Every Man's Fantasy
Way back in the year 1997, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, my good friend Adam approached me with the idea of forming a football league where you draft NFL players, position by position, forming a team that accumulated points on a weekly basis. Little did we know at the time just how big the game of Fantasy Sports would become and how it would change the landscape of viewing sports forever.
The beginnings of the game for us were very primitive indeed. Adam would actually have to get a newspaper (see wikipedia for definition) every week and by candlelight, in his modest one room shack in the mountains, he would scribe the results by kerosene lamp onto the bark of a birch tree. From there Adam would gather his transcripts and place them in a burlap satchel and head out at 5am every Monday morning for the three hour carriage ride into town where the members of the league gathered at the local saloon waiting for the results.
Of course I'm exaggerating for effect... the carriage ride was little more than a two hour trip. For all intents and purposes, it might as well have been that way though compared to what is available on the Internet to the masses now with the online drafts, waiver wires and draft kits.
One thing is for sure though, as the years went on I found allegiances to my respective favourite pro sports teams shrank while my involvement in Fantasy Sports grew. Gone were the days of donning my Miami Dolphin garb and planting myself in my lazy-boy recliner for three hours fixated on that one game. Soon it became a scattered montage of my fantasy team as I channel surfed relentlessly, adding up each point as they came in throughout the afternoon and night.
One by one my teams fell prey to the all consuming fantasy monster as hockey, baseball, and basketball fantasy leagues began to pop up year after year. It got so bad that we actually had an F-1 auto racing league one year. Fantasy sports can become all consuming if you let it, but before you fall too far in, go into your closet and pull out that old Toronto Maple Leaf jersey and watch that team you have forgotten about all these years, well, maybe this is a really bad example but you get the idea.
The beginnings of the game for us were very primitive indeed. Adam would actually have to get a newspaper (see wikipedia for definition) every week and by candlelight, in his modest one room shack in the mountains, he would scribe the results by kerosene lamp onto the bark of a birch tree. From there Adam would gather his transcripts and place them in a burlap satchel and head out at 5am every Monday morning for the three hour carriage ride into town where the members of the league gathered at the local saloon waiting for the results.
Of course I'm exaggerating for effect... the carriage ride was little more than a two hour trip. For all intents and purposes, it might as well have been that way though compared to what is available on the Internet to the masses now with the online drafts, waiver wires and draft kits.
One thing is for sure though, as the years went on I found allegiances to my respective favourite pro sports teams shrank while my involvement in Fantasy Sports grew. Gone were the days of donning my Miami Dolphin garb and planting myself in my lazy-boy recliner for three hours fixated on that one game. Soon it became a scattered montage of my fantasy team as I channel surfed relentlessly, adding up each point as they came in throughout the afternoon and night.
One by one my teams fell prey to the all consuming fantasy monster as hockey, baseball, and basketball fantasy leagues began to pop up year after year. It got so bad that we actually had an F-1 auto racing league one year. Fantasy sports can become all consuming if you let it, but before you fall too far in, go into your closet and pull out that old Toronto Maple Leaf jersey and watch that team you have forgotten about all these years, well, maybe this is a really bad example but you get the idea.
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