Picture it. New York City, 1962. Three great football fans, sitting around imbibing on their favorite alcoholic beverages in a hotel room. One of the men, the late Wilfred "Bill" Winkenbach, had the bright idea of groups of fans tallying up numbers of professional football players to see who winds up with the most points. He collaborated with his two friends and the rest is history. Though the term was not coined until many years later, what we now know as fantasy football was born. Winkenbach was no stranger to fantasy sports, or real-life sports, for that matter. A limited partner with the Los Angeles Raiders, he had previously created similar fantasy games in the realms of golf and baseball. In the late 1950s, he developed a game where …show more content…
It was a league that awarded points for scores only, as many were prior to the Internet boom. The top AFL fantasy player of 1963 was then-Houston Oilers quarterback George Blanda, who racked up an astounding 1,430 points under GOPPPL's scoring scheme (50 points for a rushing TD, 25 points for a thrown or caught TD, 25 points for a field goal, 10 points for an extra point and 200 points for a kick or interception returned for a TD). Blanda threw 27 touchdowns, kicked 11 field goals and made 48 extra points. In the days before kicking specialists emerged, some skill position players moonlighted as kickers, allowing their point totals to …show more content…
As a small business owner, Winkenbach had all the means necessary (phone lines, typewriters and a mimeograph machine) to become the first fantasy football league commissioner. However, the tools that allowed Winkenbach to kickoff this now famous game are also what stalled it. Without the proper technology to keep track of scores in an efficient way, the time spent looking through box scores and calculating points discouraged people from playing. And there were no instant results; competitors had to wait for the commissioner to compile and report the results. Fantasy football didn’t become public until Oakland restauranteur and original GOPPPL member Andy Mousalimas opened the first fantasy football league to patrons of his Kings X Sports Bar in 1969. Divisions grew in numbers, and by 1974, The Queens became the first all-female division. Though a few leagues started at Kings X, the hype eventually simmered due to the time-consuming nature of the game’s scoring. For years, the game remained underground before it slowly spread via word-of-mouth. The next oldest league on record is Seattle’s Coach the Pros, which formed in 1976 and is reportedly the oldest, continuously run league in the United
The National Football League is a professional American football league consisting of 32 teams, divided equally between the National Football Conference and the American Football Conference. The NFL was founded in 1920s and ever since then has been a representative of the "All-American, Family Entertainment, Sport". Football is played from kids starting at age five to adulthood and is very popular throughout different races and social classes. With the increase of people playing football, came the increase of the sports related injuries.
Frank Supovitz, who was Senior Vice President of Events for the National Football League. His department, event production must score touchdowns on a lengthy roster of events, including the Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, NFL Experience, NFL Draft, and the NFL International Series.
The XFL is to begin play the week after the Super Bowl, Saturday, February 3, 2001. The league will be comprise...
First known as the American Professional Football Association or APFA and later named the National Football League in 1922, the league's first president official was Jim Thorpe (“NFL Founded” 1). Without a debate the most known athlete of his time, Thorpe helped improve reliability to the sport. Although it wasn’t in the news in 1920, the league's creation was the start of a journey that has made the NFL this country's preferred sport (1).
Fantasy football is the most anticipated and hyped competition for sports fans each year. It is where sports fans try to get bragging rights and show off their expertise in sports. According to Forbes, 33 million people play fantasy football each year. This includes an estimated 6.4 million women. They also found that Americans spend an estimated $800 million annually on all fantasy sports media products. This really is an American phenomenon.
Foner, Eric, and John A. Garraty. "Football." The Reader's Companion to American History. Dec. 1
This rich history all started in between the years of 1867 to 1873. It was introduced by a professor at Kaisei Gakka, a college boarding school. His name was Horace Wilson. Wilson was the one that brought the game to Japan, but there were others that helped him teach the Japanese the ways of the game. Him and another professor named Albert Bates would help teach and train those who were interested in playing
When Finny comes up with the idea of blitzball, he is again thinking like a child. The way he comes up with it makes him seem like the six-year-old Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes. He makes up the rules as they play the game, sometimes making it impossible for other people to get the ball.
Baseball was based on the English game of rounders. Rounders becomes popular in the United States in the early 19th century, where the game was called "townball", "base", or "baseball". Cartwright formalized the modern rules of baseball. The first recorded baseball game in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers lost to the New York Baseball Club. The game was held at the Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey. In 1858, the National Association of Base Ball Players, the first organized baseball league was formed.
Football was invented in 1879 by Walter Camp; he attended Yale from 1876 to 1882 and was head advisory football coach from 1888 to 1912. Camp helped evolve the rules of the game away from rugby and soccer into the rules of American Football as they are known today. An influence to Walter Camp’s invention was William Ellis who was the first person noted for picking up the ball during a soccer game and running with it. From that point, Camp began to assess the rules of football. Football is an fairly understandable sport; one can begin learning the aspects of catching and walking with a football at around the age of two. About 25 years ago, the National football Association did not have the reputation it has today, with the continuous rise of sports television packages, the release of video games, and the invention of the internet perpetuating the regional growth across the United States, and inevitably, the world. The broadcasts began in 1939 with the first pro football game airing on television as network executives began to realize the advertisement could potentially generate substantial profits. Networks began broadcasting football once a week and it quickly became a product turning into their top income stream. By this time, football was given a huge amount of global exposure, eventually increasing with international broadcasts and internet media. ...
During the early years of football, many players were injured due to the violence in the game, and as a result of this, many people wanted to change the way the game was played. From 1876 to 1882, Walter Camp pioneered the idea of a Quarter Back handling the ball every play. He also thought of the four-downs system. In this system, each team had four chances to move the ball ten yards, or the other team would receive the ball. His new ideas helped reduce injury drastically. Amos Alonzo Stagg designed the huddle so that the players on each team would know which play the Quarter Back was running, and therefore, would have less chance of running into another player. However, the most revolutionary idea ever came in 1906. John Heisman, a former college football player, thought of the idea of throwing the ball forward, instead of just back and across the field. This creative new concept changed the face of American Football forever.
“You can’t say that video games grew out of pinball, but you can assume that video games wouldn’t have happened without it. It’s like bicycles and cars. One industry leads to the other and then they exist side by side. But you had to have bicycles to one day have motor cars” (Steven Baxter). In 1931 David Gottlieb invented the first pinball machine. Gottlieb was a short, stocky person. He had brown hair and smoked a cigar. His machine was called “Baffle Ball.” Baffle Ball had no flippers or scoring devices. One’s score was determined by which scoring pocket the ball went into. One had to keep score in one’s head. The only moving part was the plunger; the part which one pulls back to launch the ball. The only way one could control which scoring pocket the ball went in was to shake the cabinet in different directions. To give a sense of how old baffle ball is picture this: seven balls for a penny. Because of Gottlieb’s success, imitators sprang up everywhere. Two of them were David Rockola and Ray Moloney. Moloney’s first machine was called “Ballyhoo.” It sold so well that Moloney renamed his company Bally. His and Rockola’s machines were cheaper but were lower quality. Before inventing Baffle Ball, Gottlieb invented a novelty game called Husky Grip. It tested the player’s strength. All kinds of novelty games were popular in arcades before video games.
The main Frisbee game in the world is the game Ultimate Frisbee. The game begins in the late 1960s the game ultimate started by to guys named Joel Silver and Jared Kass. Joel Silver was a graduate from Lafayette College, he was on the Frisbee team of fall in the year 1968. Other students got with Silver and he claimed it to be the ultimate game experience. He got the sport from Frisbee football, and that was likely learned by Jared Kass. The first ultimate game was played in 1972, and the teas who played agents each other where Princeton and Rutgers. The Rutgers had beat Princeton on the same field in the same college football game 103 years before. The rules of the game are played differently depending on the place and the level of competition.
... in the USA. N.p., 6 Nov. 2004. Web. 13 Apr. 2014. This source was very general and it gave the history of the nfl is sections/ It did not really tell me how it affected america and was kind of short compared to my other sources.
This was dominated by those clubs who had supported professionalism, and the twelve founding members consisted of six from Lancashire (Blackburn Rovers, Burnley, Bolton Wanderers, Accrington, Everton and Preston North End) and six from the Midlands (Aston Villa, Derby County, Nott’s County, Stoke, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers). No sides from the South or London initially participated. Preston north end were the first ever team to win the football league and they did it without losing a single