Fantasies fulfilled.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Sports Biz

I CAN THINK OF MAYBE TWO JOBS THAT AMERICAN MALE sports fans might enjoy more than what brothers Dan and Kelly Grogan do for a living:

We could be that guy who evaluates those photos for Sports Illustrated's swimsuit issue. Or we could be football commentator Joe Theisman, except with decent hair.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But the sad truth is we're a bunch of working stiffs, and Littleton's Dan and Kelly Grogan are living out a fantasy.

It's not just that they get to wear shorts and sandals to work. It's that they get paid for being football fans.

You heard me. For talking football. Yeah. I know. It hurts, brother. You and I do the same from August through January, except the last time I checked nobody's exactly slipping us $100 bills for weighing in on whether Ricky Williams can still pound it out between the tackles.

The Grogans used to have real jobs, too. Cubicles, expense reports, icy stares from headstrong receptionists. But they quit. Now, the brothers have figured out how to make a living helping geeks like us decide who to draft in fantasy football leagues.

Oh, the humanity.

Here's the story. The Grogans are New Jersey kids whose father was transplanted to Colorado during the Johns Manville expansion in the early 1970s. They went to college, got jobs. In 1985, an acquaintance invited the Grogans to participate in a local recreational league devoted to a then-obscure sports hobby. In their fantasy football inaugural draft, the brothers selected a Seattle Seahawks receiver, Paul Johns. A crafty pick, except that Johns had broken his neck and retired the year before.

Humbled, the Grogans vowed to do better research the next time. They read newspapers. Made phone calls. Listened to sports-radio. Typed up player notes and lists of sleeper picks. When a league rival offered to pay the Grogans for a copy of their research, the synapses connected.

Dan Grogan made a few dozen copies of his fantasy football cheat sheets and convinced Johnny Kareski, the proprietor of Johnny's Newsstand on Champa Street, to stock them. "Johnny had never heard of 'fantasy football,'" Dan Grogan says. "He didn't know if it was something X-rated."

But after all the copies sold out in a few hours, Dan and Kelly realized they were onto something. They printed more booklets and drove around the city looking for softball fields where they figured male jocks would be likely patrons. They hand-delivered copies to customers' homes. By the end of the first year, after...