A football fantasy comes true.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Sports Biz - DAN Grogan

WHEN WE LAST VISITED WITH LITTLETON PUBLISHER DAN Grogan, it was on the eve of the late summer ritual that consumes millions of otherwise well-balanced individuals: the fantasy football draft.

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Between fielding phone calls from readers who wanted Grogan's take on hot prospects, Grogan and his brother Kelly told stories about how they transformed a makeshift fantasy football "tip sheet"--printed up from typewritten notes and copied on a Xerox machine--into a full-time job publishing an annual magazine and a companion website.

Twenty-one years alter starting Grogan Sports, the brothers consummated a fantasy of another sort: Earlier this year, they accepted a buyout offer from Nashville sports publisher Athlon Sports Inc. The Grogans' annual fantasy-football draft guide that hit the newsstands last month is headlined with the Athlon name, with "Grogan" appearing in a more subdued typeface.

Second-billing is the price of the deal for the Grogans, who continue to write the magazine and produce content for Athlon's Grogansports.com. But after more than 20 years of running the numbers on NFL players and making studied projections about fantasy-league performance, Dan Grogan still loves what he does for a living. Ask him for a couple of "sleeper" prospects for the upcoming NFL season and he's on the case immediately, launching a quick dossier on a handful of unheralded players he thinks are worth a mid-round selection. (As a public service, I'll share one: Minnesota Vikings running back Chester Taylor The rest I'm keeping to myself.)

Grogan won't say how much he and his brother got for selling their sports information business other than to remark, "It's not enough to retire on, and anyway I'm not ready to retire."

But the fact that Grogan Sports was able to attract an offer from a national publisher is a sign of how far the enterprise has come.

The Grogans came close to calling it quits after just a few years when a magazine distributor stiffed the brothers on their share of revenues from newsstand sales. But they kept at it, cultivating a cultish following among fantasy football zealots.

Athlon Sports, which publishes a variety of sports magazines, liked the Grogan Sports business because it gave the privately held publisher instant presence and credibility in the fantasy sports market, which attracts 15 million participants a year, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.

DENVER'S SPORTING CHANCE

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