Birthdays never bother me. Getting older continues to be far better than the alternative.
The only one that ever bugged me was 23. Think about it. You spend your whole life aspiring to be older than you are. Sixteen so you can drive. Eighteen so you can vote, or go to bars without a fake ID (at the time, that was the minimum age in West Virginia). Twenty-one, so you can go to bars without a fake ID in the states where the drinking age wasn’t 18.
At 22, you’re still in the afterglow of 21. At 23, it hit me. There are no other “good” birthdays out there.
So, all that said, PFT is now 23.
We flipped the switch on November 1, 2001. I’d stumbled into the business more than a year earlier, writing for free (they got their money’s worth) at the long-defunct NFLTalk.com. I started doing more and more for them, at the same rate of pay. I started doing some radio appearances to talk about football and to promote the long-defunct NFLTalk.com, which taught me (over time) how to speak extemporaneously and, most of the time, make sense while doing so.
When the tech bubble burst for the first time, in early 2001, the NFLTalk.com parent company (SportsTalk.com) went belly up. ESPN bought the carcass. One thing led to another, and I ended up with a six-month contract to write a daily news roundup for ESPN.com’s Insider subscription service.
They didn’t exactly know I was practicing law on a full-time basis. I didn’t exactly tell them. I’d get up at five, work for four or five hours, and then go to my office for the rest of the day. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Then came 9/11, and it made me ask myself whether it made sense to keep burning the candle at both ends, and in the middle. ESPN offered a one-year extension, effective November 1, for the princely sum of $36,000.
How and why and when that became a decision to start my own thing remains murky. Mostly, I acted on instinct. The biggest factors were: (1) I couldn’t keep working 12 to 15 hours a day, maybe more; and (2) I didn’t like the fact that, after submitting my daily product to whoever got it at ESPN.com, it took two or three hours for the various layers and levels of approval to be given and for the content to go live.
What if, I thought, I set up my own thing that allowed me to post blurbs instantly, without delay?
And so, for $500 and $50 per month, PFT was born. Twenty-three years ago today. I had no idea where it would go. I had no idea whether it would last. All I knew was that I liked doing it. It was fun. It gave me a creative outlet, it allowed me to follow more closely than ever before a sport I’d loved since I was seven years old.
“And who knows?” I told myself at the time. “Maybe it’ll turn into something.”
It took several years to generate any real revenue. Which was fine. It was a hobby. Cheaper than golf or other things that cost more than $50 a month to do. And the traffic was growing, slowly but surely. A snowball rolling down a long, flat slope. The numbers were bigger and bigger, each and every month.
Sprint arrived as the first major sponsor in early 2006, out of the blue. That’s when I knew I’d eventually stop practicing law and start doing this all the time. Three years later, Rick Cordella (now the president of NBC Sports), called to discuss partnering up.
I didn’t want to do it. Only after our traffic sparked a complete implosion of the servers on the first day of 2009 free agency did I realize it wasn’t sustainable — not without a major infusion of cash that I was too cheap and too strapped to spend.
So we did the deal. Effective July 1, 2009. And here we are, more than 15 years later, still with NBC. One day at a time, one post at a time. It has just kept on going.
We’ve gone from one part-time writer (me) to five full-time contributors. We’ve expanded to various other platforms. I probably spend as much time on it now as I did when I was working two jobs in 2001. But I wouldn’t do anything else. (Other than write books when I can find a couple of quiet hours, four or five nights a week.)
Twenty-three years. On this day 23 years ago, I never would have imagined what it became.
I’ll keep doing it as long as I’m physically able. For every single day since January 1, 2004 (the only New Year’s resolution I ever kept), I’ve written at least one item for PFT. Most days, it’s between 10 and 15. Plenty of days, it’s more. Along with a two-hour weekday morning show, 20-plus weekends of NBC travel and pregame shows, and everything else that goes with the territory.
It’s good territory. The eight-year-old version of me, if he could have even begun to comprehend how digital content would be created and distributed, would have been simultaneously shitting his pants and counting the days.
Really, that would have made my 23rd birthday a lot easier. I would have known that I was just a few months away from meeting my wife (it took a little while longer than that to get her to reciprocate the interest), eight years away from having a son, and 13 years away from starting a ride that has carried me to the brink of 60 — and that will keep going until it’s time to check out for good.
I don’t fear the end, whenever it might be. None of us should. All we can do is do the best we can with the time we have. And even though there are days when I wonder whether I’m contributing anything of value to society, I’ve got an ever-growing collection of emails from folks who use our content as a temporary escape from the stuff they have to deal with every day, a welcome part of their routines that helps to balance out the unwelcome parts of their routines.
That’s good enough for me. Mostly because it’s too damn late to get off the horse. I’ll ride it as long as I can, and I’ll be grateful to every one of you who keep giving it a reason to be ridden.
