Goodbye, Red’s Army

It’s been almost exactly 13 years since Chuck and I launched Red’s Army.

We were both overnight news producers at WBZ having a lot of fun reading Boston Dirt Dogs and talking a LOT of shit as we tried to get through the grind of an 11pm to 8am shift.

I remember one of us having the epiphany that we should basically make a  Boston Dirt Dogs-type site for the Celtics. At that point, blogs were in their infancy and neither of us really knew of a site like that.

So we came up with a name, deciding that followers of the Celtics were led by Red Auerbach. We were, in essence, following our leader wherever he took us. That made Red the general, and it made every Celtic’s fan part of Red’s army.

The early iterations of the site were crude, but it didn’t matter because all we ever wanted to do with it was have fun. I made inane Photoshops before they were called “memes.” We took outrageous stances because we were just a couple of sleep-deprived jackasses with time on our hands and we didn’t feel like doing the stuff other sites were already doing well.

A lot has changed over the years. Personally, I began to take the outlet a little more seriously as it got more attention. I became a sort of Jim Carrey of blogging; the abject goofiness eventually gave way to more serious work. Every once in a while I’ll still flex my weird chops but over the years I developed the desire to get deeper and deeper into actual basketball coverage.

Eventually, as my life changed and I evolved as a person, I started to believe that Red’s Army was my path out of television news and into a full-time basketball career. It wasn’t just a site for me anymore, it became an obsession.

Chuck and I constantly joke about the failures of our other ventures, the Ted’s Army Red Sox blog and Ray’s Army Bruins blog, saying our biggest problem was not being able to find people who were too stupid to stop blogging when life got in the way.

If I told you every private detail about my life, “too stupid to stop” might be how most of you summed it up too. The reality, though, is that I’m too in love with the game to give it up. I’m too in love with writing and talking about it to stop. It’s not that I was too stupid to give it up when other things seemed more pressing. It’s that I didn’t love anything else enough to make it more of a priority.

That is, until today.

As many of you already know, I’ve taken a job a Celtics beat writer for MassLive.com. After all these years of blogging, I’m now going to be working full-time for a great outlet covering the Boston Celtics. It’s a dream gig that comes with only one downside. I have to leave RedsArmy.com.

The good news is (at least for those of you who like what I do) is that my coverage will look very similar on MassLive. Tom Westerholm and I are teaming up to hopefully give you some of the best Celtics coverage around. It’s going to be a lot of fun for me, and I hope for you as well.

Thank you to everyone along the way for reading, even if you’ve stopped a long time ago and you never see this sentence. The support has been amazing for such a long time, and without it, I never would have believed I had a chance to pursue this as a career. Every piece of encouragement, every argument, everyone who told me I sucked… it all matters to me.

Thanks to everyone who ever wrote a word on this site. You all helped make it what it is, and you helped me keep going. Some of you are still writing, some of you have moved on, some of you have given up blogging entirely, but you’ve all done meaningful work here.

And Thanks most of all to my partner in this for 13 years, Chuck McKenney. Sometimes I don’t know how we kept this damn site afloat, but we did. Thanks for the encouragement along the way as I tried to make this leap.

Red’s Army will continue now under Chuck and our great staff. Maybe some of my stuff will be worthy of aggregation on here. Maybe I’ll be back when MassLive realizes what a horrible mistake it has made.

The great thing about this is that I don’t feel like it’s a real “goodbye.” My stuff is just going to live somewhere else in the same neighborhood… it just has nicer offices and a better expense account.

I hope you drop by sometime.