Fantasy football league friends still going strong
“I’m in what is probably one of the top five oldest fantasy football leagues still in existence. We were all attending Arizona State, where I was a grad student. We were these jocks who played together on an intramural football team. We were just good friends who liked to hang around each other all the time.
“We held our first draft in 1978. We made up our own rules, who got scoring and all that kind of stuff. We started off at $5 a week. Whoever won the Super Bowl got to take a date out for dinner with wine, and bring back the tab for us all to split up.
“It started with 11 of us on that intramural team. Nine of the 11 are left. Two of us have passed. So we’ve got nine, plus a couple guys we’ve added over the years.
“The cool thing is that we all started our careers together. One guy went to the Naval Academy, and we call him The Admiral. We have very successful businessmen. We have educators. We have psychiatrists. We have one guy who’s in charge of all the electricity grids in western America.
“We’ve been through everything together: the birth of our kids, friends dying, businesses going up and down. We’ve gone on vacations together with our wives. We still meet twice a year religiously to do our draft and everything. That’s pretty cool, I think, to have a circle of friends, nine of whom are from the core you’ve known for over 40 years.
“We really never have gone online. We’re so old-fashioned, we still keep notes by hand. We have hard copy written minutes of every meeting. We have an archive of documents that you wouldn’t believe. All we do with the internet is submit our lineups every week, and we use it to communicate.
“We have a pretty special bond. I guess we all just love each other. But we still have a bloody, bloody rivalry when it comes to who wins that trophy, I’ll tell you that. It’s pretty cutthroat.”
— Jeff Butler
They were planning to meet in Las Vegas to hold this season’s draft. But due to the coronavirus pandemic, they will probably do it on Zoom.
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