Have you ever done this before? Well, once upon a time I wrote a bit for okstate.com and helped piece together some of the media guides all of you have enjoyed.
Did you even play sports? I did. Kind of. I was like the 26th guy out of the bullpen one Fall for Oklahoma State’s baseball team and, as you can deduce, that didn’t last very long. So I started writing about sports instead of playing them.
So, you’re qualified to run this website? As qualified as Mike Gundy is to run a high-level organization that makes tens of millions of dollars a year. Translation: not really but it’s working so why mess with it?
Is this your real job? If ‘real’ is defined as the thing I’m most passionate about and what I pour most of my now-working waking moments into, then yes, this is my real job. I do also have another gig that provides money for my wife and I to eat and pay rent with though.
What athlete would you compare your writing skills to? I like to think of myself as Kellen Moore with a keyboard. Minus the Bieber look. I’m not going to do a lot of things that are going to wow people but I love writing and I study it. I take what I like from other writers and make it my own and hone it into something hopefully all of you will enjoy. And thank God I don’t have an assistant (kicker) to come in and blow everything I’ve ever worked on. That is until my server crashes, then you’ll probably get a tweet that goes something like “I just renamed my web hosting company ‘Brotzman’ in my cell phone.”
Do you go to all the games? Unfortunately, no. I go to most of the football games but I have to catch hoops on TV or some obscure Russian website when they’re not televised. If you know Boone and can talk him into flying me to the basketball games I won’t turn you down.
Why are you doing this? I think I already covered that but in case you missed it: I love OSU, always have, always will. My buddies and I found ourselves sending thousand-word emails on a weekly (if not daily) basis about ridiculous OSU stuff and I was usually the instigator. I also received a little buzz (albeit message board buzz) over this Georgia post I wrote last year as well as this Bedlam one from this year.
What does your wife think about this site? Mrs. Pistols is cool with it. She likes to chime in with typical girl stuff like “Zac Robinson’s eyes are a color blue I’ve never seen before” (actual quote) and “Kendall Hunter looks like Zacchaeus” (another actual quote). However, I can’t make fun of her ever again considering she finished in the 99.7% in the 2010-11 ESPN Bowl Challenge out of like 300,000. Seriously, she did, and she literally cannot name one college football player outside of Cam Newton and a few guys on OSU.
When did you decide to do this? There was a sequential string of events that led me to all of this but I really think the turning point was when I read this Tim Tebow profile by Jason Fagone in Esquire. I had read great stories before, heck, there are hundreds of fantastic articles posted on the internet every day, but I had never been overrun by a piece like I was that one. It was one of the first times I ever thought the way we put words together is capable of affecting people and, on very good days, changing lives.
