Then, luckily for me, my father (Dr. Michael A. Jenike, M.D.) was offerred a FREE Prodigy Account. The reason was that Prodigy had these bulletin boards and one of them was for Medical Services. Pops happened to be the daddy Mac of treating the disease Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and a lot of people wanted to ask questions about that at the time. So all dad had to do was frequest the Medical Services BB and respond to posts directed at him, plus answer any e-mails Prodigy subscribers had and he would be rewarded with a FREE PRODIGY CLASSIC ACCOUNT. This was gold at the time. Prodigy had just passed Compuserve in the last year as the world's #1 Internet Service Provider. In those days. you subscribed to Prodigy for $20 per month and got 20 hours, then had to pay an addition $2 for every hour after twenty! Not to mention you had a 14.4k modem! I immediatly found the Basketball Bulletin Board and joined a Fantasy Basketball League. I figured my free Prodigy would make up for my age difference and allow me to be competetive (a 12yr old with no fantasy experience but with unlimited on-line time should be able to compete with a high school or college student who has only twenty hours but has been in leagues for years.
The first league I ever joined was a SIM called NBA run by an evil dictator named Chris Woods. He told me that the stats for the league were avaliable on ESPNNET (which was ESPN's official URL back in the day). He also gave me the worst team in the league (my best players were Anthoney Mason and Chris Mills in a league with over 20 GMs). So I went there and made a trade based on the stats that were there. Woods visciously denied my trade saying that I was incompetent to run a team. He failed to notice that a NEW NBA SEASON had started and the previous season's stats, which the league was using were long gone, replaced by the current season's stats. When I pointed out the fact that he told me to use stats on ESPNNET (never mentioning that it was LAST YEAR'S STATS) and that the trade with those stats would've indeed made the trade work out in my favor, he became increasingly more bitchy.
Soon after that, a brilliant individual named Edgar Binoya took me under his wing and showed me the Fantasy Ropes. Edgar himself ran a fantasy League, only his was the traditional Rotisserre-style league (you know, a league that uses real NBA stats from game to game). Edgar told me the history of Fantasy Basketball
Anyways, I was under the impression that NBA was the big thing on Prodigy. This is not the case as another Rotisserre League called CHAMP had been around much longer. It was started by Fantasy Basketball Legend Alan Nelson. Nelson used to make potential GMs go through CHAMP Bootcamp, a rigorious training session to see if they were indeed qualified to run a team in CHAMP. Nelson was not a popular guy, but his league was top-notch. By the time I got on Prodigy, Nelson had left Prodigy for personal reasons, and the league was run by a bunch of former CHAMP GMs who still wanted to participate.
I finished my first season in the NBA finishing in last place, but my team showed slight improvements as the season went on. I was optimistic about my future in Fantasy Basketball. I enjoyed Fantasy Basketball much more than I enjoyed school so I started putting a lot more time into the leagues than I did to my school work. It was the best thing I ever did.
Chris Woods won the championship in the NBA's final year. Chris was a party animal living with his girlfriend and decided that he could no longer run the NBA. We had around 25 GMs for NBA and all of us were very into fantasy
Until, right when the league was SUPPOSED to start, Rob Licht dissapeared! Once again, we were saved. Steve Riffel, GM of the ABL's Anchorage Avalanche stepped up and said that he could run the league. Steve had been on the Fantasy Basketball BB for as long as anybody. Steve was the perfect choice because he spent a lot of time on-line, talked to people on Instant Messages, and was opinioned and dedicated enough to run a successful league. Although Edgar was the one who showed me how to make a Fantasy Basketball draft list and got me into Conan O'Brien, it was Steve who opened me up to new worldviews, got me back into Nine Inch Nails, and ran the best damn SIM basketball league in the world, bar none.
These leagues were run on Thomas Mink's REPLAY PROFFESIONAL BASKETBALL SIMULATOR. It was a text-only SIM that took into account almost all stats. Another league that had success was Edgar Binoya's "E". RBA ended up being the best SIM league of all-time. We had GMs carry over from the NBA such as Brian Mitchell, John "JB" Boyer, Edgar Binoya, Chris Woods, Evan Lederman, Rick Khanna, Mike Harenza, Dan Winans, and George Walden. Obviously Steve Riffel and myself carried over as well.
I ended up becoming co-commish of the RBA. Steve did all the work and all credit goes to him: simming games, posting boxscores and league leaders, and entering the results of the draft onto the SIM. All I did was take advantage of my free Prodigy to find new GMs to replace inactive ones and confirm or deny the occasional trade.
RBA lasted for six season between 1995 and 1999. It is possible to do SIM leagues during the off-season, so that is how we fit six seasons into four years. Commishiners like Riffel and Binoya worked year-round for free for years and as a result are members of the RBA Hall of Fame (as voted by RBA GMs). RBA is fairly old now that we think about it. Prodigy went out of business in 1999 thanks to AOL. People like myself and Steve bitter over the genocide of our beautiful on-line community have not began using AOL services again until fairly recently. During this time, nobody we know has participated in SIM Fantasy Basketball Leagues. I have participated in one Rotisserre League, and I won it by beating Matt Withington, Alex Byrne, and Peter An in a Sandbox league.