Op-Ed: A time when I played fantasy football with Meat Loaf

If you spend enough time in Las Vegas, you’ll end up running into something famous, but I didn’t expect it to happen during a high-profile fantasy football draft. There I met Michael Aday, aka Meat Loaf, in 2004.

Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell” was one of the classic rock stations I listened to as an adult, but decades later I was much more impressed with the musician’s turn as Bob Paulson in David Fincher’s “Fight Club”.

Fantasy sports combine a little skill and a lot of luck. The owners create teams of real players. Statistics collected by players during the season will be converted into points, which will be calculated for your team. One point per catch, six points from a touchdown, etc. The team with the most points wins.

My brother Emmett is a fantasy sports guru who has redeemed more checks in fantasy sports than I ever did as a writer. (In 1999, however, I won $ 5,000 in a fantasy basketball playoff challenge, and that’s all the skills, honey.) When my brother and I shared the cost of the team, I’m just an assistant manager on behalf. She has surgery on her brain and I am a trained cheerleader.

Attending the main event in Las Vegas cost $ 1,250 and the grand prize was $ 100,000. In fantasy sports, like gambling, you have to risk money to make money. There were 224 teams in 16 series. Fortunately, our team was in the same series as the Meat Loaf team, which was the first and only time the claim was true.

There is always a buzz in the Bellagio, but it rose a notch as Meathop stepped into the hall. He was a big, clumsy man in a black football shirt. He looked like Meat Loaf, but Meat Loaf fits the profile of many fantasy sports nerds.

This was not, the organizer warned, Meat Loaf’s first experiment in fantasy sports. He had reached the main event earlier and was in place. The legend sat alone and chose his own team.

That night, the names of our teams were posted on the website. Our name was Yiz Fancy Pants, a dialogue line from the movie “Miller’s Crossing.” Meat Loaf’s was Spin Cycle Agitators.

During the fantasy season, there was little junk sports through the league chat, but Meat Loaf didn’t take the bait. At the end of the race, it faced a Spin Cycle Agitators vs. Yiz Fancy Pants match that was fought in a win-or-take home battle. The winner would get into the playoffs, the loser would not.

Things didn’t look good to Yiz Fancy Pants. We limped into the final game of the fantasy season – the “Monday Night Football” between the Dallas Cowboys and the Seattle Seahawks. Meat Loaf had Jason Witten, a tight head, in his second season at the Cowboys. We had a large set of receivers depleted of injuries. So my brother picked up Jerry Rice’s abandonment thread. Yeah, that Jerry Rice.

After an incredible San Francisco 49ers career in which he won three Super Bowls, Rice did the inconceivable and went to the Raiders. By 2004, flowering had risen, and six games during the season he was traded to Seattle, where he had a rather miserable year. But my brother had noticed that in the previous two weeks his goals had risen and he had received a touchdown. So we got him.

It was a great movement. In the fourth quarter, Rice got five catches, 77 yards, and a touchdown with which he also set an NFL record in combined net yards. But Witten got six prey, and we were still lost.

Then it happened unlikely. After dropping 12 points, Seattle made three touchdowns and took the lead with 2:45 left. But somehow Dallas managed to make two touchdowns. With less than 30 seconds left, Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselback hit Rice with 28 yards, a game worth 3.8 points for our fantasy team, enough to get us past Squeeze Meat Loaf and advance to the playoffs.

The Seahawks lost, but Jerry Rice ended the evening with eight catches, 145 yards and a touchdown. He was 42 years old.

Unfortunately, it was Yiz Fancy Pants. Although the result was a loss, we did not redeem large checks. Meat Loaf had many platinum records and a film career. We had a little football glory. As the wise man once said, “Two out of three is not bad.”

Jim Ruland has written “Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise and Fall of SST Records,” which will be released in April.