On a rainy November night in Manhattan in 1962, Fantasy Football had a very humble beginning.

In the early years of the American Football League, the Raiders took a two-week swing through the East, during which they played the Buffalo Bills, New York Titans (who became the Jets in 1963) and the Boston (now New England) Patriots. To save money, they stayed in the East for that period, instead of flying back to Oakland after each game.

So one night in '62 Raiders limited partner Bill Winkenbach, Oakland Tribune beat writer Scotty Stirling and Raiders public relations man Bill Tunnell sat in a New York hotel room and planned the scheme that would form the basis for Fantasy Football .

"It was really Wink who came up with the idea," said Stirling, now head of college scouting for the Sacramento Kings. "He was an amazing guy, very smart, who had made a lot of really good business investments. He loved playing with different ideas."

Winkenbach, who died several years ago, also came up with the whimsical name for the game: Greater Oakland Pigskin Prognosticators League (GOPPL).

"We basically put the thing together there and brought it home the next day," Stirling said.

As soon as they returned, Winkenbach enlisted the aid of Tribune sports editor George Ross, who is retired and living in the Sierra Nevada area in the small Plumas County town of Graeagle.

"Wink had played around with a fantasy baseball concept in the '50s and we had talked about it, so I was familiar with the idea," Ross said. "I could see right away that it would be easy to set up and something everybody would enjoy."

At the beginning, the only players were members of the Tribune staff and people connected with the Raiders.

"One of the reasons I liked it was that it forced the reporters who were involved to follow the whole league, not just the Raiders," Ross said, "so they wrote better stories."

The rules were similar to today's games -- drafting players whose statistical success determines the payoffs -- but the money involved was not. A participant earned just 25 cents for a passing touchdown, for instance, and the only "big money" payoffs were $2.50 for kickoffs returned for touchdowns and a whopping $5 for a touchdown by a defensive lineman.

There were eight club owners for the first year, including Winkenbach, Ross, Stirling and Tunnell. The commissioner was a local high school teacher, Tom Crawford. Bill Downing, one of the original owners, was the second commissioner.

Teams had to choose four receivers, four halfbacks, two fullbacks, two quarterbacks, two kick returners, two placekickers, two defensive backs or linebackers and two defensive linemen.

The first player chosen was Houston quarterback George Blanda, for a logical reason: Blanda threw at least 40 passes a game and a fair percentage of them went for touchdowns. Blanda still holds club records for the Oilers/Titans with 68 passes in a 1964 game against Buffalo and 36 touchdown passes in the 1961 season.

Research for the drafts was very primitive, with little of the information that is available today. The basic information was supplied by the Street and Smith yearbooks, but that information was all from the previous season. Even when a midseason draft was added in the '70s, information was sketchy.

"I remember one year one club drafted a tight end, J.V. Cain, who was playing for the Cardinals -- but he had died some weeks before," said Andy Mousalimas, longtime owner of the Kings X sports bar in Oakland and a club owner that first year. (Cain had a fatal heart attack in training camp on July 22, 1979).

The first few drafts were held in Winkenbach's rumpus room, after which the team owners would go to dinner at an Oakland restaurant.

"We had fun with it," Stirling said. "Wink had a wood lathe in his basement and he carved a figure of a football with a dunce cap on it. The loser each year would get that and he had to display it prominently in his house. If one of us visited him and he didn't have it out, he could be fined."

Mousalimas opened the Kings X in November 1968, and the next year the draft was held in his bar. He also started sports trivia contests to bring in more business.

"I think that's what really started the spread of the game," Stirling said. "A lot of guys came over from San Francisco to play our game and the trivia contests, and pretty soon, San Francisco bars had their own leagues."

The game, under different names, soon spread across the country. "I heard later that the guys in New York who started the Rotisserie League claimed they were the first," Stirling said, "but they weren't. We were."

"Scotty and I used to talk about maybe taking this idea to a game company and trying to sell it," Ross said, "but we never did. I don't know how much money we would have made, but before we could do anything, it seemed everybody was playing it."

Even in Oakland, there were multiple leagues. Upset when Mousalimas suggested some rules changes, Winkenbach split with him, and Mousalimas started his own Kings X League. Tribune employees also started their own league.

Now, of course, the game is huge nationwide. All football publications include sections on Fantasy Football, there are entire magazines devoted to it and even some TV stations show stats for Fantasy League players. Mousalimas was invited to a Fantasy Football convention in Las Vegas two years ago by Emil Kladec, a publisher of one of the magazines.

"He had reserved 500 rooms at the MGM Grand," Mousalimas said. "I said to him, 'Are you crazy?' He said, 'There are 2-3 million playing this game. Do you think I can't get 500 of them to come here?' Of course, he filled them all. "