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

Okay, so life is hard.

The Polar ice caps are melting, the great recession is seemingly endless, Congress can’t agree on anything. But never mind all that, let’s indulge in some fantasy. Not that kind. The kind Matthew Berry has made a career out of and describes in his new book Fantasy Life.

A while back if you were to Google the word fantasy you’d get a definition pretty similar to the one Wikipedia offers, around a “genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary plot element, theme or setting.” Or you might be searching for a version of the term similar to that offered by the Luxor and other Las Vegas hotels built more around indulgences of another kind.

But if you were to search fantasy today, the great majority of terms would come back relating to fantasy sports and games of all types that more than 35 million players in the U.S. and Canada take part in. And the Yoda-like guru of popular fantasy sports is Matthew Berry. This is his story—and along the way the story of the meteoric growth of a genre based wholly on people’s desire to be someone they’re not, own something they can’t, determine the destiny of a team or enterprise they would never have the chance to steer in real life.

People have been playing fantasy baseball, football, basketball, and the like for many years, well before cell phones, the Internet, and voluminous reams of info and data about the players they selected to be part of their teams and to compete with the teams of their families, friends, relatives, coworkers, and virtual strangers. It’s for many the best game ever invented and the day teams are drafted the best day of the year bar none. As they say in Game of Thrones, “it is known.”

Mr. Berry points to this as the earliest form of communities that would later morph into My Space, Facebook, and the like, bringing people with like interests together (in Mr. Berry’s book seemingly to heap endless amounts of grief and abuse on fellow players and hapless losers). If you’re a veteran fantasy player, fan, Geek, zealot, or otherwise looking for Mr. Berry, who is now senior fantasy sports analyst for ESPN, to provide all the answers and strategies to dominating your league, this isn’t your book.

Because all along, Matthew Berry has been a writer, not just a source of data analytics as is so popular today. Yes, he has been a lifelong sports fan, but he has also been a comedy writer in Hollywood, working on TV shows as disparate as The George Carlin Show to Married With Children, and on Hollywood scripts for pretty forgettable movies like Undercover Elvis and Crocodile Dundee III.

The comedy writer shows in his many columns over the years for major fantasy sports websites such as RotoWorld, to his own The Talented Mr. Roto (the title of which was suggested by his first wife after the Matt Damon/Jude Law film The Talented Mr. Ripley).

In many of Mr. Berry’s columns, the hardcore fantasy stat content and forecasts (no easy task predicting the statistical performances of real life athletes) are only gotten to after first browsing through Mr. Berry’s patented TRUM, “thoughts, ramblings, useless information and musings.”

About anything. About life. But that’s what separated Berry from the traditional fantasy writers, which, with rare exception was akin to reading the ramblings of a Wall Street quant database supercomputer. Mr. Berry entertained you, made you laugh, made you think, made you feel human and not a stat freak Geek with no friends. Made you see the big picture, that all of this competition and desire to beat the next guy to the next big thing was all in fun in an effort to bring people together with a sense of community. A fraternity—without the hazing (actually sometimes with that) and multiple kamikaze shots. And that’s what he does in his new book.

Fantasy Life is more a humor book and one person’s memoir of beating the odds to develop and thrive in a new form of content and gamesmanship than it is a sports book.

Anyone who has ever played a fantasy game—be it one of the big sports or as Mr. Berry offers, even fantasy sumo wrestling, golf, stocks, bass fishing (really?), and much more—will enjoy the many examples of different leagues, drafts of players, prizes, trophies, rites, and rituals that he offers in his book (I mean, forcing the league loser to have that fact tattooed on his arm alongside a Justin Bieber likeness, yikes, that’s hard core, remind me not to join that one).

But anyone who is a human being but maybe not a sports fan (there are such people) will enjoy Mr. Berry’s many anecdotes (and there are many) of real people in actual leagues and players and the lengths they go to compete and win. Leagues created by and played in by firemen, priests and pastors, soldiers in Iraq drafting teams while ducking mortar rounds, Playboy playmates, politicians, Broadway casts, music industry luminaries, doctors and surgeons (hopefully not while, you know . . .), even national security advisers in down time in situation rooms.

A doctor stepping out while setting a child’s broken arm to make his fantasy football pick—the mother is horrified, the father likes his pick. New fathers drafting teams in the delivery room while their wives give birth (I know of such an example personally), drafts conducted during religious high holy days, the bride at a wedding—yes she has a team in the league too—picking the draft order just before the ceremony begins, the best man frantically trying to pull off a trade at the deadline on his cell phone while the ceremony awaits the ring he holds in his pocket. Costumed mascots participating in drafts at a bar in between doing their acts. Fathers taking advantage of younger sons and daughters in lopsided trades (though it works the other way around too), 87-year-old grandmothers as proud league champions.

It all makes for a fun ride.

Along the way is Matthew Berry’s career ride and decision to give up the TV and Hollywood writing to cast his lot with the fledgling industry that fascinated him since he was 14 years old, something in which he could belong and fit in as his family moved frequently.

He describes the struggles of convincing sites to let him write for them, usually for no pay. He describes the lack of interest from the as usual not so visionary TV networks to legitimize what they originally looked as a game played by a small audience of geeks living in their parents’ basements glued to computer screens—not a demographic they perceived as having strong purchasing power.

He points out companies that clamped down on people who dared take a few minutes on precious company time and captivating spreadsheets to check on their fantasy teams—none other than famous outplacement consultant Challenger Gray & Christmas warned of the significant loss of office productivity from these nefarious games—and people were actually fired from their jobs for having the audacity to participate in these pursuits.

But Challenger later reversed itself when they dug deeper and found that these types of games brought people closer together, improved morale and created camaraderie around something clerical workers, accounting departments and C-suite types could all talk about, laugh about and get together on.

One former boss of mine threatened a sales executive with assuming the Cleveland sales territory (which only at the time seemed like a bad thing and was far away from his Connecticut home) if he didn’t trade him the star running back of the San Diego Chargers.

Mr. Berry made the decision to pursue this path and despite admitted self-doubts, finally wore down the doubters and helped grow the niche to what it is today, a big part of mainstream America with 13% of Americans players. Turn on any sports event now and you’ll see scrolling stats and references to “you fantasy players out there and your teams and players.”

Heck, athletes themselves have their own fantasy teams (and sometimes, with their own performances cause their teams to win or lose!) And Matthew Berry not only writes about all this, but is on camera on ESPN talking about it. A fantasy realized.

Most people will probably be drawn to this book for its stories about wild and crazy leagues and players and the lengths they go to to win their leagues. And that’s there.

But there’s also the human element of Mr. Berry’s own up and down career path, doubts, failed first marriage and ultimate redemption in his belief in the power of fantasy games, chucking aside his writing career to focus fully on fantasy, and finally achieving the ultimate fantasy in his life, happiness and fulfillment in his second marriage, one that came complete with an instant family of three kids.

Ultimately, in a series of games people play to chase trophies, Mr. Berry’s biggest win and trophy was his family. And that’s what makes this a romance novel as well as anything else. It’s a paen to Mr. Berry’s two loves. A love affair with fantasy games as ways to bring people and families together, and with his new family. The journeys people go through to compete and win trophies alongside the journeys they go through to find their true path in life.

You’ll enjoy the ride. To borrow a Matthew Berry phrase, “just saying!”