I didn’t care about sports for a long time.
When I was a kid, they were a big deal. The Leafs never won anything, but the fact that they were this entity for which a whole city would unquestionably band together convinced me they were something special. I got to watch the Blue Jays win two World Series — back-to-back, no less — before I was 10 years old. I was young enough when the Raptors came to town that it didn’t occur to me why such a name would seem silly a few years down the line. The Argos … well, the CFL was always bullshit.
Like every other kid whose parents relied on external forces to keep them busy during the summer, I played soccer for a few years. I was slow with a weak kick, and ended up spending most of my time in goal, fielding meteorites from adolescent Italians with full beards and girls who had more use for jockstraps than I did.
But baseball was my real love. Getting to play little league was a revelation, and things got off to a momentous start — I hit an inside-the-park home run on my first at-bat. Fuck and yes. I was eight feet tall. I wore my cock as a tie and a belt. My coach moved me up in the order to bat clean-up after that, where I stayed for approximately three seconds before remembering I was an under-developed 12-year-old and proceeded to get about one hit for the rest of the season. I did, however, get beaned by an inordinate amount of pitches. I played first base because my coach thought we needed a lefty there … even though I was clearly right-handed. I guess he noticed I batted left, and that was all the evidence he required. (Apparently, there wasn’t too rigid a screening process for little league coaches in those days.)
Then I hit high school and the shit didn’t matter. All my friends started playing rugby and generally excelling at sports, and I started hanging out with goths and made a series of questionable romantic decisions. They all got into tremendous shape and played in tournaments across Europe, and I started piercing my face and smoking heavily. (At the time, it didn’t occur to me that these activities needn’t have been mutually exclusive.) “No guys, that’s fine — you can run around a dewy track at dawn all you please; my Marilyn Manson records aren’t going to listen to themselves, though.”
It was a holding pattern of sorts. The Jays, best as I could tell, were mired in obscurity; hockey was expanding to the point of tedium (Columbus? Really?); and who gave a shit about basketball. Then, a couple years out of high school, somebody, for some reason, sent me an article by Bill Simmons, and with it, a sea change.
It wasn’t even the shock that sports could be funny as much as the realization that sports were funny. The subtext and subplots were there all along, but as far as I could tell, nobody ever wrote about this stuff in a way that wasn’t clinical at best. (Again, I grew up in Canada and, as such, missed out on the Olbermann/Patrick era of SportsCenter.) All of a sudden, I felt like I’d been missing out on something absolutely vital for years.
So I read Simmons and, when I started my first writing job (not sports related), I pretty shamelessly emulated him at times (though I’m by no means a disciple of the Sports Guy). The idea of being able to write about something that prospective readers may not give two wooden fucks about in a way that would make them want to read on regardless seemed like a worthwhile goal. Through osmosis I eventually found Deadspin, and with it the rest of the sports blogosphere, and my Interwebbing hasn’t been the same since.
This is the most excited I’ve been about sports since hitting that inside-the-park home run. This Kissing Suzy Kolber post explains why better than I probably could, so to quote Big Daddy Drew:
Suddenly, a door had opened … sites (sprung) up seemingly overnight, awash in new ideas and the kind of crass, juvenile humor I will never tire of. It’s like walking into the world’s greatest sports bar, and everyone there has a seat open for you at their table. And they all know Simpsons quotes! And they can swear! Tremendous! … I used to think blogs were for droning diarists and annoying political commentators. I don’t anymore. There are some genuinely talented people getting together, sharing ideas and inspiring one another on these sites. In turn, it’s causing more and more people to come out of the woodwork and try it themselves.
And that’s why I’m here — sites like Deadspin, Kissing Suzy Kolber, The Mighty MJD and The Basketball Jones — these people who make traditional sports writers seem borderline useless; who make sports more interesting than I think most of us ever imagined they could be. I never thought reading about basketball would be as fascinating as Free Darko makes it, nor did I ever think I’d habitually make an absolute jackass of myself at work and school by laughing like an idiot at baseball (see: The Dugout).
Don’t get me wrong — I am not in the league of any of these people. Not even a little. Hence, The Nitwit Scene. I’ve never written about sports in any meaningful capacity, so this is by all means an experiment. I’m not sure what I have to offer the blogosphere. If I’m just taking up space, I’ll be happy to retreat to my other home. Initially, I thought this may be somewhat Toronto-centric, but I’ve found that I’m not always able to write about local sports with anything resembling rationality. So that may not be the case, after all.
And that’s it, really. I have no expectations for this. There is surely no shortage of terrible blogs on the Internet, and I’d rather not contribute to that teeming mass. So, if at any point it smells like Najeh Davenport’s been here, for the love of God, let me know.
