My Blog Bat Around: Growing Pains

When I first discovered blogging, I was immediately turned on by the fact that I could finally say whatever I wanted, when I wanted. I would no longer have to put up with any 12 year olds on the BMB who disagree just to disagree, and if I wanted to swim against the current I could without a problem. Being an English major in school, I loved to write, especially informal pieces about things I love. What better excursion could there be than blogging about cards?

The problem started out that I had a lot of pent up anger ready to fire at those I was angry at, and not many people willing to listen. I wasn’t experienced at building a site, and the community we have now was relatively small at the time. After the Exquisite fiasco of last year, the subject I wanted to focus on had a springboard and a purpose. The problem was, the perpetrators I chose conflicted with the owner of the place I was going to use to disseminate my site. That was a problem as you could imagine, and I was banned shortly after my site was mentioned on the board.

Much to their chagrin, many people started reading from my presence on the board, some out of hate, others out of support. I finally had an audience, and I was more than happy to preach to their waiting ears. Ill tell you, I had so much fun the first few months doing the blog, I barely cared that my video on youtube had more views than the site. Then, at that time, it was about having fun and if people were pissed, they were pissed. Some times you have to crack the eggs to make an omelette.

As the months started to pass, more people joined the blog community, which led to more people coming to the blog. Mario helped out quite a bit by promoting SCU on the directory he had started, and the sitemeter at the bottom of the page started to grow. You can imagine that more haters also started reading, including some with more hatred than I have for Beckett. They started to make the blog their toilet for comment diarrhea, but most of the time SCU wsa for like minded people to myself.

Somewhere around that time, internet views of the media evil empire started to change, as more people came on board with SCU, which made me take on a new purpose for blogging too. Instead of doing it to have fun, my purpose became to discredit, defame, and change the mindset away from previous paradigms that had plagued the hobby. I wanted to change people's mind, and I was going to have fun doing it. I, in fact, did have a blast sticking it to the 'man' and even acquired some interesting visitors in the process. Top dogs from UD, Donruss, and other companies started to read the blog, including many of the people I despised at Teenage Sports Card Life and Love Magazine. To know that there were people listening, though few, was exhilerating, and I continued my quest to be at the forefront of their mind when planning for the future.

This continued, as well as my love for blogging, well past the 100,000 visitor and 1 year anniversary of the site, up until Tuesday of this week. Im going to elaborate in case you are not in the know. On Monday, I was approved for Media access to the NFL rookie premiere at the LA Coliseum, making it my best day as a blogger, ever. Finally, I had made enough progress to be able to move past my humble beginnings as an outlet from a heavily censored message board to an actual hobby media member. My success was short lived as less than 24 hours later, my credentials were revoked in a blanket decision to not allow bloggers and media members like me. I immediately got on the horn and started finding out why things had done a complete 180, but didn’t get very far. The NFL could not comment on who had made the decision, but reps at NFL Players there made my assumptions rise that someone had requested this be the case. I talked to a few industry people close to the event, and all of them had said that this type of revokation had NEVER happened before. They also hinted to me that there was more that was going on - typical. When I talked to my main source, whom I have never spoken about on this blog, they mentioned that there were people in the industry who had made it clear to the NFL that I was not to be allowed at the event. Apparently, this was done on behalf of people who disliked my mission in life, and that they had made a mistake blabbing about it to sympathic industry people to their interests. I wanted to find out who, but it was pretty clear that it could be a number of people, with two at the top of the list.

So, instead of going to the event with the intent of providing coverage for you guys, I am now sitting at home this Saturday because certain people in this hobby function like the cast of Mean Girls. If you think that I regret my past trangressions against the brass of the hobby, you are completely wrong. I would never trade my stances for access to an event. Nor do I regret anything. I would do it all the same.

To answer the question of why do I blog, the answer is simple. Its part of who I am.