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Double your fantasy sports fun

By Max Dickstein, amNewYork Sports Editor | amNY Exclusive

September 28, 2007

My friend Ravi Shankar is what you'd call an advanced fantasy mind.

He is not the sitar strummer who charmed the Beatles. He is the fantasy manager who has quite a trophy case.

"Part of the fun of it is that there are all these different approaches from extremely quantitative to extremely qualitative," Ravi says of the joys of fantasy sports, "and I think they can all work."

Ravi, a Tappan Zee native who was a college newspaper colleague of mine, was playing fantasy sports using a Xeroxed grid sheet and the USA Today sports section during 10th grade study hall before I knew what Rotisserie baseball was.

(Note: I still don't know.)

After years of competition against Ravi in the fantasy basketball leagues that he commissions with aplomb, Ravi invited me to make my first foray into fantasy football as his co-manager.

I went for it, hook, line and Shankar. And now we command a juggernaut.

Going into week four, our team, the Shabbat Ballers (Ravi Googled up an image of a football-shaped yarmulke to better brand us), is 3-0, the only undefeated outfit in a 12-team keeper league.

Our greatest coup was picking Randy Moss and Plaxico Burress at Nos. 11 and 14 in our draft. The two have scored 10 touchdowns.

"It's more gratifying to bounce ideas off of a co-manager and arrive at a decision together, especially when it turns out to be a successful one," says Ravi, who lives and works in Los Angeles.

"The successes are sweeter."

Some dual fantasy brain trusts no doubt suffer the sorrows of co-mismanagement, but not ours.

Linked with Ravi, the Vince Lombardi of fantasy football, I can lay claim to the sweet, sweet joys of co-management.