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

by Matthew Berry

  But here’s the combo meal. On the untimed play, Bledsoe finds Ben Coates for a touchdown, Patriots win. So disgusted are the Bills (they feel they got jobbed by the refs), they head to the locker room before the extra point is kicked.

  But the play still needs to happen, so Adam Vinatieri runs in unopposed for a two-point conversion, which means Vinatieri scores two points instead of one for kicking an extra point, and the Ransackers have an improbable one-point loss.

  “My Dad looked like he saw a ghost,” Jeff remembers. “Just total silence.”

  Think about all the different gut-wrenching aspects of what just happened. You have a number 19 (“Really?!? Him?!?!”) for the kicker being the one to score a two-pointer, you have a number 13 (“They Called What?!?”) for the very questionable catch call, you have a weird version of number 4 (“Wait! Where Are You Going? Get Back in There!”) for the Buffalo coach not having enough class to stay and just defend the extra point, you have a second number 13 (“They Called What?!?”) for the pass interference in the end zone (replay wasn’t in the league at that point, but later that week the NFL stated the game-extending pass-interference call was incorrect), and you add all of those to the fact that this was a number 9 (“One of Those Plays”).

  The combo meal is a multi-play parlay of losing, and it sucks because of the infinite odds against it and because it has so many different ways to torture you.

  No scientific study has proved that a loss like that takes years off your life. But I assure you it does.

  It’s because the losses stay with you longer. I’ve had plenty of them over the years, and a few stick with me. Maybe the cruelest loss happened in the Fat Dog league, my longtime 12-team NL-only keeper league in Texas that I wrote about in chapter 1.

  Heading into the last day of the season in the year 2000, my team, the Hollywood Phonies, were tied for first with the Country Hix, owned by David Hicks. The tiebreaker was most categories leading in, and I was beating David there, five categories to three. So all I needed to do was maintain a tie and the title was mine.

  In each category, David and I were very set at our spots. No matter what our teams did on the last day, we were not gaining or losing a point in any category. Except pitcher wins, where the Hix were three wins behind the Faux Pas, owned by Warren Faulkner.

  But wins are very hard to get, and even better, Hicks only had two starters going on that last day. (The league doesn’t allow daily moves, so his lineup was set.) Even better than that? His pitchers were terrible. And even better than that? The terrible pitchers were ice-cold: Adam Eaton (4.13 ERA) and Andy Benes (4.88 ERA) had combined to lose 12 of their previous 15 games heading into the last day.

  Of course, Eaton throws six innings of shutout ball to beat the Dodgers, and Benes beats the Reds 6–2 for a win. Ridiculous. But whatever. It’s only two wins. He needs three and doesn’t have any more starters. Well, you see where this is going, right?

  Hicks also has a young middle reliever for the Cubs named Kyle Farnsworth. He appeared in 46 games that year in middle relief, compiling a 6.43 ERA. He won only two games the entire year. Wanna guess when the second win came??????

  The Cubs were playing the Pirates that day, and Pittsburgh starter Kris Benson is given a seven-run lead. But Benson and his relievers can’t hold—again—a SEVEN-RUN LEAD—so Farnsworth comes into the game for the Cubs only down 8 to 7. Farnsworth doesn’t give up any more runs, so when Scott Sauerbeck, the Pirates’ middle reliever who had 107 career holds and 13 holds that particular year, can’t hold the lead, Farnsworth gets the stupid, cheap win to finish 2–9 on the season.

  Hicks’s three wins gave him an extra half-point, and he ended up beating me 68.5 to 68.0. I’ve hated Kris Benson ever since, well before it was cool to do so. Kyle Farnsworth played 14 more seasons (and counting) after that. I’ve never owned him. In any league. And I wouldn’t want to be Scott Sauerbeck at a bar with me after I’ve had a few.

  It’s been 12 years. I’m still not over it.

  One of the beauties of fantasy is that it’s a microcosm of life. Highs and lows, surprises and disappointments, laughter and anguish. Fleeting interactions and lifetime relationships. The truest form of the good, the bad, the ugly.

  And memories to last a lifetime.

  Fantasy sports helped me develop a thick skin for events I could not control. I didn’t know it yet, but as I packed up my life and my dog and moved to central Connecticut in the spring of 2007, I was gonna need it . . .

  18.

  Trash Talk

  or

  At Which Point Monty’s Wife Walks In, Holding a Sharpie: “Now’s Your Chance”

  Chris Brzinski is not what you would call a “good loser.”

  Competitive? Sure. Smart? You bet. Hilarious? Definitely.

  But being a bad loser is, no question, among his personal failings.

  Chris plays in the PDC Ceeper League (“Our commissioner is so dumb, he spelled keeper wrong—not a joke,” Chris says), a longtime PPR league comprising close college friends from the University of Wisconsin–Stout.

  In 2011, Chris made it to the championship game. Where he lost by less than one point. 0.93 points, to be exact.

  He did not take it well. And he desperately wanted to get back at the guy who won the league.

  What Chris did next would not have occurred to anyone. Which is why it’s borderline genius. Semi-cruel and crazy, but definitely hilarious and undeniably creative.

  Chris went out and bought an URL/domain name with the winner’s name. Something like www.MatthewJBerry.com, but with the winner’s name instead of mine. And after buying the URL, Chris, what did you do?

  “I launched a simple website with a picture of a piece of poop in a gutter.”

  That’s right. The above image is all that’s on the website that had the URL of the guy’s actual name. Note the ability at the top to tweet, share, or “like” it on Facebook.

  Chris sent out the link to the site in a league message board post, where “I congratulated the winner and told him I blew all my winnings on 10 years of domain ownership and hosting to commemorate his win.”

  A few days later, Chris was asked to take it down. The guy was VP of a bank and apparently “Googling his name wasn’t providing the rich, professional details that you’d expect from such a prestigious man.”

  Chris said he would take down the website and have the URL redirect to this guy’s LinkedIn profile under one condition: the champ would post on the message board that his win over Chris was a fluke and apologize for calling his own team a dynasty.

  Of course, the winner complied and posted the message. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m pretty sure Chris won that league.

  As funny as it is, I can totally appreciate the bank VP being upset. It’s weird and uncomfortable to have someone, even someone you know, trashing you in public. League message boards are one thing, but here was this site that anyone Googling his name would immediately find.

  It makes you feel embarrassed, and you’re wondering who else has read it. And then you run into people and you wonder if they read it. What do they think? Do they think I’m a piece of poop? Do they realize it’s the work of a semi-crazy guy who lost to me in fantasy football?

  It’s such a bizarre sensation and one that I had never experienced. Until I got to ESPN, where I found out one fairly important thing about myself.

  I wasn’t ready.

  They say hindsight is 20/20, but in my case it’s more like 20/10. With the luxury of time to reflect and more years of experience to do so, it’s only now I am reminded of the old saying, “I didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

  I had spent so much of my life both practicing and preaching “being prepared,” you’d think I’d be ready when I got the biggest opportunity of my life. Wrong. And I didn’t know I wasn’t prepared, which made things even worse.

&nb
sp; ESPN hired me to do two jobs. The first was as an on-air analyst, doing fantasy sports for the network. ESPN also hired me as its senior director of fantasy sports. That’s a management position focused on things like helping grow the audience and revenue from our online portfolio of fantasy games and increasing fantasy content offerings on ESPN’s many platforms: TV, radio, the magazine, non-fantasy sections of ESPN.com, and so on.

  I was actually management, had direct reports, a P&L to oversee, and open positions for hiring. That is an awesome opportunity—if you know what the hell you’re doing. I thought I could handle it and I had told ESPN I could. Yes, I had run some profitable websites, but running two small, successful websites where I’m the only full-time employee is very different from leading a division of a major corporation. Decisions are different; the stakes are different. And the daily, in-person oversight of full-time staff is very different from managing a bunch of freelancers over the Internet. The only similarity is that both jobs are on planet Earth. Seriously, that’s about it.

  Forget running a major corporate division. I had never even worked at a major corporation before. I was from Los Angeles. Show business. I worked on sitcoms. Working on a sitcom as a writer is different from any other job in the universe. Dress code, hours, expected behavior—everything is different.

  Add to that the fact that obviously Los Angeles is not Bristol, Connecticut. For all those reasons and many more, I was basically a fish out of water. I had no clue what I was doing and, worse, had no idea I had no idea. It was a very challenging situation—and I didn’t handle it well.

  I made many, many mistakes in new, spectacular, never-before-seen ways. I invented new things to screw up.

  I won’t get into the details because it’s a fantasy sports book, not a “How to Screw Up in Business Without Really Trying” kind of thing, but suffice it to say my first year was really difficult in my new surroundings. And at every opportunity I unwittingly made it worse.

  Also, I was alone. I moved there as a single guy, not knowing anyone, and who wants to go have a beer with the boss? Oh, they’ll go, but do they want to? I never wanted to be that guy, so I tried not to force that.

  It’s different in metropolitan areas like New York or LA, but in small-town Connecticut most adults have spouses and kids, and they aren’t really interested in grabbing a bite or hitting the bars with a newly single 37-year-old dude. So early on, I had only a few friends, especially as I was busy with a full-time job where I was trying to hire folks, help build up our fantasy business, and constantly put out the fires I’d set.

  But while the management piece of it was a challenge, the biggest thing I wasn’t ready for . . . the part of the equation that I misjudged . . . the thing that, frankly, I just had no idea about . . .

  . . . was the whole ESPN-ness of it.

  I wasn’t prepared for the size of ESPN’s audience. Yes, I knew it was big, but until you’re in the middle of it, you don’t realize how many millions—yes, between TV and online—MILLIONS are aware of every single pick you make. Obviously, you can’t tell the future, so you’re gonna miss sometimes. Before ESPN, when I got a pick wrong, not that many people were paying attention. But when you swing and miss on a national stage like ESPN, everyone knows. At least it seemed like it. The amount of attention was unsettling, and I was not ready for it. To this day, people will bring up calls I missed from 2007 or 2008.

  I wasn’t prepared for the power of the ESPN brand. “The Worldwide Leader in Sports” isn’t just a slogan, people believe it. The ESPN brand resonates with sports fans from all over the world. And when I was introduced as the senior fantasy analyst, people expected me to be the greatest fantasy analyst alive. “If he’s on ESPN, he must be the best in the world.” I thought I was a guy who knew what he was talking about and presented it in a fun, goofy manner. Not some fantasy Rain Man, which is what people expected from the senior director of fantasy of ESPN.

  I wasn’t prepared for the scrutiny. It wasn’t just my picks or my knowledge going under the microscope once I got to ESPN. It was everything. It’s not like I’m some big star or something, I’m not. (Unless you’re a woman who turned me down in high school, then yes, I am actually a crazy big MEGA-STAR. Your loss.) But there’s a certain group of people interested in anyone working for ESPN, especially if the story could embarrass the company. So suddenly there were stories about who I was with or where I was. They were always some weird and very distorted version of reality. I’d be at a bar, and suddenly there’d be a flash as some stranger was taking my picture. One guy filmed video of me at the airport with my family and posted it to YouTube. It took getting used to.

  I wasn’t prepared for the reaction to my style. I was and have always been different from other fantasy analysts, but many people felt someone on ESPN should be just the stats and nothing else. I did a humor column for my college newspaper—I’d been writing the same way for more than 15 years—and humor/pop culture/writing about my life was my thing. But a lot of people disagreed and weren’t shy about telling me.

  I wasn’t prepared for social media. Facebook and Twitter exploded during my time at ESPN. They are amazing tools for fantasy sports in terms of news reaction, analysis, and immediate fan interaction, but social media is also, as a comedian once said, “like everyone on the planet having your cell phone and being able to text you whenever they want.” I was learning as I went on social media and I definitely made some mistakes. But you get a lot of tweets on a Sunday afternoon, and not all of them are positive; well it’s hard to ignore sometimes.

  I wasn’t prepared for the jealousy and lack of support from some within the fantasy community. Maybe I was naive, but my thought was that all of my fellow fantasy analysts would be rooting for me. A “Hey, another one of us made it!” kind of thing. Especially since among my big goals was to help promote and make fantasy sports more mainstream and popular, something that would benefit everyone in the community. But while my longtime friends in the industry were kind and supportive, others were not. I was shocked by the vitriol spewed toward me on message boards, Twitter, Facebook, and other fantasy sites by other fantasy analysts. No matter where I was in my career, I have never taken shots at others because I know the challenges of predicting the future for more than 200 football players every week, just like everyone who does fantasy analysis should.

  I wasn’t prepared for how every aspect of my personal appearance would come under fire. I wasn’t prepared for people being angry with me that I wasn’t Eric Karabell or Tristan Cockcroft, two guys who had been doing fantasy at ESPN for a long time. People thought I was replacing them, not adding to them, so there was resentment there. And I wasn’t prepared for the fact that (at the time) some hard-core ESPN sports fans thought fantasy was a stupid nerd game and had no place on ESPN’s airwaves or pages.

  But mostly, I just wasn’t prepared for the anonymous anger and venom. I would be lying (and frankly, wouldn’t be human) if I didn’t say stuff like that bums me out sometimes. Not all the time, and of course, a logical part of my brain says, hey, these people have something wrong with them or are massively unhappy. They are cowardly to hide behind a screen name. Plus, let’s be honest: there’s part of me that brings this on myself because I was following the “Howard Stern style” in my writing. Printing some of the hate mail only encouraged more of it to come in. And, to be fair, I probably came across as too cocky early on, trying to overcompensate. So it’s definitely my fault on some level. But still. I wasn’t ready for it.

  So imagine you are me: You move across the country to a new town where you know no one. You have never worked in a corporate environment, you’ve never done this full-time in your life, and now you’re working for the biggest company in the world for your profession.

  You handle criticism and authority very poorly. You have what you thought was your dream job, but now you are alone, confused on how to act and proceed, you have many eyes on you, an
d you live in a town with few single people your own age.

  My first year at ESPN was among the toughest of my life.

  I ended up getting used to it as part of the job. Things bother me a lot less these days and thick skin is a must when you’re in the public eye. Just as it is in any fantasy league of friends who have been together for a while. In fact, the hate mail, extreme and crazy as it may be, does remind me of one of my favorite parts of fantasy sports.

  Trash talk. There is a difference, of course, between crazy hate-filled emails and fun fantasy league trash talk. When done right among people who are all in on the joke, there’s nothing better. The best leagues are the ones where a close-knit group takes the smack talk to epic proportions.

  Trash talk takes many forms: face-to-face, emails, message board posts, texts, photos, “gifts,” pranks, you name it. The only thing consistent is the message: You suck. I rule. But mostly, you suck.

  And like everything else, trash talk starts at the draft. I’ve mentioned before that Jacksonville Jaguars running back Maurice Jones-Drew is an avid fantasy football player. In his main league, a bunch of Jaguars teammates and staff, there is no shortage of trash talk. MJD explains, “During the season, if I have a bad game, people will paste articles talking about how terrible I am on my locker.”

  Now, most leagues let MJD draft himself. Most. So draft day comes, and in the first round it’s the pick right before MJD. The guy stands up, looks right at MJD, and says, “From the Jacksonville Jaguars, I pick running back . . .” Maurice is shaking his head. He can’t believe the guy is gonna do him like this. “. . . Rashad Jennings.”

  Yes! MJD’s backup. Drafted ahead of MJD. It was the 2012 season, MJD was in a very public holdout over a contract dispute, and while MJD was publicly telling fantasy owners not to worry and to draft him as a first-round pick, his teammates still drafted his backup over him. And laughed their butts off as MJD just sat there and stewed. “It was definitely messed up,” Maurice recalled.