Ten years ago Thursday, near as I can tell, two very important things happened in the world of sports.
1. Roger Goodell began his reign as commissioner of the NFL.
2. The Post launched this blog, calling it the D.C. Sports Bog, a last-minute name that no one put much thought into.
These events converged just once, I believe, when — for inexplicable reasons — I asked Roger Goodell to describe the last time he said “Hip Hip Hooray.” Those were simpler times. For both of us.
The 10-year anniversary, though, has prompted me to think a bit about what things were like 10 years ago, and what they’re like now. It hasn’t prompted deep thoughts, really, because I don’t specialize in those. But here are 10 thoughts.
1) This blog wasn’t really about sports
Well, it wasn’t about games, anyhow. Back then, a huge part of what we at The Post did was still writing and reporting on the results of games. I remember a staff-wide meeting in probably 2003 or 2004 in which I argued that we should just stop doing game stories, that everyone who cared already knew the results, that none of my friends subscribed to newspapers and that they never would if we were offering game stories. I think I got emotional and almost cried. It was odd.
The blog was supposed to be more conversational and less formal, more about random things that happened and less about things you could watch for yourself on TV. I didn’t want to write about injuries, or defensive strategies. I didn’t even really want to write about sports. (That has since changed.) But if I was at a Wizards practice and something goofy happened — which was every Wizards practice back then — I wanted to write it up immediately, complete with horrible blurry photos and way too much first-person. I wanted to write about fans, the things they experienced and the things that mattered to them. I wanted to throw pumpkins off the roof of RFK Stadium with Alecko Eskandarian. (We did.) I wanted to make people smile, if you can believe that.
This seems impossibly trite now. Very little popular sports Internet content involves a score. Bill Simmons is one of the kings of online sports. Everyone wants viral content, and a game story isn’t going viral (although neither is a Wizards practice, sadly). All our beat writers are constantly providing terrific off-the-field updates, with more context and expertise than anyone else could manage. And every quirky moment in a game instantly lands on social media. In some ways, those changes have made the idea of the Bog obsolete.
2) I didn’t want to have takes
If there was one conviction that linked that early generation of sports bloggers, I think it was this: that sports were supposed to be fun, and that old men yelling angrily about decorum or unwritten rules or improper behavior was definitely not fun. This has long since changed; the sports Internet now has more crazily shouted opinions than newspapers ever did. There is judgment everywhere. Takes — or takes on takes — are once again gold.
But back then, it seemed like there were a bunch of youngish non-traditional writers who mostly wanted to use sports as entertainment and escapism, and who wanted to avoid what we saw in many newspapers and magazines: Serious Sports People who knew How Things Should Be and who were anxious to instruct the world.
Now I’m a “columnist,” theoretically. If you’ve ever read my wishy-washy thoughts and wondered “why doesn’t he just have a damn opinion,” this might be why. I’m still suspicious of certainty.
Gilbert Arenas rehabs his surgically repaired knee during the 2007 offseason at Cardozo High in the District.
3) The Bog stumbled into the Internet at the perfect time
This wasn’t The Post’s first blog. It wasn’t even The Post’s first sports blog — Redskins Insider had launched, under Jason La Canfora and Cindy Boren’s guidance, a couple of weeks earlier. And Caps Insider and Wizards Insider came a couple weeks later. (I can’t remember when Nats Journal started?) But I think I was the first Post employee — or one of them, anyhow — whose entire job was to feed content to the Internet. (WashingtonPost.com was then still a separate entity.)
And I saw myself as less of a journalist and more of a blogger, whatever that meant. Deadspin and the Big Lead were already taking off, and all the cool kids were reading Free Darko and Can’t Stop the Bleeding, and new sports blogs were popping up daily. The Wizznutzz had a cult following, and just about every Nats fan was running a Nats blog.
Newspapers, though, seemed slow to catch on, or at least slow to consider themselves peers with the online crew. There was still some us-against-themism. But I figured everyone who was writing about Washington sports was kind of my colleague, and the illusion that any of this was different or innovative helped.
4) The Bog stumbled into the Internet in the perfect city
We had Clinton Portis and Alex Ovechkin and Gilbert Arenas, who back then were among the quirkiest high-level athletes in the country. Arenas was especially important — by far the most exposure the Bog got in its first few months were thanks to his constant exploits. He oozed Internet content.
Fans were already calling him Agent Zero by October 2006 — my second month blogging — but he seemed not to have heard of the name. At that point, he planned on calling himself “The Stealth.” So I told him about Agent Zero.
“Ooooh, I like that, I like that, I like that, I like that,” he said. Then he said he should have named his new shoes the Agent Zeros.
When we launched the Bog, it was as a one-year trial, which had required approval from The Post’s publisher, since no Post staff writers had previously devoted themselves entirely to the Internet. (That’s what I was told, anyhow.) I don’t know if it would have lasted without Arenas. No one around the country cared when I was writing about American University basketball or D.C. media members singing karaoke or message boards. They cared about Gilbert.
5) But that’s not the only reason it was the perfect city
It really did feel like every D.C. sports fan back then ran a sports blog. That meant that there was some kind of validation for them when The Post jumped on board, and a willingness to support something new.
And then, for whatever reason, there were the nationally known sports bloggers who lived here or grew up here: Drew Magary and Jack Kogod and Mike Tunison from Kissing Suzy Kolber, and Dan Shanoff from ESPN, and Jamie and Chris Mottram who helped build the sports Internet, and dozens of others. (Lot of 20- and 30-something white dudes, if I’m being honest.) SB Nation wound up setting up shop in D.C. We had dumb sports blogger happy hours. We all shared each others’ work.
And so people with Internet cachet wound up promoting The Post’s sports blogs. That wouldn’t have happened if I was blogging about, say, Phoenix sports.
6) Web traffic was not easily available
I saw my traffic a few times in the first year. (It was always bad.) But there was a freedom in not knowing that is impossible to maintain when you know.
That’s why I spent an entire day at a polo event in Loudoun County and wrote 1,300 excruciatingly boring words about it. (Although this did allow me to meet the Salahis before they became famous.) I took fancy beer and cheese to a NASCAR tailgate in Richmond and made strangers taste them. (I just looked at my notes. “It’s almost like a diesel fuel taste to it,” one person said. “This [expletive] tastes like breast milk,” someone else said. “Does it have hallucinogenics in it?” another asked.)
I didn’t have many big ideas back then, and most of the ones I had were wrong. My first typed-out proposal suggested that the Bog should never even mention the Redskins, since the team was so over-covered, and argued instead for intensive coverage of the then-terrible Capitals. Eastern Europeans, I wrote, were hilarious. I’m sure everyone was clamoring for more Jiri Novotny Web coverage.
We should be happy to have such great analytical tools now, to be able to know what readers want and to give it to them. But just about every idea for a blog item now comes with the question: Will anyone click on that? Sometimes you miss those more ignorant times.
7) It was the Wild West
There were no editors. I mean, there were editors, but they didn’t even look at my stuff before it was published. I took images that didn’t belong to us off the Internet and used them. (Don’t tell anyone.) I wrote mean things about Tony Kornheiser. I flirted with profanity.
And since I was convinced I was going to fail, I promoted my own stuff constantly. I e-mailed links to every random sports blogger I could find. I printed up little pieces of paper with the Bog URL and handed them to strangers. I asked if any readers would go watch random local college basketball games with me, just so I could convince myself that there actually were readers out there.
Eventually, I started a poll in which random readers voted for the best local college basketball teams. This was also done to prove to me that live human beings were aware of this blog’s existence. One of the early voters was Scott Allen. He’s now a full-time writer here. And we have an entire blog pod, with close to a dozen employees. All of us focus all day long on creating content just for the Web, which The Post’s social-media crew then promote all over the Internet. That’s kind of a big change.
8) I only wanted to write about D.C. sports
I had friends who told me the way to grow this thing was to write about national sports. Why would you court only Wizards fans, if you could also court Yankees and Cowboys and Lakers fans? Why would you ignore the sexiest headlines in favor of something about Brooks Laich?
They were right. I put a lid on the possibilities of this thing by refusing to expand beyond Washington. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how many millions of readers our Olympics coverage attracted this summer. Meanwhile, this blog was covering offseason stories about an NBA team with a tiny fan base, plus the most boring Redskins training camp in a generation.
9) I’m kinda glad I did
I think it’s hard for many transplants to get a sense of living in this place. It’s a combination of the transience, the two states (and a District), the weird demographics, the uncertainty of how long you’re going to stay here, the persistent perception that “Washington” is more a distant and evil capital than a real place for real people to live.
Following Washington sports teams, though, is the single thing that has most made me feel at home. It’s let me meet hundreds and hundreds of you who are from here, and do care about these teams. (Including my wife, as it turns out!) It’s opened up the actual innards of this place to me — more than anything else, anyhow.
I’m not a fan of local teams, for professional reasons, but there’s something inside me that feels good when I’m out of town and I see a Caps shirt, or a Nats hat, or a John Wall jersey, or even Redskins gear. (That one took the longest, probably.) And the fact that so many people use Washington sports fans as a punching bag has only made that feeling stronger. This blog has always had a silly provincialism and a homerish tint, which probably isn’t befitting an international newspaper. But working on this blog is what made me love living in Washington.
That’s not really much of an observation about sports blogging. But I think it says something about sports.
(I wanted to get to 10, but this is already way too long. So here’s a 10th: thanks for keeping me employed, anyone who’s read this blog. You’ve all changed my life.)
(Bleh. Genuine emotions give me hives.)
