ESPN's Fantasy Film is More Silly Than Reality

ESPN is in the middle of a series of documentaries looking at events and issues in sports that have arisen over the networks 30-year history. Most have been fascinating.
A new documentary, Silly Little Game, makes its debut Tuesday and it illustrates the difficulty in illustrating fantasy sports—games played on paper by people studying statistics, arguing about trades at tables in restaurants or, even worse, staring for hours on end at computer terminals.
The film focuses on the founders of the first fantasy baseball league. Back then, in 1980, it was called Rotisserie Baseball, because the group met at a Manhattan restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise. Magazine editor Dan Okrent came up with the first set of rules and convinced some of his publishing friends to form a league. Partly because they were in media, word of their game spread quickly.
Aided by the Internet, fantasy has become a multi-billion business, but the original Roto leaguers didn’t cash in big. In fact Okrent managed to never even finish first in the league he organized around a game he invented. (That’s like hearing that Hugh Hefner never got laid, quips one of his fellow founding fathers.)
In the film, Okrent’s law is stated thusly: There is nothing more interesting than your own Roto team. And there’s nothing less interesting that someone else’s.
In order to make this story more cinematic, the filmmakers resorted to several devices to try to give it more visual appeal. One of them is using actors to play the founders when they were younger to recreate great moments in Roto history. By and large, these fall fairly flat.
A review in the New York Times concurs. “As ideas go, this one’s slightly worse than the designated hitter,” writes Mike Hale.
Nevertheless, it is amusing to see fantasy fans—now just about everyone you know—depicted as nerds and dorks. And having real sports figures like Sparky Anderson admit they have no idea how to win at the home version of their sport.
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