You gotta have faith
I was in the Bay Area, along with many of my colleagues, for the Fantasy Sports Trade Association's annual summer conference.
I know. The idea of a fantasy sports conference sounds kind of nerdy and silly, and I'm not gonna lie: It's not the coolest gathering in the world. And it gets sillier- and nerdier-sounding when I tell you the conference kicked off with a Hall of Fame induction ceremony. But while you may scoff and make fun, it's really important to a lot of people who take fantasy sports seriously, and if they hadn't cared so much and worked so hard for many, many years, all of us would be playing a different game with different tools, and there wouldn't be nearly as many of us -- including maybe you -- who get to take so much joy from our hobby.
So we gathered Monday night to honor three people that most of you have never, ever heard of but without whose contributions, fantasy sports wouldn't be what they are today.
Wilfred "Wink" Wickenbach was inducted posthumously by his grandson. Wink, as his grandson noted he was known to his friends, was a limited partner of the Oakland Raiders. And in 1962, with the help of some friends, he created a game in which you drafted professional football players to imaginary teams and got points for those performances. The GOPPPL (Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Procrastinators League) was essentially the first league to play what we now know as fantasy football.
I never met Wink, but the other two who were inducted that night are dear friends of mine. Rick Wolf, currently a muckety-muck executive at NBC Sports, started his fantasy career at Prodigy (1987-95), where he was on the development team for Baseball Manager and the PRODIGY Network Golf Tour, two of the first online fantasy games. He has since worked for several other fantasy companies and also worked long and hard for the industry as a member of the FSTA, including serving as chairman during some of the toughest times the industry has faced.
And I was honored to be asked by Peter Schoenke of Rotowire.com to introduce him. Among the remarks I made about Peter that night were that, when he founded RotoNews in 1997 (with Jeff Erickson and Herb Ilk), he created the "What happened and what it means" news and analysis blurb for fantasy player news. Peter has also been a FSTA board member since 2000, and as the chair of the market research committee from 2001-10, he got the word out about just how popular our little game was: 32 million players strong in the United States and Canada, according to the organization.
Area Code 478 - News
Grooms, 324 SC 249, 478 SE2d 841 (1996), and Kizer v. Clark, 360 SC 86, 600 SE2d 529 (2004). While our opinion today does not make the third time the proverbial charm for Town because we find its incorporation petition was not sufficient,
The days of 478-page government reports landing on a desk with a thud are long gone. They now tend to arrive silently via a digital belch. If you want to thumb through its pages, that's between you, your printer and, too often, whomever you call to
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If his manager still has confidence in him, so do I. Ubaldo Jimenez, SP, Rockies (478): Anyone that has read me the last few years knows I am not rational when it comes to Ubaldo. And hey, he's now gone three straight starts without getting rocked!
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Area code 478 is a telephone area code serving the state of Georgia, in the United States. ... List of exchanges from AreaCodeDownload.com, 478 Area Code ...
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478 478 is an area code in these Georgia areas: Adrian Allentown Bartow Birdsville Blun Blundale Bolingbroke Bonaire Bryon Business Reply Mail Butler
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