Fantasy Life: The Outrageous, Uplifting, and Heartbreaking World of Fantasy Sports from the Guy Who's Lived It

by Matthew Berry

  Years after that, Gomez had the highest-scoring team. He had won the year before, and a repeat title seemed like a foregone conclusion. But then he got cocky and taunted the fantasy football gods. “Instead of staying humble, I took a picture of Ricky’s ex-wife holding the trophy while sitting on my lap.”

  I try to tell people about fantasy karma. They never listen. So after posting that picture, there was a firestorm on his league’s message boards, and what happened, Gomez? “The fantasy gods wiped my team off the face of the earth in the semifinal, due to my arrogance.”

  Exactly. But did Gomez learn? No, Gomez did not learn.

  “Since the picture did not have the desired effect, I felt like I still owed Ricky some payback. That is when I devised the cynical plot to ruin Ricky’s fantasy baseball draft this year. I invited Ricky’s ex-wife to join our baseball league.”

  It was half evil, half genius to invite Ricky’s ex-wife into the league. Especially because they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other since the divorce a year and a half earlier. “The company line is we needed to fill an open slot; however, my personal intentions were much more sinister.”

  No kidding.

  “She accepted, but then I felt guilty. So I wrote in to your podcast, asking, ‘Did I cross a line by inviting her to play in the league, only to throw him off his game on draft day?’”

  I remember. Your follow-up question was: “Should I tell him she is in the league or wait until draft day, where this will do the most psychological damage?”

  “Right. When I emailed you, I knew I was taking the risk of Ricky hearing it on the podcast. Then my brother brought up a good point. Ricky has never finished higher than fourth place in fantasy baseball. Someone who is so terrible at fantasy baseball couldn’t possibly listen to the ESPN Fantasy Focus 06010 podcast.”

  You don’t have to suck up, Gomez. You’re already in the book. So what happened?

  “Well, Ricky heard the podcast and gave me an ultimatum: ‘It is either me or her, you choose who you want in the league.’ I told him to grow up and deal with it, because she had already accepted the invite and paid her money (in advance). She was champing at the bit to destroy her ex at something that she knew he loved.”

  Clearly, Gomez didn’t learn his lesson from the fantasy gods. In the end, Ricky chose to quit the league, and his ex-wife destroyed everyone, winning the league by 11.5 games.

  Game, set, match . . . fantasy karma.

  But don’t feel bad, Gomez. The game has been around for more than 30 years. Millions and millions of players and leagues covering every sport in the universe have been played. And fantasy karma is still undefeated . . .

  TIME-OUT:

  Texts from Last Night

  (913): In a meeting downtown with the department of transportation. Hungover. Pretending to take notes on my laptop, but I’m really in the middle of my fantasy baseball draft. Yes, this is a mass text.

  It’s a mass text from the 913 area code, to be specific. It’s kind of sketchy to be doing a fantasy draft in the middle of a work meeting, but if there’s one thing that people do more often than having questionable behavior related to fantasy, it’s texting their friends about it. How do I know this? Because Lauren Leto has made a small fortune off it. Leto and partner Ben Bator founded a website called TextsFromLastNight.com. People send in the embarrassing, awkward, funny, sad, brilliant, and what-the-hell-was-that texts they’ve received. Each text is anonymous, with only the area code it was sent from, and the site receives more than 15,000 submissions every day.

  Given the obsession folks have with fantasy sports, along with the staggering number of submissions the site receives, it’s no surprise that quite a few texts out there are related to fantasy sports. I asked Lauren to pull the funniest and most interesting. She came through like a champ.

  (813): She just told me she was pregnant, will you look after my fantasy football team? There’s $40 on the line.

  (214): He woke up just long enough to set his fantasy football lineup and puke. Then he passed out again.

  (914): We did a fantasy football draft together and then had sex . . . I found the perfect woman.

  (801): Playing in my drug dealer’s fantasy football league. When I win I’m making him pay me in weed.

  (954): Last night my boyfriend wasn’t able to have sex with me because he couldn’t stop thinking about his fantasy football team.

  (954): Is his team good?

  (954): You’re an asshole.

  (727): I’m cooking Thanksgiving in lingerie and a matching apron, while screaming at the Texans D/ST for fucking up my fantasy team. I think I now qualify as a southern lady.

  (716): So my girlfriend wanted to get freaky during my draft last night . . . I ended up with three kickers and no quarterbacks. Totally worth it.

  (336): We thought you were passed out, but every time the announcer said the name of a guy on your fantasy team you gave a thumbs-up.

  (218): I broke up with my fantasy football team today. Never share a team with your significant other.

  (325): No more vodka for you until you can go a night without sobbing over your fantasy baseball team.

  (276): He’s winning his fantasy football league . . . I had to sleep with him.

  (301): I think I told her that she’d never mean as much to me as Matthew Berry does.

  6.

  Fallout from Cheating

  or

  “Uh, Mom . . . Can You Bail Me Out of Jail? I, Uh, Sorta Beat Up Dad . . .”

  It was Alex Moretto’s junior year in high school when his dad had a parent-teacher conference with his history teacher. Alex hoped it went well, hoped his teacher had nothing bad to say, and hoped his dad didn’t share any embarrassing stories from home.

  As it turned out, both dad and teacher were huge Dolphins fans, and they really hit it off. Hit it off so well that dad invited the teacher to play in the family fantasy football league the next year. A league that Alex is also in.

  The teacher had never played before but had always wanted to try. And so, after being invited, Alex remembers, “my teacher is thrilled, and my grade suddenly goes from a 75 to a 90.” The only downside was the teacher coming to Alex’s house during the summer for the draft. “Nothing better than seeing your teacher in the middle of the summer.”

  But the next season everything’s going great until about the halfway point. Alex’s dad then swindles Alex’s teacher in a trade, preying on his inexperience and lying to him about the rules. “My teacher found out a few days later that he had been ripped off and ‘initiated into the league’ after being dealt a draft pick that he wouldn’t be able to use.” The teacher’s team went from first to worst, and as the teacher’s team dropped, so did Alex’s grades. “My grade inexplicably dropped a staggering 15 percent in three weeks!”

  I can truly appreciate Alex’s feeling of helplessness. Of sitting there thinking, Why am I being punished? I did nothing wrong. But because someone else let his ego get in the way, Alex had to suffer. The only positive for Alex was at least no one else knew about it. In my situation, it was broadcast around the world . . .

  It was a few days after Thanksgiving, and my writing partner and I were, once again, unemployed. We had just finished working as semi-low-level writers on a sitcom called Union Square. Executive-produced by James Burrows, among others, it had been an NBC Thursday night show slotted between Friends and Seinfeld. It couldn’t miss. Except, of course, it did. The show was canceled, and we had five months or so to kill before “staffing season,” the time when shows go about the once-a-year process of hiring new writers.

  This was before we had written Undercover Elvis, before we’d ever done anything in movies, and as we were trying to decide what we wanted to do, our agent called with a simple question.

  AGENT: You guys know who Paul Hogan is?

  ME: Of course. />
  AGENT: You ever see Crocodile Dundee?

  ME: Of course.

  AGENT: Well, Paul Hogan is a client here. And he wants to do a third installment of the franchise. I’m one of the agents in charge of putting together writers to pitch him ideas for the film. If you want, I’ll throw you guys on the list.

  ME: But we’ve never written a movie before. We don’t even have a spec.

  AGENT: I know. You probably won’t get the job. But it’ll be good practice. And you never know.

  So Eric and I thought about it and were like, “What the hell. Let’s meet Paul Hogan. It’ll be a funny story.”

  So we rewatched the first two movies. They’re charming. They are not laugh-out-loud funny, and they don’t have large elaborate scenes, like a car chase or something, but they’re easy to watch. They’re a series of small moments. Okay, got it.

  The other thing we noticed was that Paul Hogan’s character is much funnier reacting than acting. This is an important distinction that some writers fail to understand. Most comedic actors are funnier when they have the punch line or when they are the one forcing the action or doing the big, outrageous thing.

  But in this case the comedy comes from this guy from another land (Down Under!) reacting to things that are normal to us but obviously not normal to a guy who has lived in the Australian outback. So, easy, right? Film of simple moments, loose plot, need him to react to stuff. Got it.

  At this time, There’s Something About Mary was the big movie, and R-rated comedies were “in.” So we’re like . . . uh, this isn’t built to compete with movies like that. The only shot this movie has is if it’s a family comedy that people who liked the original can take their kids to. That was our logic. Plus, we weren’t getting this job anyway, weren’t even sure we wanted it, so we didn’t spend a lot of time.

  All we knew was that Linda, Hogan’s real-life wife and costar of the first two movies, had to be in it. And he wanted it to take place present-day, which is to say, 16 years after the last movie.

  So, like a week later, we met him, and we didn’t give the hard sell. Instead, we gave a very simple pitch. “In the first two movies you were dating Linda but never married. But you guys have been together all this time, so let’s say you have a kid together. He’s a little Croc. You did New York in the first two movies, so let’s do Los Angeles this time. Your wife gets a great job offer in LA, and the kid has never been outside of Australia, so you decide to move to LA, and now you’re showing the kid around because you ‘know America.’ It’s the blind leading the blind. Eventually, you get a job at a movie studio as an animal trainer because you can ‘talk’ to animals. Turns out, there’s some bad guys there, you save the day. At the end, you decide to marry her, so we end with a wedding. Everyone loves a wedding. But most of the time, you’re in Hollywood. There’s lots of craziness here, you’ll wander around and react to stuff. I mean, come on, it’s Crocodile Dundee. We’ll make it funny.”

  And there was a long pause as he looked at us. And then he said, in that unmistakable accent, “Ah, you guys are the only ones who get me. You’re hired.”

  What??!

  Turns out he had met with like 30 other writers, and everyone else had pitched him crazy stuff. “Crocodile Dundee saves the world from a nuclear explosion,” Crocodile Dundee in Space, or really raunchy humor to jump on the Mary bandwagon. Apparently we were the only ones who were like, “Dude, it’s not hard. The movies are what they are. Put him in funny situations and let him react. That’s the whole movie.”

  As we wavered on accepting, our agent pitched us on it: Look, this movie will get made. (It’s almost impossible to get a movie, any movie, made in Hollywood. Especially from first-time writers.) You’ve never written a movie before. They will pay you to write one, and if it’s good, you can use it as a sample. And guess what they want to pay you?

  When we heard the amount, we almost choked. If you’re gonna sell out, kids, sell out big.

  I didn’t love how the movie turned out—it was never going to be great given we were starting with a sequel to a 16-year-old movie—but the original script was much more self-referential and snarky. For example, the movie studio where Croc worked made nothing but “useless sequels for movies no one remembers.” Lots of jokes like that, making fun of ourselves, making fun of Paul, that sort of thing, and all of it got cut. But, to be honest, the movie could have been much worse. It’s definitely a watchable family movie. A movie you can sit your kid in front of without worry and the whole thing goes by quickly. You won’t laugh a ton, but it’s not a train wreck. It’s just very, very vanilla.

  But that wasn’t the issue. The issue was writing credit. When we signed on to do the film, it was with the understanding that we would share writing credit with Paul. That was fine with us. And that’s how we submitted it to the Writers Guild. But then Paul Hogan—that would be star, executive producer, in-every-single-frame-of-the-movie Paul Hogan, announced that he also needed solo writing credit and wanted our names taken off the script entirely.

  Which would have been fine with us—it’s not like we were proud of the thing. Except here’s the problem: for significant financial reasons (residuals, certain contractual things, etc.) we needed to have writing credit. The whole reason we wrote the damn thing was money.

  We were happy to share credit with Paul, but once he demanded solo credit, the line was drawn in the sand: us or him for credit. So we had to go through an arbitration process, where we submitted everything we wrote, Paul submitted the rewrite he did on our original script, and they compared both to the final script. And the three-person panel independently voted for us. Then Paul appealed. And we won again with a new set of people. And then Paul appealed the appeal. And lost for a third time.

  Paul had his day in court. Nine different objective people ruled for us on three separate occasions, he’s still getting tons of credit on the film, and he’s still insanely rich. So he dropped it, right?

  Wrong. Paul then goes public with it. He does an interview with The Hollywood Reporter and in every single radio/TV/press interview he does for the movie he talks about how he is going to take the Writers Guild to court (unheard of), and how we are getting writing credit that we don’t deserve. So now we’re in this very public legal fight to demand credit for something we didn’t want public credit for and weren’t real proud of to begin with. So awkward and terrible. “No, really, we wrote Croc 3! Yes, us! Why are you looking at me like that? I know it’s a bad movie. What of it?” Sigh.

  Now, normally, when you get credit as screenwriters on a produced movie, you’re part of the marketing materials, you do some press, you get a good seat and table at the premiere and after-party, etc. We got none of that. You can only find our names on the movie in the one place Paramount was legally forced to put it. There was no mention of us anywhere in anything promoting the movie, we were shoved in the back of the theater, we weren’t allowed to sit with the rest of the cast and crew. The whole thing was humiliating and horrible, and I hated almost every moment of it. Suffice it to say, I am not a fan of Paul Hogan, the human being. That movie bought me a nice big house in Los Angeles. But it was a painful, hurtful experience, and it taught me a very powerful lesson: doing something you don’t care about kills you inside. And a lot of money won’t change that.

  You know, after the Croc episode I felt so damn beat up. I was never actually beat up, of course, I just felt like I had been. Hogan never actually sued the Writers Guild, he just talked about it (and us) nonstop until the movie came out. It was the spring of 2001, and I was just emotionally drained and embarrassed, and it really wore on me. And just like the stars in Hollywood chasing fame (or screen credit), pursuing fantasy glory has led some people to questionable behavior. And sometimes questionable behavior does include getting physical.

  “Before each draft,” Caleb Rappaport tells me, “the Balco Boys Fantasy League from Nashville drink . . .
heavily! Pitchers and shots flow freely as we ‘pregame’ for hours before each draft. In past years laptop computers were drenched in beer and ruined due to out-of-control predraft antics, but it had never actually affected the draft. Until 2008.”

  In the first round of 2008, Caleb remembers, “I proudly put my sticker on the board and declared, ‘The Buffalo Bills Bombsquad selects Adrian Peterson.’”

  He sat down confident and happy. Then the next team went:

  “Muzic City Mayhem selects the Vikings’ Adrian Peterson.”

  Yep.

  “In my drunken stupor, I had selected the Bears’ Adrian Peterson! As we stopped the draft to discuss, the feeling was that I would be allowed to have the AP that was obviously intended. However, Jacob Schneier, one of my best friends, would not stand for it.”

  Apparently, Jacob is also the most belligerent, antagonistic owner of their group. “Since my hand had come off the sticker, Jacob demanded that the selection be made final. This led to much shouting, pushing, and eventually me throwing a right cross and two uppercuts.”

  A full-on brawl ensued.

  And here’s why you know Caleb and Jacob are such good friends. Twenty minutes after that fight, the two of them were cool again. Caleb was allowed to draft the Peterson he wanted, and order was restored. “We all laughed, rehashed the timeline of events, and of course did all kinds of shots in honor of ‘Balco Brawl I.’”

  I’m not sure more drinking was the solution at that point, but it seems to work for Caleb’s league. “Yeah, we drink too much, go out way too much, get in far too much trouble for 30-plus-year-olds with families to be getting into, but love every second of it. College is over, but this is our fraternity now.”

  Speaking of punches being thrown, Matt Henehan relays a story that took place a long time ago, before cell phones, while he was in high school. During class one day, “a guy in our league, Kevin, was talking about picking up Felipe Lopez during class.” Apparently they then mentioned this to another league member named Tom. Tom, in a move that is both ingenious and kind of weaselly, faked being sick to go home early. Tom got Lopez. I’ve heard of lots of reasons to fake being sick over the years—avoiding a test being number one—but to pick up Felipe Lopez? (Career batting average: .264.)