zlionsfan
Name: Dave
Age: 36
Status: single (and likely to be for some time, thanks to this site)
Occupation: programmer/analyst
State of residence: Indiana
College: Purdue University
Grew up: Michigan, Indiana
WIS screen name: way back in the early days of playing QB1, you choose a six-letter nickname for each team, so I used Lions and Fan. When I joined AOL, someone already had LionsFan (shocker), and ALionsFan ... so I skipped ahead and chose ZLionsFan. I've used it ever since ...
Favorite NBA player: for overall performance, Joe Dumars, colored by his GM performance and the fact that Isiah has ruined everything he's touched since he retired. My true favorite is probably Kurt Rambis. Yes, really. The reason is that when I played pickup games, my game consisted of occasional rebounding, tough play, and, well, I wore glasses. My friends made the connection.
Favorite WIS moment: My first World Series win. In basketball, my first (and currently only) series win ...
Sports memories: Seeing Mark Fidrych pitch in Tiger Stadium in '76 ... seeing Nolan Ryan pitch in old Comiskey for the Rangers ... seeing a game at Wrigley in August when it was about 40 degrees in the bleachers ... attending a Purdue-IU basketball game in Assembly Hall in '85, cheering with the crowd when Knight threw one of his tantrums, and just seeing, out of the corner of my eye, an object scooting across the court ... getting two tickets in the lottery for the '91 Final Four in Indianapolis, getting an offer of $1000 per ticket when IU was in the regional semis, settling for $400 total after Kansas knocked them out ... watching the Pistons through the playoffs and hearing other people around here actually rooting for my team ... holding season tickets to the Detroit Lions in '98 and being surrounded by people all rooting for my team.
It was only a matter of time before I got hooked on this. The earliest sims I had were APBA football (board game, not PC) with I think the '81 season included, a game for the Apple that I can't remember, and an old version of APBA Baseball for the IBM PC - I loved the newer version with Ernie Harwell doing the play-by-play. I played all kinds of video games - Intellivision was the first set with real sports game, the 2600 games just weren't "realistic" enough. Got into more in-depth games, EA games mostly (still play the NCAA football, but would recommend NFL2K5 this year), and a lot of fantasy games, mostly at ESPN.com. Stumbled across WIS for the SimMatchup, actually, fell into baseball first, and that was that. I'm not yet heavily into basketball, but Dave keeps coming up with league ideas that I like.
It's ironic ... in real life, I follow the NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA, about in that order. On the site, it's almost exactly the opposite ... haven't yet got the hang of hockey, and the football engine is impossible, but I like baseball, and I'm slowly learning basketball ...
Later adding:
Wow, I had forgotten about this ... the first basketball game I owned was a board game called Pro Basketball. It came in a tall, rectangular box ... I was 5 or 6 when I got it, so I don't remember too many of the details. All I know is that they had one for every sport, I think, and I picked basketball for some reason. It was dice-based, kind of like APBA in concept, but much simpler. You rolled the die, moved a little plastic game piece to different spots on the board, depending on where the charts said the ball was, and marked off time with little tick marks based on shots taken, or something like that. I do remember that I had an epiphany one day ... "offense" and "defense" weren't assigned before the start of the game. I wondered why one team always seemed to score so much more than the other.