SportsProf's First Anniversary

I normally don't get sentimental about such things, but I realized about a week ago that I have been blogging on sports for about a year. When I started, I got very few hits a day, and now get about a hundred and fifty or so. I've probably posted more than once a day on the average during the past year, even though my production dropped off during the past ten days because of a short trip and a short-lived obsession with figuring out EA FIFA Soccer 2005 on the PlayStation (and, yes, the other day I did score three goals playing as Juventus against some Division Two English soccer team from the Cotswolds). Through cross-linking to other bloggers, posting on some blogs and sharing an occasional e-mail with a fellow blogger, I started to get more hits, and I thank all of you that.

I suppose I started blogging because I wanted to see what it would be like to write regularly about sports and to see how my voice, as it were, would develop in this area. As it has turned out, I like writing about human interest matters, people who are long since off the radar screen and a sense of fair play, while also trying to poke good and clean fun at the establishment every now and then. Here are 25 of my favorite posts:

Iranians in the NBA Draft;

The Legacy of Wilt Chamberlain;

The Interesting Tale of Willie Williams;

SI's Hall of Fame Photograph;

A Little Boy's First Baseball Game;

On Giving Up Tickets to the Greatest College Basketball Game Ever;

Must Joe Go?;

Fishing with My Daughter;

The All African-American QB Roster;

Letting Kids Be Kids;

The Best Reality TV There Is;

All-Time Quarterback Ratings;

A Homecoming of Sorts;

I Think I Can, I Think I Can;

I Am a Philadelphia Eagles Fan;

Say It Ain't So, Jose (The Poem);

Sports Reality TV That Could Be on Its Way;

My All-Time Favorite Sports Movies;

The MSM Is Now Hot on the Steroids Issue in Baseball;

The SportsProf Sports Quiz;

The Ballad of Barry Bonds;

And They Don't Take American Express;

Jermaine O'Neal, David Stern and the NBA;

Adrian McPherson's Chance for Redemption;

NASA Offers to Buy Citizens Bank Park from Phillies, Philadelphia; and

Mike Nolan Should Be Fit To Be Tied.

I hope that you've enjoyed reading these posts as much as I've enjoyed writing them. I don't know where my writing journey will take me. I'd like to write a novel some day, and I hope that I'll find the time and discipline to get it done some day. Taking about a half hour a day to blog, perhaps, has been a good intermediate step, causing me to write every day without regard for the urge for perfection that has prevented me from finishing the three or four or five novels that I have begun to write but, with a busy life, haven't found the time to finish (one, about a pair of aging vets that help the Red Sox to win the World Series will never get finished, but that's a happy sacrifice I'll make).

Blogging also has enabled me to join a community that I didn't really know existed before I began this blog, a community of concerned writers and fans who like to examine some of the same topics that I do. To my fellow bloggers, thanks for letting me into your community; I really appreciate it.

This isn't a signoff or a swansong, just a reflection on a first anniversary of something that I enjoy doing. Like anything else in life, there are hot and cold streaks, times when you want to write many posts of day on topics that are amusing, concerning or infuriating, or times when you look at the major news in the sports world and wonder why you're blogging in the first place. And when you hit that place, there's always something that pops up to fuel a whole string of new posts.

I might slow down my posts a bit to, well, the frequency of a sports columnist in a major daily, using the rest of the time to try to piece together and finish that first novel. Blogging has helped me discover that sitting down to write every day is as important an act in the journey of a writer as anything else. Sometimes you'll look back on what you wrote and ask why you wrote it, other times you'll look back and say, "that was pretty good, wasn't it?" The key thing is that I sat down to write in the first place, and I'm hopeful that if I bring the energy to the book that I have brought to this blog, I'll be in pretty good shape.

Thanks for your support.