Consider how retired adult film star Lisa Ann tackled fantasy football — and keeps fielding life’s goals.
She’s Got (Fantasy Football) Game
Sexy and savvy Lisa Ann is indisputably the reigning queen of fantasy football, but it’s a crown the lifelong sports fan has earned through nearly a decade of dedication and hard work. As pro athletes gear up for the gridiron and fantasy players eye their every move, Penthouse talked to expert analyst Lisa Ann about her journey from being one of the biggest names in adult entertainment to her rise to the top of the fantasy football heap — and how her latest career is her most fulfilling yet.
Lisa Ann has proven herself to be the mistress of reinvention. Her first stint as an on-camera talent in the adult industry ended in 1997. But nine years later, she came out of retirement to portray Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin in a string of blockbuster porn parodies, which also sparked a MILF movie revolution.
By 2013, she switched gears to co-host the radio show Stripper Town, where fans would hoodwink call screeners to get on-air and steer the discussion from clubs to Monday Night Football to update her on the games. Her enthusiasm for the sport led to a SiriusXM opportunity — co-hosting a show about fantasy football.
For anyone unfamiliar with the wildly popular pastime, participants create hypothetical rosters from real athletes in the National Football League (NFL) and compete against the dream teams of others within a league to score points based on the performances of their players in real-life NFL games. While some fantasy participants scrimmage for cash prizes, others simply compete for bragging rights with their best buddies.
In the two months before Lisa Ann’s first sports broadcast, the longtime Dallas Cowboys fan gave herself a crash course in fantasy football, reading every book on the subject she could get her hands on and working up countless mock football drafts.
She recalls, “When I got my first one-year [fantasy football radio] contract, my best friend said to me, ‘You can either be a flash in the pan, or you can be so good at this they can’t fire you.’”
Her winning performance kicked off a seven-year stint at Sirius, where she helmed the hugely popular Lisa Ann Does Fantasy. She also competed in the Howard Stern Show’s Emotional Friends league, alongside then-ESPN personality Matthew Berry and War at Home actor Michael Rapaport. But she’s since branched out on her own, leaving Sirius during the pandemic to produce her own content on her social channels — including @thereallisaann on Instagram, where she breaks down the NFL’s divisions and gets into football’s nitty-gritty details with her 4.3 million followers.
“I realized what a great tool social media and YouTube was,” she says. “I thought what if I did Sunday morning start/sits on my YouTube channel and just engaged in a live setting, helping people set their lineups and using my Instagram to do IG Live.”
Since 2015, she’s also engaged in what she’s dubbed Fantasy Football Fridays, where she connects with multiple radio shows from coast to coast — such as Saint Louis’ The Morning After STL (insideSTL.com) and Tampa’s Beckles & Recher on WDAE (953wdae.iheart.com/featured/beckles-recher) — to talk strategy with callers and take deep dives into local teams every week during the season.
When it comes to her own selections, Lisa Ann — who participates in up to 25 leagues annually — says her drafts are all about diversity, which helps her stay up to speed on the NFL’s many players and allows her to offer the most well-rounded advice as she interacts with her audience.
However, her work is more than just a job. She explains, “When I fell into fantasy football, which I call the game inside the game, I realized it was a passion for me.”
She says the sense of community fantasy football engenders and how it strengthens the bonds between friends old and new are some of its greatest joys. But she still works hard to keep her head in the game, devouring ever-evolving news from well before the start of training camp to the last second of the season.
“Starting in July, I up my fantasy football news to between two and four hours a day,” she shares. “By August, I make it five to seven hours a day. And then for the rest of the season, I listen to sports news from eight to 10 hours a day.”
She confides her passion for football fuels her soul and says it adds another facet to her conversations with fans from her porn past, allowing her to interact with them on a new level. But Lisa Ann’s one-woman media empire covers more than just fantasy sports. She keeps her finger on the pulse of popular culture with engaging interviews on her YouTube channel The Real Lisa Ann and podcast The Lisa Ann Experience and discusses dating conundrums and more with special guests — including many of today’s most popular porn stars — on her YouTube channel and podcast Dudes Do Better.
She’s also the author of two memoirs, The Life — which covers her journey in the adult industry — and the recently released The Life Back, which discusses her evolution through fantasy sports and how it put her on a new path.
Lisa Ann admits for the next few months, “Football will run my life — and I will love it!” But she reveals she’s also eager to grow her podcasts because “I love finding interesting conversations to be shared and meeting people.”
Though Lisa Ann no longer shoots scenes for the adult market, she maintains a connection with the industry by going to trade shows to greet fans and mentoring young stars. She also recently shot a groundbreaking sexual wellness campaign for condom brand Durex in Turkey with fellow porn legend Rocco Siffredi. But her leap from X-rated fare to mainstream fame marks one of the most successful career transitions of any adult entertainer.
Lisa Ann managed to avoid the pitfalls which have plagued so many of porn’s most dynamic performers and credits friends with keeping her grounded. The straight-shooting stunner also acknowledges she never allowed her adult career to become her whole identity.
“One of the reasons I was so happy to start Dudes Do Better and to talk to performers who are newer in the industry today is to kind of be a pace car for them,” she shares. “I think they look at me, and they’re like, ‘This is pretty cool. I think her life is OK. She did all of this, too. Let me get to know her. Let me figure out what she did to have this future afterwards.’”
“If I could do that for even just one person that would be the greatest part of my legacy … [To help them understand] if you do things right, your opportunities will be unlimited.”
You can find Lisa Ann as her own web site, by the way. We cannot be sure how many fake Lisa Anns there might be out there, but they’ll have a tough time of it in either the fantasy football or adult film worlds. Because we can, we thought we’d throw in a little more illustration of a woman who also has game – albeit in a different kind of football in this case.
You can read more about Penthouse Pet Savannah Sixx in these very pages, actually. Fair warning, though: You may find yourself not thinking about fantasy football of any kind.
