That Woj Bomb

He did it. He actually did it.

This week ESPN NBA Insider Adrian Wojnarowski announced that he would be retiring from ESPN. It’s not that he retired at 55, or that he left his job at the peak of his powers (all due respect to Shams Charania, I was always a Woj man) that made the move so jarring. It’s that Woj left ESPN to become the General Manager of his alma mater’s basketball team at St. Bonaventure.

I don’t want to speak for every sports writer out there, so I’ll just speak for the ones I know - we have all dreamed of being a General Manager of our favorite team. Just like every fantasy football jockey who stays up at 3:30 a.m. to scour the waiver wire, we just want to go fix our teams. Worse yet - we’ve all convinced ourselves that we could really be the ones to turn it all around. After all, we’ve covered the game for so long that there might not be anyone better than us to do it.

We’re the ones who stay after the stadium shuts down to meet our deadlines. We make the lonely walk to the car and the even lonelier drive back home so we can sit in front of our computers and refresh the website until we see our byline. We put in the work - when do we get to taste the glory? Now they feed us with likes and reposts - even with money. But we’re chasing something else.

Because we are fools.

We write because we still dream. As boys (and girls), we all dreamed of the glory of winning at recess. But we weren’t first picked and no one gave us the ball at the end of the game either. If we had the talent to play, we lost it along the way. Traded sweat equity and meal money for a used MacBook Pro plastered with the faded and peeling stickers of the team or league we write about.

By now we all know we can’t ever step on the field. We’re fools; not ignoramuses.

We write about our sports and teams because we love it. We love all of it. Life would be boring without sports. We do it because we can’t imagine doing anything else.

Except…that’s not true. We can always imagine running the show. Being the boss. Making trades. Analyzing the draft class, making our picks. Listen - we created mock drafts! Those are ours! You read them!

For a few seconds, we got to be right about everything that mattered!

Remember that?

We hope you never forget it. but we also know that you will. And tomorrow morning we will have to get up and try to find another way to impress you so that you keep seeking out our byline. Maybe someday enough of you will do that that we get a chance to write a book, or get a podcast - some of us might even get on broadcast TV!

But for now, we’ll just keep hammering away at the keys. Taking calls from random numbers that aren’t saved in our phones. We will desperately comb social media for story ideas or maybe the sweet sweet morsel of a mention. We will write on the back end of our sites even though we know we could lose all of our text if we close the window or the cache timer resets. That’s how we ride the lightning.

That’s how we stay alive.

Honestly, everyone should take a second to congratulate Woj, because he deserves it. He had an unassailable run covering one of the most popular pro sports leagues in the world.

But what he did for sports writers was much more valuable.

He kept our other dream alive.

Because he beat us to it.