No longer just for sports fans, new fantasy leagues track

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Oct 17, 2006 | by Candace Murphy, STAFF WRITER

THE FOUNDERS of fantasy leagues could never have envisioned this.

Nope, Daniel Okrent, one of the publishing world's glitterati who in 1979 was one of the original 10 founders of the first Rotisserie Baseball League, couldn't have.

Neither could former Oakland Raiders limited partner Bill Winkenbach, who along with former Oakland Tribune sports editor George Ross and beat reporter Scotty Stirling, became the daddy of all fantasy leagues in 1962 when he started the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prognosticators League.

Neither could the millions of fantasy league addicts, who today carpet these great United States with not just baseball and football fantasy leagues, but with basketball, hockey, golf, NASCAR and soccer.

The latest to enter the fantasy fray is decidedly unsporty. Well, depending on their outfit on any particular day. Joining the land where there most definitely is an "I" in "team" are celebrities.

Yes, red carpet stars are now the focus of fantasy tabloid leagues, where fantasy players recruit not athletes, but A-listers, and weekly scores are based not on performance, but on where the celebs appear in magazines such as People and Us Weekly and gossip blogs such as Bricks and Stones and Defamer.

"The whole idea is to give a fantasy game to people who don't necessarily follow athletes," says Tabloid Fantasy League co- founder Firooz Basri, a University of Minnesota Law School graduate who launched http://www.tabfl.com with his girlfriend Mandy Dalsing, her sister Amy Reif and Web designer Breht Burri.

"We did it because first off, we think that's totally fine you like to follow celebrities. We're trying to tell people it's OK -- you don't have to be ashamed or hide the fact that you read celebrity magazines. It's totally accepted in our culture to sit on a couch all day and watch sports, but if someone wants to flip through Us or People, somehow that's taboo. So we're saying 'You're not alone.'"

The Tabloid Fantasy League, which launched three months ago and is based in Kansas City, Mo., is not alone. Another popular celebrity-based fantasy league is Fafarazzi (www.fafarazzi.com), which launched in August. Fantasy League Ltd. (www.fantasyleague.com), a more traditional fantasy-leaguers hangout, has also sprouted a celebrity arm.

Most of the recent frenetic activity surrounding celebrity fantasy leagues though, seems to have been sparked by the musings of ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons, aka the Sports Guy, who penned a piece in May about how he'd like to share the fantasy love with his wife and create an Us Weekly fantasy league. In the column, Simmons proposed 10 teams in an auction format with a $200 spending cap and two seasons a year. If a celebrity gets on a cover of Us, the player who drafted the celebrity gets 10 points. Three points for an inset photo. And minus three points if they're in the Fashion Police, a feature that slams stars for commiting fashion don'ts.

Though Simmons wasn't the first to think of the idea -- a fantasy fashion league that cropped up about two years ago, where fashion designers who make the news earn points for players, is thought to have paved the way -- the ESPN.com column had a big audience. And Basri admits it got the wheels in motion for his own venture.

"It was a catalyst," says Basri, 27. "Actually, my girlfriend saw the Bill Simmons article, and once we saw that, we thought we had to get on top of it, and we were actually surprised to find that there weren't that many leagues out there."

Every celebrity-based fantasy is slightly different. Fafarazzi, one of the bigger leagues out there with formidable Web sites to match, trods in the seamier side of celebrity: Points are earned for divorces, new boyfriends and a favorite of gawkers everywhere, the infamous "nip-slips."

Points are also diligently tracked. Last Thursday morning, the day's leaders for points on Fafarazzi were Nick Lachey, who scored two points in the "Say What?" department for saying that the MTV reality show "Newlyweds," starring him and his ex-wife Jessica Simpson, was a dumb idea.

Sienna Miller has scored two points in the "Grab Bag" department for having her velvet rope street cred called into question when she was carded at a night club. And Michael Jackson had two points in the "Fruit Basket" department for hitting the streets in San Tropez in mom jeans and pumps.

Basri's Tabloid Fantasy League, though, tries to take a higher road, or as high as one can take when trafficking in the world of unearned idolatry. The Tabloid Fantasy League is based entirely on celebrities' pictures and how often or where they appear in what Basri and his colleagues have deemed the Big Four magazines: People, Us Weekly, In Touch and Star. Before this story went to press, Jessica Simpson led all stars with a total of 619 points, the last of which was earned for an appearance on page 93 of In Touch, the issue whose cover asks, "Did Jen Have a Boob Job?"

The highest-ranking male star at the moment is Brad Pitt, who ranks sixth overall out of 1,174 celebrities with any points whatsoever. He has 408 points.