“I feel like J. Robert Oppenheimer, having invented the atomic bomb,’’’ Dan Okrent said last weekend. “I meant it for peaceful purposes.’’
Okrent is the man who came up with the concept of season long fantasy sports at the close of the 1970’s. At the time he could not have conceived of one-week or even one-day leagues.
The later is now under serious scrutiny from politicians and law enforcement alike, not to mention the media and playing community. Such scrutiny surfaced last week after it was revealed a DraftKings employee had access to “insider information” and may have utilized such data to win $350,000 at rival site FanDuel. The verdict is still out on this one.
Yep, Okrent created a monster.
The Boston Globe writes:
Fantasy has emerged as the unchecked, runaway monster of sports, with billions of dollars changing hands, an endless loop of skull-imploding commercials (“Just pick your sport, pick your players, and pick up your cash!”), blatant hypocrisy in the partnering teams/leagues, an inevitable insider trading scandal, and impending congressional investigations and government regulation.
But in this case, Okrent may be getting double f***ed. That’s because the man who invented fantasy sports is not deriving a single cent from the explosive new DFS industry that is raking in billions of dollars over these past two years.
Joe Brennan, Jr, an industry analyst who himself is behind the soon-to-launch London-based Daily Fantasy Sports site FastFantasy.com, suggests Okrent has a grudge against the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel.
After all, it was the New York Times that blew the doors wide open on the current DraftKings/FanDuel scandal. Okrent just happens to have been the Times former Editor.
Brennan lashed out on Twitter against the Times:
I wonder if the NY Times got so anti-DFS b/c former editor Dan Okrent invented fantasy & never made a dime off of it?
While it’s true Okrent might not be deriving any financial benefit from Daily Fantasy Sports, he has indeed made money off of his original concept.
$15,000 lifetime from the concept the fantasy founding fathers trademarked as “Rotisserie League Baseball.” Can we get a big “WHOOPIE”!
“The one thing we could protect was the name,’’ said Okrent. “But in our effort to protect the trademark somebody came up with the generic term: fantasy. That was in the late 1980s. The next big leap was the arrival of the Internet. That was the thing that made it truly widespread and deep in the culture. It became so easy to play and the stats were there and you could follow your teams really closely and people built websites around it.’’
– Pauly Mosconi, DFS911.com