• We noticed a slightly tangy flavor in Shaq's ass.
• Stephen Jackson's therapeutic measures.
• Look! We have video!
• And ode to one ol friend.
• And some others.
• Fun with domestic violence.
• Jay Mariotti could use some protection.
• Zombie Kickball.
• Good grief.
• We'll always remember you, Carl.
• We do hope the message people get out of this post is not "oooh, blog fight!" Because it's not. We continue to encourage everyone to check out The Big Lead. It's a good site. Swear.
• Wow. This was staggering. We still can't believe Simmons and Van Pelt showed up. And Christ, Skeets is a genius.
• Drafty!
• If you made it all the way through this, you win the kewpie doll.
• These guys have already been hanging around our apartment all day, measuring the windows, checking out drapery. Jeez, guys, wait until the body's cold, would ya?
Fun week. Your weekend editor is Christmas Ape.
OK, let's get this over with, after the jump.
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When we started working on this site, back in 2005, the brilliant then-Gawker editor Jessica Coen noticed that we were writing about 20 posts a day in a fevered rush. It was amazing to us that we would be able to write about what we wanted, how we wanted, in a way that we hoped other sports fans - and, really, non-sports fans - could connect to, understand, and be a part of. So we were writing like crazy. Back then, we worked out of Gawker's old office, which was up eight flights of stairs, lacked air conditioning and seemed to be teeming with feral cats. We would pause every hour or so to run downstairs, suck down a Marlboro Red and sprint back up to write some more. We could not believe our luck.
Jessica had a warning for us. "Will, you have to slow down. This job is hard. You'll burn yourself out."
We have no doubt that she was probably right, but a funny thing happened: We never burned out. We never tired of talking about sports, of laughing at the hilarity people could come up with, of typing faster than we could think. It was a job that, at last, was tuned exactly to our frequency. Noah Robischon, the managing editor of Gawker, told us the other day that we wrote more posts for Gawker Media than anyone in their six-year history. We feel like we should have done more. We feel like we should have done a lot more.
We're still going to be writing around here, if just because New York is unlikely to have much use for posts about Rick Ankiel, Carl Monday and Elijah Dukes. (Not that we will not try.) But this site has been our baby, something that has been at the forefront of our minds, for three years now, the first thing we thought about when we woke up, the last thing we thought about before we went to sleep. It was not a stress on our life. It was just what we did, and what we were. So, uh, transitioning might take a tiny bit of adjustment on our part.
The tributes this week have been completely silly - we mean, we're just leavin' a darned blog - and still awesome and, most important, bone-shatteringly funny. That's all we wanted Deadspin to be all along; a place where people could slip away from their life for a while, dig in, have some fun, then head back to the regular life, where bills must be paid, family must be attended to, jobs must be (slightly) acknowledged. You know: Kind of like sports themselves. Life is difficult. Life is scary. Diversions - real, palpable diversions, places where you can go away and frolic, and then return to the world the way you found it, for better or worse - are rare, and should be cherished. That's what sports are. That's what we hope this site has been. That's what we're certain it will continue to be.
We could go through a list of people to thank, but we kind of did that in our book acknowledgments already, and, honestly, it's a beautiful early Friday evening in New York City. It's time to head out there, see the world, enjoy what it has to offer, log everything we find and come back to report it all, breathlessly. Doing this has been the most joyous experience of our professional lives, which is to say: It has been pretty much the most joyous experience of our lives. (These things are always dangerously intertwined.) Every day at Deadspin has provided us huge belly laughs, and made us feel like we're a part of something, something that you - not us - created. So yeah: Thanks.
All right: That'll do it for us. We'll stay away for a couple of weeks, and then we'll pop back by to say hi, check in with everybody, see what everybody's laughing so hard about. It will now be our diversion. Like everyone else, we'll need it, and it will be comforting to always know that it's here.
So yeah: Hi. I'm Will. It has been my honor to be here. I do appreciate you having me.