George Vecsey opens an otherwise grating article with a telling point.
We are supposed to bay at the moon over the burning issues of the day, maybe inept trades or expensive free-agent signings or the terrible injustice of the Bowl Championship Series.
But then I see people lobbing rockets at each other and lunatics killing innocents in the hearts of cities, and it's hard to be edgy over something as trivial as America's not having a college football playoff.
My name is Steven Gomez. I grew up a sports fan, obsessed as a kid to where I knew histories, stats and the like of many sports back to front. I've also been an avid writer my entire life. As the internet age blew up sports coverage like the Godfather, it only made sense that someone like me should end up blogging about sports.
So why haven't I? I know what the internet is and all, so can't say I had no idea. But I think Vecsey's quote captures some of the idea why. There are a lot of blogs, talk shows, TV personalities, drama-whores and the like competing for your attention and/or the advertising dollar. Many will go to great lengths to rage histrionic about any news item of consequence (I'm looking at BOTH of you, Jim Rome and Stephen A Smith). The writing and tone of a lot of blogs strains to find some sort of edgy take to any news item of relevance. Given the market was cornered, and I didn't share the same... well, passion, I saw no need to join the ranks.
After moving to Seattle in 2004, a lot of my blogging or writing over the last few years focused on local news and politics, national and world news and issues, personal news and issues. I wrote a little bit about sports here and there but never did I make it a focus. There's enough going on outside my door on a daily basis. In the grand scheme of things, the craziest things in sports on any level typically amount to a relative trifle. As George Vecsey invokes, there are (or were until about a few days ago) people in Gaza whose homes got bombarded with Israeli rockets. There are people on our streets robbing, mugging, killing and on a lesser scale screwing each other over every single day. Ultimately, does sports really matter all that much?
Let's be honest: it still does, to a lot of us. It is our escape from otherwise harsh realities and the various trials of our everyday lives, our teams bringing people of different ideals, cultures and divisions together to cheer for a common civic goal: the fate of a franchise (even if that franchise takes hundreds of millions of dollars away from local coffers and gives little to nothing back besides this ideological beacon of athletic hope). George Vecsey can cry crocodile tears. I'm going to start writing seriously about sports for a change, and let's see what happens.
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The name Dead Cat Bounce comes from a term originally from stock trading that has migrated to baseball sabermetric discussions. In baseball, a fading veteran whose performance has begun to erode may fire off one final stretch of fine productivity before his performance finally collapses for good... a proverbial dead cat bouncing off the ground, into the air and back to the ground again, never again to rise.
I would have called the blog Dead Cat Bounce but some douchebag on Blogger swiped the name in 2003, posted an entry or two and was never heard from again. So you'll have to settle for the more colloquially engaging moniker Dead Cat's Bounce, since, after all, the bounce does belong to the dead cat.
And likewise, as a veteran sports fan whose obsession has faded over the years, you can consider this blog the dead cat bounce of that lifelong obsession. May it bounce high before my interest fades. Maybe it comes back down quick. Maybe it'll never come down.
We'll see.
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