Site News: Happy Anniversary to me

Send News


It was one year ago today that I joined the blogging world. You can see my first ever post here and that first month worth of here

As you can see, things have come a long way from that first month, where the site was all mine and covered pretty much everything I had an interest in. Since that time, Euan Taylor came aboard in September, as did Wade and Art. Art started out writing about music on the old site and had most of his wrestling/mma work elsewhere. That went on pretty much until February where I decided to refocus my energy just on things I hoped to make a living covering, I.E. Wrestling and MMA. In February we also debuted our message board. In early March we did our first audio show and in late may, Art closed his other blog and we decided to combine forces for good. This move reduced our workload a bit and brought some sanity back to our lives. Then we saught out a new name, and on July 22, this site officially hit the air.

I would be bitched at by Ric if I did not give him credit for something in this post, so here goes...

1. If it wasn't for Ric and his proding on the old Ric and Steve...er...Karl Show, I might not be blogging today since it was he more than anyone else that said I needed to do it.
   
2. Ric went from commenter on the blog, to contributor, to affiliate/partner but also to friend. It was Ric who once told me that he thought I could indeed make a living doing this, and that was the first time anyone had said that so I do appreciate it.
   
3. Ric also helped find the name. He suggested that we call ourselves Sitting in the Front Row. Then that led to what our audio show could be called and I thought: "Who sits in the front row?" and immediately, Hooligans came to mind. Then I thought, well we all kind of have a combative relationship with one another and we do cover combat sports, thus www.combat-hooligans.com
   
4. There are things that will be happening in the near and far off future that will happen in large part because of Ric's help so I'll give him credit in advance for those even if I'm not going to tell you what they are yet.

I'd also like to thank Karl Stern who first read an email of mine on his show back in March of 2006 and did so for many weeks after that. Karl is back online after a brief retirement and I couldn't be happier, so check out his site. Karl and I have had brief conversations about doing stuff together in the future and we'll discuss it more and when something happens, we'll let you know.

I can't also help but thank Mark Danger who became the sites first regular commenter. It isn't just because Danger and myself both love the Atlanta Braves but we find him funny, and I was glad to see him join our band of merry event predictors in June.

It goes without saying that Art and Euan should get thanked. Euan puts in a lot of hours working on the podcast and basically doing anything and everything I've asked him to do because I've been too lazy to do it myself. Art posts all the news and columns you see with his name on the byline but also does most of the design stuff for the site and all of the banners. I've found that Art and I have a lot in common at least as it relates to the major wrestling companies in the United States.

Wade for writing all of those Raw recaps back in the day and ECW which I'm sure had to suck.

Thanks to Daniel Puder for being our first guest on the Combat Hooligans.com audio show.

Last but definitely most important (though Ric might disagree) is the people who read this.

Really, that's all of you but I kind of split this in to 2 groups. There's group A which is people that came across this site by whatever means and have decided to come back. I hope in the future we can offer you more reasons to come back as my personal belief is that there's never enough that I could do. Once I feel like I've done everything I can, that's when laziness arrives.

Then there's group B which come directly from HTF because of my sometimes overly constant self-promotion in the WWE, TNA and most especially UFC thread.

Here is hoping year 2 is bigger than year one and I'll have more people to thank to kick off year 3.