Did one of these a LONG time ago, ask me anything, sports or non-sports. Quality answers not guaranteed!
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Did one of these a LONG time ago, ask me anything, sports or non-sports. Quality answers not guaranteed!
Other than almost winning a women's pickleball tournament recently, what was your greatest sports achievement?
I think I need to hear this story.
copied from my nostr account:
Hilarious thing happened today. Wanted to start playing more Padel, so I asked the guy at my daughter’s basketball/tennis club yesterday if I could sign up. He said show up tomorrow (Sunday) at 1:30, to enter a tournament.
So I show up at 1:30 today, but he apologizes, said he did the math wrong, there’s no spot for me, but if I want to wait around until 3:30 there’s another one that definitely has a spot. In the meantime he gets three people to play with me for half an hour on a spare court while I’m waiting.
So I wait out the other hour and half, then he sends me to the court to meet my doubles partner. She’s a 30-ish YO Dutch woman somewhere between attractive girl next door and movie actress. (I’m out of the game now, but any man would notice.)
We draw two Asian women as our opponents, and it dawns on me I’m the ONLY dude in the tournament. Basically like the trans dude getting a leg up in women’s sports. I ask my partner, and she confirms this is a women’s tournament. But they apparently were one short,I had waited two hours, and the dude never told me!
(Also keep in mind I’m almost 54 and have only played like 10 times in my life, and these women are way younger and play all the time for years.)
We ended up making the finals and losing a close match. Think I might have played a little more sloppily at the end because I would have been embarrassed to win a woman's tournament!
Haha great story.
Looks like you have bright future in women's pickleball.
We have a couple pickleball courts down the street from us. Got the kids out a few times last summer. They really enjoyed it. Personally I still prefer tennis but the kids seem to like pickleball better. It's a fun sport.
Tennis is hard, you have to be good at tennis to enjoy it. I'm okay, I like playing, but Padel and paddle tennis are easy to have good points. Never played pickle ball actually, but think I'm scheduled to next week when I'm back in the States.
haha -- that was epic. Should have been more ruthless.
Man, I'm a decent athlete, but nothing special. I have some hoops games where I lit it up pretty good, we won our league in lacrosse a couple years in high school, but honestly nothing that remarkable!
Do you think there's much potential for bitcoin to change sports (or vice versa)?
If so, what do you think will be the largest impact?
good question -- I think sports is the rare area in society that's still largely based on merit, so I don't think it would change that much. I mean it's hard to predict nth order effects of sound money as it ripples through society, so I'm probably underestimating it, but for the most part incentives are in the right place in sports.
If you could purple-pill any professional athlete(s) out there and bring them onto Nostr, who would you choose? And which of them do you think are most primed to find their way to the freedom protocol?
Good question. I mean Russell Okung should be here already, but obviously I'd go bigger if I had my pick. Aaron Rodgers and Kyrie Irving are no brainers as they've been cancelled for their views/actions on regular media/social media.
There are a handful of current and retired athletes who are public bitcoiners. What's your sense of how many are in the closet?
hundreds
What sports did you play growing up?
when I was a little kid, I played baseball and football (not real organized football, just with my friends in the park.) In high school, our baseball team sucked and they canceled the football team because someone died during the 70s, so I wrestled, played a little soccer and a lot of lacrosse. But in college I played a TON of pickup basketball, and pickup ball (and coaching at the YCMA) was my life in LA for a few years.
What do you think of e-sports?
Don't know much about it, but my company Rotowire invested like 100K in building out a section for clients, but we sucked at it because we were GenX and didn't really get it. Good lesson though -- stick to what you know.
For a few years there it seemed to be the in thing for traditional sports media and orgs to get into e-sports but I don't know that any of them did well in it. Even the NBA's esports league didn't seem to go anywhere. So, I think it is a good point about sticking to what you know and are good at.
yeah, we hired a 22-YO kid to run it, but even he wasn't that into it in the end. It's a weird thing to watch people play video games, IMO
But as I said, we're Gen-X, basically boomers when it comes to that kind of shit.
Wait until you hear about people watching madden simulations.
it's like 4th derivative of actually moving your body
Appreciate you guys having me -- have to run and get my dog from his day camp. Happy to run it back any time.
Thanks Chris. Hope to have you as a guest on the pod soon.
anytime!
FWIW -- my "career" if you can call it that was in fantasy sports, not sports journalism -- we built a business around that and got pretty serious in high stakes leagues where you could win a good chunk of $.
One day @Undisciplined can regale you with the tale of how he managed to get Allen and Mahomes in our fantasy football draft. He still lost to me in the playoffs. Just saying.
haha, fantasy football is so arbitrary in the playoffs. You can kill it in the regular season and get bounced in the first round. Baseball is much more true to form. One guy had a saying that the village idiot could win your fantasy football league, but never the baseball one.
We currently have a fantasy baseball league going as well. First year we have done it. I haven't played fantasy baseball in over a decade so it has been fun.
Fantasy baseball is great (and so is NBA), but it's also hell to manage. I actually outsourced management of my high stakes leagues to some hard core guys. I bought the entry fee, we split the winnings, I draft, they do all the grunt (in-season) management work.
How do you see Nostr and its value-4-value ethos changing the sports media landscape?
It's not changing it AT ALL right now. My sports posts are virtually ignored, only my main account gets engagement. Part of that is I only really post full articles to it lately, and I put more effort into my regular account, but maybe Stacker news can be a bridge of sorts.
Problem is I have four Twitter accounts (two satire ones), a Sports one and a regular one and four nostr accounts, one for my wife's wine/travel guide, my sports, my regular and my dog Oscar's. Just a lot of accounts plus two substacks. Need a metaapp to auto-post sports to both.
Disclaimer: I work for Stacker News
Stacker News is indeed better suited for long-form content than Nostr imo
You can also crosspost from here to nostr, see settings:
(Currently only works on desktop with a signer extension like nos2x though)
maybe I'll start doing that, thanks
Fun question: Why do you think USA plays Football with Hands?
ha -- it is odd they called it that. Calling soccer "football" makes a lot more sense. I guess back in the day when there wasn't a lot of forward passing, kicking and punting were a bigger aspect of the game.
Thanks. We all agree it's odd. But somehow Americans argue Soccer is Soccer and Football is original to US.
American football I think started in the 1880s, but I imagine football as the rest of the world knows it is probably older.
Football is much more older definitely. It's funny they also made a different version of Cricket and called it Baseball. Cricket has been played since 1600s but they think Baseball is older.
Anyways, rest of world has more originality than US ever had. ; )
yeah, baseball also 19th century
testing
What attracted you to a career in sports reporting?
I went to law school, thought it was boring af and got really lucky some friends of friends created a startup in fantasy sports, something I loved.
Why are humans drawn to sports the way they are?
I think humans are drawn to competition instinctively, and sports are a way to "kill" your enemy without actually harming him. It's a wholesome channeling of that aggressive instinct.
Hey Chris. Thanks for doing this.
How did you end up finding Nostr?
No problem! Can't remember where I first heard about, probably on Twitter. Seemed like it was based, so I gave it a shot.
Very cool. I didn’t realize you were coming on for an AMA today but nice to have you.
thanks!
Thanks for doing the AMA
Have you ever watched a Cricket match?
not live, but some dude I was drinking with in the UK had it on in the background. My former company, RotoWire.com, used to cover cricket, (maybe still do), but it was only because we had a deal with some company in India. I don't even know the rules.
That's fine. Cricket is only the 2nd most popular game in the world. We're running amazing Cricket pools on SN where you can earn real Sats for your predictions.
Would love to see you join there if you got a few minutes weekly.
ha - I would if I knew the first thing about it. Know almost zero about rugby either.
You wouldn't be the only one who was playing without knowing the rules.
I didn't know about baseball, Football (American) yet I joined the pools and was surprised that I learned about these games pretty quickly. Now all of the sports stackers here take my predictions very seriously.
I can tell you how I predicted that Eagles would win the Super Bowl mid of NFL season 2024-2025 and everyone laughed.
BTW I'm from India.
I have to jump off SN for a bit but one last fun one. How many QBs will be drafted in the first round this year?
I know VERY little about college football, never really start paying attention until AFTER the draft, once they've slotted into their respective teams. I'm a Giants fans, so I thought we might get one though odd they signed TWO scrub veterans, so maybe not. But after Ward and Sanders, I really don't know.
Ward and Sanders are the first round locks but QBs always get pushed up the board so I am curious to see if Dart and/or Milroe sneak into the first round as well.
I'd love the Giants to draft Travis Hunter and sneak a QB in Rd2 if one drops, but I have no idea.
How far are sports media people (maybe just media people in general) from "getting it", however broadly or narrowly you want to take that?
Most of them are MILES away. Some of the most compliant midwits on the planet.
Just seen this, chuffed to see you got such a positive response!
thanks -- was fun doing it
How can one become a validator on any blockchain network?
What motivates you?
Doing things I like