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Malcolm Gladwell here from Revisionist History. Did you know T-Mobile for Business has an award show specifically for their customers? It's happening October 20th in sunny Orlando, Florida, and I'm encouraging you, yes, you to enter. This event honors outside the box thinking that changes industries, communities, and even the world. And if that doesn't sound great already, I'll be there as the keynote speaker. If your company did something next level using T-Mobile for Business, you're eligible.
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This episode is brought to you by the 2025 Hyundai IONIQ 5. And we return to our American stories up next a story about America's favorite non contact sport, talking about fantasy football. For the uninformed or uninitiated fantasy football has nothing to do with sorcery or magic spells.
Unless you count getting a league winner off of the waiver wire as a particular form of sorcery. It's a game where you serve as the general manager of a football team by drafting real life players and receiving points for how well they did in their real life game that week. Here to tell the story of the first fantasy football league is Peter Funt, author of Inside Fantasy Football and the host of Candid Camera.
Let's get into the story. We started with football going from bush league to the big time because of a merger. Oakland Raiders were third in the Western Division with a 6-8 record.
John Flores was ranked sixth in passing in the AFL. The turning point really was in 1960 when the AFL was formed. And this was a rival to the NFL as we know it now. And some of the teams in the AFL were owned by guys who tried hard to get an NFL franchise and were for one reason or another rejected.
So there were these wealthy individuals who wanted to invest in football. The NFL wouldn't let them in. And so they formed the AFL. Originally in 1960 there were eight teams in the AFL. And one of them, in fact the last to join the list, was the Oakland Raiders.
They were last because they weren't even supposed to be in. That spot was intended for the Minnesota Vikings. But at the last minute the Vikings jumped into the NFL and these AFL upstarts had won vacancy. So they hurriedly formed the Oakland Raiders.
And right from the start it was a mess. And I don't want to insult Raider fans today. They won a few games their first year in 1960. They won I believe two in their second season.
And by the third season, the 1962 season, their pathetic record was one and thirteen. And a minority owner of this Oakland Raider franchise was a Bay Area resident named Bill Winkenbach. His friends called him Wink. He was a big sports fan. He was interested, like many of us, in playing sports but quickly found he wasn't good enough at it. What he was good at was business and he was in the ceramic tile business.
It made a lot of money. And he decided to invest a chunk of it in this terrible Oakland Raider team. The interesting thing about Winkenbach is that ten years earlier, in the mid-early 1950s, he actually invented an early form of fantasy sports. First he did it with PGA Tour golf. And he had this idea that if he and his friends each divided up the field at a PGA Tour event and then kept track of the individual scores of the players and translated it somehow into small monetary bets, they could make a game out of it. They never used the word fantasy sports.
That came in way later. But they were playing essentially a form of the game. They became interested to the point where they tried it with baseball. So again, in the mid-fifties, Winkenbach was playing a very crude early form of fantasy baseball. All they counted was home runs and certain pitching statistics.
But that was in the back of his mind in 1962. When Winkenbach accompanied the Raiders on a road trip to the East Coast, by the time they landed in New York City, their record for the season was 0-7. And really, things were headed in the wrong direction. Winkenbach and his pals, who traveled with the team, and that included a writer for the Oakland Tribune, some members of the Raiders front office staff, they were all miserable, not only because the team was doing so poorly, but because as fans, they wish they had some superstars to root for. Don't forget the other league, the successful NFL, had big stars like Jim Brown and Mike Ditka and Frank Gifford.
And they're kind of moaning over the fact that they don't have anybody in their league of that caliber, and they certainly don't have anybody that good on the Raiders. So here they are in New York, and they're going to play the team called the New York Titans. And they later became, as we know, the New York Jets. But this was the Titans in 1962. It was a rainy, miserable night when they showed up in New York in advance of the game.
They went to a hotel in mid-Manhattan and quickly made their way into the bar. And the more they drank, the more the idea for this – again, they didn't call it fantasy game, but this game, this pretend football game took shape. And by morning, they had essentially invented fantasy football.
They flew home to Oakland, and it was too late in the season to start this game. And they waited until the following summer, the 1963 football season. And they had a draft in August in Winkenbach's basement in Oakland. And there were eight guys, and they each had a helper.
So there was a grand total of 16 guys. And they formed this league, the very first fantasy football league in history. And they gave it a very unusual, cumbersome name. They called it the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League – GOAPL. And that, folks, was the first fantasy football league. Interesting thing is, the rules that they came up with for the GOAPL league were quite similar to what we play today, at least in so-called seasonal redraft, recreational fantasy football competition.
It's quite similar to what they did. But it was much, much more difficult for these guys, primarily because there were no computers. The only source of information about the football games was the box scores in newspapers. And in order to keep track of the results for the fantasy football games, Winkenbach spent hours and hours each week late into the night looking at the box score in the early edition of the newspaper and carefully tabulating how everybody was doing. And I repeat, they did not use the term fantasy football. In fact, that term didn't even enter the lexicon until some decades later. What did they call it? Winkenbach called his game the draft. That's what he called it because they knew then, as many of us know now, that perhaps the most exciting part of a fantasy football competition is the draft – getting together, taking turns, picking players, forming relationships that in some cases carry on for decades. And so they called it the draft.
But the rules were similar to what we think of today. They played for pennies and they had a lot of fun. And a special thanks to Peter Funt, his book Inside Fantasy Football.
Go to Amazon or the usual suspects and pick it up. And by the way, the draft is now a mega event and a larger part of it has to do with these guys drinking in New York. And the next thing you know, you have the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League, GOAPL, and the beginning, the birth of fantasy football. The story of the first fantasy football team here on Our American Stories.
We've all done it. You see a headline but don't have time to read the whole story or there's so much news you're not sure what is worth your time. I'm Kolby Ekowitz, co-host of Post Reports, the weekday afternoon podcast from The Washington Post. Post Reports brings you what's relevant and revealing, breaking stories, politics, wellness, culture. Each episode goes beyond a headline for the context you need.
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