2.  Heather Lueke Smith practiced law in the Florida justice
system for almost a decade before she went into private
practice. Since starting her own firm, she has
concentrated on construction disputes as well as city and
county government law. Outside of the office, Heather
Lueke Smith enjoys a broad range of hobbies and
recreational activities. Every year, she participates in a
fantasy football league.
Fantasy football is a statistics-driven competition that
allows any and every football fan to take control of a
team and match wits with others by virtual head-to-head
competition. Developed in 1962 for sports journalists and
other football insiders, the game “went public” in 1969
when one of the original players introduced it in an
Oakland tavern he owned.

3.  It caught on, but didn’t really take off because
it was so labor-intensive. Every week, every
player’s performance statistics had to be
transcribed by hand from newspapers into an
analog, handwritten spreadsheet. In addition,
because fantasy football results were based on
real players’ actual performance, players
would scour the papers every day looking for
any news that might be meaningful regarding
their players’ health and probable
performance in next weekend’s games.
Fantasy football’s adherents were committed,
but most football fans simply didn’t have the
time to invest.

4.  Fantasy football’s popularity started soaring in the
1990s, and it’s estimated that something like 28 million
fans (6.5 million of whom were women) played during
the 2013 season, making fantasy football a multi-million-
dollar industry. The game’s success, though,
isn’t due to any ingenious marketing campaign, or a
slow but steady word-of-mouth effort to bring it into
American households. Fantasy football owes its
contemporary success strictly to the development of
computers as a tool of personal convenience and
productivity, the introduction of the 24-hour news
cycle, and especially the Internet, where websites
devoted to fantasy football spring up daily and help
generate the never-ending stream of statistics that it
and its fans depend on for survival.