The history of fantasy football actually began several years before the first fantasy team was selected. Although the exact details seem to differ according to who is telling the story, there is no doubt that it was one Wilfred Winkenbach that first had the idea of a fantasy sport, wherein participants would formulate their own teams and determine the success or otherwise of these teams by means of the statistics of the individual team members.
-Golf Came First!
In fact, it was not football but golf that was the first sport to be played under fantasy rules. Wilfred Winkenbach devised fantasy golf in the latter part of the 1950s, in which each player selected a team of professional golfers and the person with the lowest combined total of strokes at the end of the tournament would win. Golf is a simple fantasy game to administer and keep tabs on, since you are concerned only with the scores of your team members without anything else to complicate it.
As with many breakthrough ideas, the concept was simple and it was extended to baseball before Winkenbach had the idea of fantasy football. This was not surprising, since he was part owner of Oakland Raiders at...