Armchair Owners

It’s called fantasy football, as though there is another kind, as though football all by itself is no longer an escape from the real world. And it isn’t, of course.

Football used to be larger than life. It created legends. It unfolded like a parable. Then life grew larger--or its shopping list did, anyway. Now big-time football is another tangent of big business. It creates millionaires. It unfolds like a marketing strategy.

Sis! Boom! Blah.

“The way football has changed, you need a whole new way to watch the game--something to keep it fun,” says Matthew Berry, 20, of Fullerton, who grew up in San Francisco rooting for the mighty 49ers. “I moved to Southern California in 1994, the year both pro football teams left, and I was really disappointed. The only way I can really enjoy the feeling of a hometown team is to play fantasy football.”

Berry not only plays, he also operates the Pacific Coast Fantasy Football League on the World Wide Web (www.webworldinc.com/ckguy/pcffl). The site offers a free meeting place--including rules, player information and leagues--for anyone interested in learning or playing.

Fantasy football sounds like a refreshing alternative to the all-too-real thing, a revival of the innocence of imagining ourselves throwing long passes or running to daylight or splitting the uprights as time expires.

Except fantasy football asks us to pretend that we are entrepreneurs, not athletes. We portray the role of the team’s owner, not its star players. It’s not so much about building character or developing athletic prowess as it is about the art of closing the deal.

Go! Fight! Cha-ching!

So it is that Sunday afternoons unspool along the border between the counties famous for being abandoned by the Rams and the Raiders, where the National Sports Grill & Bar in Buena Park is packed with people playing fantasy football--sometimes also known as rotisserie league football.

Groups of them have formed leagues with funny names and chosen teams composed of NFL players and probably paid a registration fee for the privilege. Now they are kicking back and watching banks of television sets, keeping track of the players, compiling points on the basis of the yardage or touchdowns or field goals these athletes produce. The team with the most points wins.

“We come here every week, have a little breakfast and spend the day,” says Raphael Miravete, 29, commissioner of the Fantasy Fools League, formed among a group of friends nine years ago. “For us, for lots of people, this is the new tradition.”

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Superficially, it doesn’t look so different from the old one. The place is thick with the standard sports-bar ambience of misdirected testosterone, empty calories and high-tech TV signals. Plates of Rotisserie League Chicken sell for $7.99, and satellite dishes of professional football are served for free. It’s noisy.

But the enthusiasm of the audience is schizophrenic. Its allegiances are fractured, its reactions unpredictable. A crowd full of fantasy football players is apt to be cheering or groaning at any time, regardless of the team jerseys they may be wearing, the tables they may be sharing or the television they may be watching.

“When you see a guy in a Dolphins’ uniform rooting for a play the Patriots just made,” Miravete says with a laugh, “you know he’s in fantasy.”

It’s stranger than that. People in jerseys of the Minnesota Vikings, Denver Broncos and Pittsburgh Steelers are also rooting for outfits with names such as the Iron Duffs, the Swamp Mongrels and the Mankato Bikini Bandits.

“It’s like a parallel universe,” says Richard Stone, 28, who works for a telecommunications company in Brea.

Dan Cunningham isn’t having any of it. Not the rotisserie league, not the chicken, not the mission-control viewing style, not the virtual camaraderie. In fact, not even the football. Cunningham and a few of his friends have gathered in the deserted corner of a pool room to watch a baseball game.

“Fantasy football? Not me, no way, not anymore,” Cunningham asserts, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. “I played for a couple of seasons, and I was very good. I’m very competitive. But that was the problem. It took up so much time. I had to research every team, every player. I had to read every paper, watch every TV sports show, check every . . . stat. It put me over the edge.”

Rather than relieving the pressures of daily life, Cunningham says, fantasy football can become another one of them. Also, he says, it defeats the purpose of the game.

“Hear how the people in here are talking?” he asks. “You sit down with your friends to watch a game, and it’s almost not fun anymore. All they talk about is how their players are doing. They couldn’t care less about the team concept, the strategy of winning or losing. That’s out the window. It’s the same during the week, when they are planning for the next game. Rotisserie football rules their lives. I’ve had enough.”

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Elsewhere, however, people can’t seem to get enough. Although the concept has been around for 30 years, the popularity of fantasy sports has exploded during the past decade, expanding from football and baseball into basketball and hockey and even auto racing.

Fantasy football is served by a burgeoning industry that includes at least a dozen magazines, countless computer Web sites, several regional radio programs and at least one national television show. One Minneapolis-based magazine played host in August to the first fantasy-football convention, which drew 2,000 people. Related companies sell everything from logos to jerseys to trophies to computer software.

“I think it’s going to get bigger and bigger,” says James Lenz, 35, who recently moved from Tustin Ranch to Overland Park, Kan. Lenz and a partner operate Fantasy Insights, a magazine and Web site (www.fantasyinsights.com). “We’ve doubled in each of the last three years. More and more women are involved. We’re selling more and more products. We want to become a mega fantasy-football company.”

Many mainstream newspapers and TV stations have altered their sports reports to cater to fantasy players. KTLA-5 graphics feature the top individual performances of the day.

“It’s wonderful that people are interested, but I’m dumbfounded that people are so serious about fantasy sports,” says Ed Arnold of Fountain Valley, KTLA’s veteran sportscaster. “I’m one of those who, as a kid, had players who I admired, whose performances I followed. But I never thought we’d see this.”

Fantasy football is a sign of the times, most people seem to agree, a natural reaction to the changing relationship between sports and sports fans.

“After the NFL strike a few years ago, I was down on football,” Miravete says. “I wasn’t for the owners or the players. And when the game started again, it was hard to care about the teams because I knew the owners and players didn’t care about them. Not really.

“Fantasy football brought back my interest in football. But I’ve become a fan of individual players instead of teams--because I’m interested in what those players can do for me and my team.”