A change in direction

My life has purpose!

OK, fine, I mean this blog. I've finally decided what to do with this page. I've found that having an open-ended sports blog somehow gives me too much leeway to be effective. When I see something I want to write about, I always decide either that it's not interesting to enough people to be worth writing about, or that too many other people have written about it to be worth taking my time. Not the most effective way to write, I know, but coming up with a topic has always been the hardest thing for me.

So I have a plan. I'm going to dedicate this blog to a daily rundown of the most important or memorable sports event from that day's history. That way, I'm not just rehashing someone else's opinion about the latest in sports news, plus I have something to write about every day. This will keep me on task. And I get to learn about some things I might not have known about before.

First, though, comes a definition. I'm going to stick to American sports history, simply because it's a lot easier to stay focused and find what I believe to be the seminal moment from a particular day if I stay in this country. So no recapping of any great English soccer games from the past 100 years or memories of old Spanish bullfighting events. But, I think my definition of "American" is sufficiently broad. The event has to feature either American athletes or take place on American soil. So the Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal Wimbeldon final in 2008 doesn't count, since it took place in England, but the Brazil-Italy World Cup final in 1994 does, since it took place in Pasadena. I'm stretching the rule a little bit with hockey, as I will consider events between two Canadian NHL teams simply because the NHL is the major hockey league of the United States.

Also, I'm not going to try to obtain balance between sports or ignore bigger events just so I can include some other lesser ones. If everything memorable or important in August is from the world of Major League Baseball, it'll be a baseball-heavy month. No point in trying to force something to be memorable. An example of this might be Pete Sampras. He's considered in every argument about the greatest men's tennis players of all time, but it seems that many, if not all, of his memorable wins are overshadowed by other historic events from that day. Just glancing at the list I've already compiled, he might struggle to show up on here at all after today.

My biases might show up here, too. I have some sports I favor more than others, so expect a lot of football to appear in November, December, and January, and not as much basketball. The summer months will be heavily saturated with baseball. Events I remember will get some extra weight, so things that happened within the last decade or so will be featured more than they probably should. And of course, Minnesota will almost certainly be disproportionatly mentioned.

So that's that. I'm starting on April 1st because 1) I wanted to start at the beginning of a month; 2) Spring is a traditional time of new beginnings; and 3) I still don't have something for every day of March. I don't expect my list to be a perfect representation of American sports history, but I do expect to have fun with it.