The Obligatory First Post

Who I am just because it feels like a thing to say:

I used to write regularly at Throwing Into Traffic, which was cool. and fun. Then I went mildly crazy. Then I got busy with work and couldn't find the right outlet. Now I'm writing about sports again here.

Why I want to do this:

The whole point of our discussion of sports is that sports are covered wrongly by almost everybody. Sports are nowhere near as serious as the gasbags of the media would have you believe, at least not for the reasons they choose to highlight. The individuals they cover aren't idologies, or symbols, or role models meant to lead our kids and country into whatever great heights or abominable lows they reach. Sports don't tangibly change the world very often, certainly not as often as the mainstream media would have us believe, all of which makes the hellish need for individuals to be neatly fit into well known moral tropes ridiculous.

That said, sports do mean something beyond the neatly quantifiable field of play. Athletes may not be pillars of ideology, but they certainly can become characters in the greater stories of perseverance, honor, innovation, simplicity, brutality, and even right and wrong in the world, and due to their brightly lit stage they can be more easily recognized than most individual characters in these tales. Their stories can change and turn in ways that, when we really acknowledge them as a part of the greater journey of an individual life and not as part of some preordained march to a set endpoint, make us recognize changes we want to achieve or avoid in our own lives as well. If there is one thing that the stat-minded analysis era has neglected in most of its excellent work in rejecting overly simplistic mindsets, it is the undeniable truth that context matters in ways that are not always easily quantified. Sports reinforce this universal truth: The results do not always speak to the realities of the field of play.

So we're basically going to try and find the medium here, which never works but is always a fun way to tilt at windmills. 2 Way Player aims to make light of the places in sports that need to be brought back into the realms of pop culture and games, worlds in which sports absolutely belongs. It also aims to highlight for more serious discussion those parts of sports that go ignored or are misunderstood and boxed into simplistic perspectives that fail to acknowledge the greater cultural, ethical, historical, or even philosophical realities at play. It is a place for a discussion of sports as statistical reality, or as a product of literary and popular trends. It works both ways because sports works both ways, or really any way that you can validly defend. That's what makes sports fun to discuss, and we aim to make this a place for that sort of interesting and enjoyable discussion.

So with that out of the way, welcome.