As August quickly approaches and NFL teams arrive at training camp in rapid succession, the fantasy industry moves closer to its annual fever pitch.

No matter which fantasy sport you might prefer or target with your website, football is the indisputable king. About two-thirds of fantasy players enter the market via football, and about 90 percent of fantasy players surveyed by Dr. Kim Beason last year play football.

As we all get ready for our fantasy drafts, though, it’s worth taking a little time out to look at how we got to this point - where fantasy came from and how it became such a phenomenon.

It’s such a worthwhile sports topic, in fact, that the germination of fantasy sports served as the subject for one of ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentaries back in April. Unfortunately, the film’s creators came up well short in telling the real background story on fantasy sports, as we pointed out on this site after viewing the product.

We bring it back up now, though, because the fact is that the creators didn’t simply miss part of the story, they ignored the part that made a lie of the movie broadcast by The Worldwide Leader.

It would be a bit more understandable if Lucas Jensen and Adam Kurland simply failed to realize the history of fantasy before Daniel Okrent and La Rotisserie. After all, the homepage for “Silly Little Game” reads: “For all this success, the story of the game’s inception is little known. The modern fantasy leagues can be traced back to a group of writers and academics who met at La Rotisserie Francaise in New York City to form a baseball league of their own: The Rotisserie League.”

The real story of fantasy’s birth — the one that begins in the early 1960s with a group of sports lovers and professionals from Oakland, Calif. — already lives on the Web. It would have taken nothing more than a little Googling if Kurland and Jensen didn’t know about Bill Winkenbach. The thing is, they did know.

During the months of researching and filming “Silly Little Game,” Jensen actually took a crew out to Oakland and interviewed Andy Mousalimas, a manager of one of the GOPPPL’s original eight teams, as well as some of his fellow players from the Kings X leagues that began in the late ’60s.

“The film crew not only talked to me, but they filmed and interviewed four Kings X Fantasy Football charter members, including me,” Mousalimas told FSB.com recently. “Later the film crew joined us at the Grand Oaks Restaurant where we held the 42nd Kings Draft; 2009 was my 47th year of F.F. draft. The owner of the restaurant — albeit not a sports fan — was kind to spruce up his banquet room for the draft and the filming.”

Of course, for whatever reason, none of that footage made it into the documentary, nor did any mention of the West Coast games that got this whole phenomenon started. We’ll try to find out from the folks involved why they chose to ignore the history they’d learned, but the key point is that they did.

As we’ve said here before, Okrent and his leaguemates deserve credit for helping to publicize fantasy baseball, a big step toward delivering the pastime to the masses that now play it. At the same time, if you want to feel sorry for someone for not cashing in on the fantasy boom, start at the beginning.

We’re not looking to breed sympathy here, though, we’re just looking to tell the real story. That’s what we’ll be doing at FantasySportsBusiness.com over the next few weeks leading up to the NFL season. We’ll look back to the real beginning of fantasy sports and attempt to give credit to the pioneers of the games that launched our industry.

If you have any information, people or anecdotes that you want to make sure we don’t leave out, please feel free to let us know.

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– Nando Di Fino of The Wall Street Journal recently took a look at the allure of World Cup fantasy games for several companies, beginning with the official FIFA game sponsored by McDonald’s. Unfortunately, he also followed the false step of ESPN’s “Silly Little Game” in crediting Daniel Okrent with inventing fantasy sports. If the creator of Rotisserie scoring is bitter about the money being made off “his” game, just imagine how it feels to have been playing fantasy sports in the 1960s and then see various national media giving credit to a bunch of folks young enough to be your children.

– Middle Eastern firm Quirkat is supporting a Facebook app that presents World Cup fantasy “football” in three languages: Arabic, English and French.

– Fantazzle has struck a deal via Curv Sports to add Ravens running back Ray Rice as a sponsor for some of its games.

– Bloomberg Sports recently launched an iPhone app to provide its analytical baseball product to mobile users.

– Plenty of outlets have their fantasy offering for the World Cup, but the site launched by ad agency Host presents something different: A game that awards dirty play. Top scores will be achieved by “moments of utter filth, times of unforeseeable but creative cheating.”

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).

Being on the road for a week and a half after a film premiere doesn’t help much with providing a timely review, but the benefit of time is that we had a chance to see how others reacted to ESPN’s Silly Little Game.

By and large, the reaction seemed to be positive. Most reviewers seemed entertained by the reenactments that made up a large portion of the hourlong documentary and praised the filmmakers for spicing up a potentially boring subject. We tend to think, however, that Silly Little Game relied a bit too heavily on the silly and should have pushed itself to get a little bigger.

FSB.com disagrees with this heavy-handed day-after review from The Big Lead, whose writer acts offended at the blatantly whimsical sketches that accompanied the remembrances of original Rotisserie league members. The actors went obviously and purposefully over the top in sticking with the theme of silliness amid a set of games that have grown into serious business. We did find, however, that the silliness got a bit excessive at times.

At the heart of the film is the story of Daniel Okrent and his fellow roto founders. It is fun and interesting to hear their recollections of the early days of fantasy — how they got consumed the way so many of us tend to — and it’s undeniably unfortunate that they missed out on the “money train” that their league helped set into motion. Does it take a whole hour of flying graphics and Yoohoo-soaked actors to convey that, though?

“Money train” probably isn’t even a fair term, as it might imply that fantasy entrepreneurs have simply landed in a pot of gold. In reality, those who have found success in fantasy sports have done so by working long hours and often building operations from scratch at great personal financial risk. And the billions of dollars discussed in framing the industry’s impact might give some the wrong idea about its actual size beyond operators Yahoo!, ESPN and CBS Sports. It’s easy for the Rotisserie leaguers to look back and think about the money they missed out on, but would they have been willing to invest the time, work and dollars to realize that result?

The film made relatively passing mentions of the industry that has grown from fantasy’s founding, but it would have done well to switch over at some point and tell us more about how that growth took place. After all, it’s likely that most of the Silly Little Game audience came in at least passably familiar with the Rotisserie story. How many casual fantasy players who might let a baseball team go dead once they fall out of contention in August will devote an hour to a documentary about some 1980s New York magazine editors? How many devoted fantasy players did, for that matter?

The film makes a point to show us Meat Loaf (owner of 60-plus fantasy teams in multiple sports) near the end and focus on his complete indifference for fantasy’s origins.

Additionally, although the Rotisserie founders deserve plenty of credit, the film seems to focus completely on them as the gods that delivered fantasy. What about the GOPPPL, which was playing a form of fantasy football way back in 1962? Anyone that knows this industry knows that Okrent and crew did not invent fantasy sports. They gave it a nice boost, and we salute them, but a documentary like this can re-write history when it shouldn’t be re-written.

It was fun to hear the founding fantasy baseball players talk about how they had no idea what they were doing at their first draft, and even to see goofball “dramatizations” of the Rotisserie timeline. Ultimately, however, we’d sum up Silly Little Game in these three words: entertaining but disappointing.

A roundup of items recently posted on the FSB News page.

– Craigslist is displaying an ad for a six-figure position to lead fantasy games development for a new company, apparently based in Manhattan. The startup is looking for someone with plenty of gaming experience to serve as “Chief Games Development Officer.”

– Tuesday marked 30 years since Daniel Okrent gathered a group of friends/colleagues in a French restaurant in New York and created Rotisserie baseball. To celebrate the anniversary, ESPN’s Nate Ravitz and Tristan Cockcroft put together a cool retrospective — with links to other material that’s part of the ‘Silly Little Game’ project.

– 14-year-old Matthew Berry = Napoleon Dynamite?

– Fantazzle has launched a salary-cap fantasy game for the NBA playoffs, which open on Saturday.

– The World Championship of Fantasy Football announced Monday that Chicago will join the list of locations hosting main-event drafts. The events will take place Sept. 10 and 11, with Atlantic City, Orlando and Las Vegas also playing host.

– Ever wondered how your favorite personal-finance bloggers might fare against each other in a fantasy baseball league? You haven’t? Oh, well, they’re taking each other on anyway, with $100 going to the chosen charity of the winner.

Send all of your news, job postings, stories and profile ideas to FantasySportsBusiness@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter (FSBcom).