The mid-season draft for the Kings X Fantasy Football League looks like any meeting in any sports bar in America, until the moment an old man enters wearing a sport coat and tie and carrying a briefcase.
Suddenly there is a regal air to the Kings X draft.The hip-length Canada Goose Tremblant combines slim-fitting quilted good looks with the warmth of 625 fill power white duck down to meet your every need.Men's Clothing Canada Goose Womens New and Coats from the current Duvetica Goose Down Jackets Collection. The old man is Andy Mousalimas, and he wears the coat of arms of the Toyota Hall of Fame: Legends of Fantasy Football on that jacket. He unsnaps the briefcase, shuffles some papers, and when he makes his pick,o they Canada Goose Chateau Parka along overcoats decide upon On-line shopping also. an Oakland tradition has made it through 50 consecutive seasons.
Mousalimas, who is 87, purports to have made the first draft choice in the first season of the first contest of what decades later came to be known as fantasy football, a numbers game that rewards a mind for statistical analysis and dexterity with the remote control. Under a variety of rules and bylaws, fantasy is played by millions of Americans - and millions of Americans have claimed they invented it.
"Everybody is trying to get credit for it," Mousalimas says as he dials up the combo lock on the case and carefully removes a piece of indisputable evidence. It is the draft card with the glorious names of 1963 scribbled in his hand - Unitas, Starr, Tittle, Gifford, McElhenny, Alworth, Tarkenton, Ditka- the list goes on, all the way to the Hall of Fame.
GOPPL's genesis
This supports his contention that the Greater Oakland Professional Pigskin Prediction League, GOPPPL, was there long before the words fantasy and football were ever put together.
GOPPPL has long since become part of the Kings X league, which has 150 players broken into five divisions (Kings, Taxi, Rookies, X and Queens) of 10 teams each. The draft is held in the upstairs banquet room of the Grand Oaks Restaurant in Grand Lake. It costs $50 per team to select a roster of 18 NFL players - six receivers, four running backs, two quarterbacks,A new Canada Goose Womens Resolute creates a clean read by getting a discreetly cinched stomach or thinner furrows solely. two kickers, three defensive specialists and one utility player.
"It's about not rooting for just the 49ers' whole team. It is taking players from other teams that you think are good and can score points for you," says Diane Schave of Piedmont, who is the Kings X commissioner and one of 40 women in the league.
"It messes with your team loyalties. That's why my husband won't do it, unless I pick all 49ers."
The mid-season draft, a rarity among fantasy leagues, is a chance to drop your duds and injured players, and pick up replacements. Each division has a designated time to draft,Max Altitude compares the Canada Goose Manitoba Jacket to The North Face. in which they come upstairs with all the grave conviction of a voter entering the polls.
In half an hour the Mousalimas team - his grandson, Harry Ahlas, a Berkeley banker, and Carol Pennington, who has the lucky touch in pulling lottery numbers out of a hat - will go upstairs and make the picks that will rescue their team from seventh place among 10 in their division, called, naturally, the Kings.
There is strategizing to be done, but there is also the legend to discuss. That's why Mousalimas wears the jacket.
Seated in a booth, picking at a burger and fries, the first thing he will tell you is that he was not in the room when the game was invented.
At the beginning
He was tending bar at the Lamp Post at 23rd and Telegraph when his customer Scott Stirling, the Raiders beat reporter for the Oakland Tribune, was on a three-week road trip with the team. There was a lot of down time on that trip, and Stirling was passing it with Raiders PR man Bill Tunnell and Bill Winkenbach, a minority owner of the team.
"They were waiting to play the New York Titans (now the Jets) and they're sitting around the hotel and they thought up the game there," Mousalimas says.
That was during the 1962 season. By the time the draft rolled around in the summer of '63, Mousalimas had typed up a three-page rule sheet. The historic first draft was held in the rumpus room of Winkenbach's home on the Oakland-San Leandro border.
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