club. He’s been playing since Rotisserie Baseball began. He calls it “a wonderfully social activity among sports fans – something that gives you reason to call up and heckle your buddies, or try and scam them in a trade. We often lunched together and swapped multiple players over pizza orgies at the Radford Pizza Hut [when he worked there]. The draft, too, is quite the occasion. I’ve brought sound systems to announce my first pick, faux team jerseys to hold up, and even did a Chicago Bulls light show one year [basketball draft]. Good fun with friends and always nice to make a memorable appearance they would talk about for years.”
Ashley has a theory about who wins most consistently: “Some guys are such sports geeks – up all night watching scores and shows – they always have an advantage. I got to a point where working as a sportswriter, I just couldn’t come home and invest that much more time in this stuff. Rather watch a good movie.
“Guys who are good gamblers do well, also. It’s like playing the stock market: Buy low, sell high, identify trends and be enough of a fan and a mathematician to know what they mean. I always felt like I was cramming for an exam before a draft – and we did auction-style draft, bidding on players in my basketball league. There’s an art to that, too, bidding other guys up, knowing what teams and players they like, etc. Then you get stuck with a crappy player you didn’t want on the 12-man roster. I was never very good at it. Obviously didn’t put in enough time.”
Shanna Flowers, manager of volunteer services at Carilion and a former columnist for The Roanoke Times, used to play fantasy football until she went to grad school in 2011 and “my interest diminished.” Study time and NFL time clashed. When she played, though, she was “all in. … I mean it was time-consuming, because I constantly scoured online reports, watched the games, ran to the computer all the time to keep up with the fantasy points.”
She’s through playing: “Fantasy is so different now, but it was new, fresh and exciting then. It was a rip-roaring time.”
It’s still fresh and exciting for a large number of women. Shandler says between 15 and 20 percent of players are women, mostly playing football.
One of them is Jeri Warner Layne who’s ready to kick some serious butt. Especially when it’s her husband’s.