MDS is in Bristol for an ESPN Media Workshop. Here's his latest dispatch from behind the cameras of the Worldwide Leader.Within minutes of writing that Matthew Berry is the next star at ESPN, I was besieged with e-mails. Maybe Berry already is a star: People certainly have strong opinions about him.
The most interesting thing I heard in those e-mails is that Berry used to be a writer on Married ... with Children. And since I saw Berry moments after learning that fact, I decided to ask him about it. Berry tells me that Married ... with Children is the reason he's now the face of fantasy sports at the Worldwide Leader.
Berry says he's been playing fantasy games since he was 15 years old, but that it only occurred to him that he could make money off his hobby when he saw a notice that a fantasy sports site was looking for a writer. (He didn't want to name the site, although it's not exactly rocket science to do a Google search and find out where he started.) He e-mailed the editor of the fantasy site, explained that he worked on Married ... with Children (a fact confirmed on his IMDB page) and was told that it was the favorite show of the people who ran the site. He got the job.
But it really wasn't a job, and as recently as 2004, Berry was doing it mostly as a hobby, making $100 a week writing fantasy columns online. Hooking up with ESPN and actually getting to the point where fantasy sports was a better gig than writing the screenplay for Crocodile Dundee in L.A. was a recent development. And a development that never would have happened if he hadn't once written about a high school football star turned women's shoe salesman.
