I started playing fantasy football and fantasy baseball through my local newspaper when I was eight because I was bored in elementary school math. These games were a lot more beneficial to my math skills than topics like rote long division which I caught onto immediately.

The last Fantasy Football League I was in broke up in 2013. So having lived Fantasy Football for 20 years, one would think I would know the history of that, other fantasy games, and their growth. Not a chance.

Larry Schechter, a retired fantasy baseball book writer and a successful player wrote the canonical history of fantasy sports. An undertaking such as this had never happened before. At the beginning of the book, Schechter talks about almost dying from aFib and kidney disease several years ago and afterwards he didn't want his regret in life to not write a book on the history of fantasy sports. Congratulations, Mr. Schechter, you have wrote the definitive book on the subject in an easy to read format. This was clearly a multi-year labor of love as I doubt he'll get rich on this.

This book starts in the 1960's with some football media members who followed the west coast AFL (and I believe an article was just written about this in the WSJ) and strat-o-matic baseball to the international growth of fantasy sports. Fantasy cricket and futsal? Yep, those exist. Heck, I play in a fantasy league devoted to music.

What comes across to me through the book are these two things:
#1 It captures the entrepreneurial spirit of people in the 1980s through the Internet pre dot.com collapse who were willing to risk their jobs and livelihoods to start fax, media, and web services because they saw a future in what was at the time, a cottage industry.
#2 How fantasy leagues enable longtime friends to stay in touch well after their teen/college days, can be multigenerational, and even help create new bonds.

This book brought back so many memories of my father getting the daily USA Today, Sporting News, and other magazines pre-Internet so we could keep up with Statistics. I fondly remember STATS, Inc. and the first time I ever saw live season stats on a friend's AOL account. There are magazines I remember reading when bookstores had enormous periodical sections so I could get an idea of who to draft from self-styled "experts." While I was never particularly successful (it was a guarantee my QB would always be injured by week 3 and my starting pitchers would underachieve), this brought book some great memories.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who plays/played fantasy sports - especially from Late Baby Boomers to Millennials.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. But in full disclosure, I also bought this book via Kindle as well so Mr. Schechter could see a few dollars. The price is extremely low for what all he wrote.

This book interested me because my husband, brother, father, and son have played and continue to play on fantasy sports teams. I've also known some engineers who have worked in the fantasy sports industry. The History of Fantasy Sports is incredibly well researched to provide the decades long fantasy sports arena.....long before everything was available electronically.

There are terrific entrepreneurial stories where men and women dropped out of their careers and swung for the fences to create fantasy sports for hundreds of thousands of sports enthusiasts. And of course, there was litigation. The litigation chapters were directly out of David vs Goliath and to everyone's surprise, the "little guy" won.

The true meaning of fantasy sports are the long standing relationships. Many leagues have been in existence for over 30 and 40 years with very few team members leaving their league. It's an amazing story about friendship, sports, business, and passion.

A very thorough and well-researched look at the history of fantasy sports. At times, the entries read more like Wikipedia pages, and the cultural impact could be further highlighted, especially toward the beginning - I found that it took some time to get into a good rhythm moving through the book.