My sportswriting journey started by chance. I was asked in 2006 if I would join Sports Blog Nation and run the Nebraska site.
At that time, SB Nation was some tiny little sports network, and my Nebraska site, Corn Nation, might have been the eighth or tenth site on the network.
I’ve run that site ever since.
Previously I’d written in the computer industry for 20 years previous to that, but when blogging came out and around the turn of the century, all the magazines I wrote for went out of business within two years.
My writing in the computer industry ended when I wrote an article for an online website and they paid me $25.
I had previously been getting anywhere from $500 to $1500, depending upon the type of article and what magazine it was in. It would only take me a few hours to generate these articles because I had done for so long and, honestly, was fairly well known in the trade.
I spent two or three years very angry about losing my magazines and losing part of my income.
I decided I wanted to write again and it would be about my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers. So, starting Corn Nation with SB Nation was very fortuitous.
When I started, I decided that if I was going to write about college football, I was going to learn as much as possible about it. I started reading every book I could get my hands on about college football history.
I knew that if I asked for review copies, they would be free and I could just read whatever book I wanted as long as I wrote a review about it. A lot of those reviews are still over at Corn Nation.
Something funny happened along the way from 2006 to now.
On August 21st, 2015, I had a widow maker heart attack and I died. I was dead for 20 minutes, and like a buy one, get one free (BOGO), I got a brain injury out of the deal as well.
It’s not a good thing, and I will spare you all the details about the incident. If you’re interested, you can read my book, “Been Dead, Never Been To Europe“.
Because of my death and the brain injury, I lost a lot of memories. I lost personal memories; I lost memories of how to do things.
I was a boy scout leader for 17 years; I taught a lot of knot tying. Now I couldn’t tie a bowline to save my life.
A lot of those memories were about college football history.
Some skills I’ve recovered. Some are gone for good.
But one is still a work in progress and that is my knowledge of college football history.
It’s still there, but it’s kind of rather scrambled.
One of the purposes of building this website and running the Hardcore College Football History channel is so that I can recover my love of both college football and history.
That’s the primary and personal reason.
The second reason, I’ll explain in a bit.
