CelticsBlog is on the eve of Year 17. With a week before Media Day and training camp before the 2021-2022 season, we take a moment to appreciate what we have here at CelticsBlog and reflect on what it means for us to be fans, writers, and well, fans who write.
Bill Sy: When I first started at CelticsBlog nearly 10 years and 1500 posts ago, I posted a newser about Rajon Rondo replacing Joe Johnson in the All-Star Game and then an “everything is fine” piece during a bad west coast road trip. For piece #3, I wrote an ode to Paul Pierce. The Celtics were scuttling and the boo birds were calling to trade everybody including The Captain who had spent his entire career in Boston. That hurt me and I needed to put all those feelings somewhere. Writing had always been part of my life and work, but I had never married writing with a sport that I loved watching and playing growing up.
As with everything, sports is just another way we express ourselves, whether we’re playing it, watching it, or writing about it. You can find out a lot about someone based on if they take a lot of shots in a pick up game or yell at the TV during a time out or how they see the game on paper. For me, writing at CelticsBlog has always been rewarding because it gave me another outlet to figure out who I was and what I wanted to put out in the world.
Adam Taylor: Basketball is a solitary thing for me. I watch the games alone, write about them alone, and often don’t speak about the sport outside of podcasting/YouTube videos. It’s always been that way for me, having grown up in England, there were never opportunities to talk about last night’s games or how the conference is shaping up.I think that’s why I started writing about basketball in the first place. Not because I think I know more than the next person or because I feel like what I have to say has value, but because it was a way of discussing the game I love with people who wanted to read and interact with the things I had written.
Never in my wildest dreams, did I expect to be fortunate enough to write for a website as amazing as CelticsBlog, and have so many people open discussions with me on social media. Luckily, each day, I get to talk basketball with different fans, make new friends, and build on existing relationships.
Basketball is best served to a community, so while my watching and analyzing process is solitary, CelticsBlog and the power of social media have allowed me to embrace the community aspect of the sport. Now, whenever I want to talk basketball, I simply type a sentence or two into my phone and get a conversation going or I will put together an article on a topic that’s interesting to me.
I write because it’s the only way I know how to express myself in the realm of basketball, and in return I get to be myself in a community of like minded individuals.
Jesse Cinquini: Back in 2017, I was a junior in high school writing for a small Celtics website. In hopes of building a larger audience for myself, I created a Twitter account in March of that year. The very first Twitter account I followed was none other than CelticsBlog. I had read CelticsBlog years before the creation of my Twitter account. But because articles were now flooding my timeline, I was exposed to and reading their content every day.
By the summer of 2017, I had written my first FanPost on the website. Additionally, I set one ultimate goal for myself: write for CelticsBlog someday as a contributor. If I could achieve this, everything else in my sports writing career would be gravy. At the time, though, this goal felt far-fetched. I had little experience writing about sports in any capacity, and English was arguably my worst subject in high school. So, to hone my writing skills, I wrote approximately 200 articles over the next four years for about a half dozen websites ranging from USA Today’s Celtics Wire to SB Nation’s Grizzly Bear Blues.
Then, fast forward to March 2021, this years-long dream of mine to write for CelticsBlog came true. Writing for the best Celtics website out there is an incredible honor, and I look forward to doing so for many years to come.
Simon Pollock: My dad was a New Yorker, through and through. Even though he lived more than half of his life in New England, he never lost that thick, Bronx accent. He grew up around the corner from Yankee Stadium and told me about buying giant pickles out of a vat from a vendor on the way to try and sneak into games when he was seven or eight years-old. There was a ball signed by the ‘51 or ‘52 team in study. He watched the Giants every Sunday.
But he was also a Celtics fan. While working in the Berkshires, he started listening to the radio broadcasts. And by ‘86, he’d made it to a playoff game, driving hours across the state to sit in the old Garden. And there was no sports story he told like the one about watching Michael Jordan drop 63 and still lose to Larry Bird and the C’s in double-overtime. By the time I was around, the Celtics season schedule was a fixture on the kitchen bulletin board. We always finished dinner in time to watch the games.
My dad’s love for the Celtics was the most easily transferable passion and is the longest enduring one that he passed on to me. When I think about the teams of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, I think about both of us screaming “WALTAH” along with Tommy Heinsohn on the NESN broadcast.
In the summer of 2017, my dad had been gone for over half a year. I wrote Jeff about it and asked if I could lend an editing hand at the site. I’d been reporting and editing since 2010 and wanted so much to be a part of a site that shared a love of the Celtics the way my dad and I did.
The rest is history.
Rich Jensen: I’m not really sure why I write. I’ve been doing it for so long that I don’t really remember when I started. It’s possible that I write because I love to read (here’s a tip for aspiring writers out there: Read more than you write).
For me, part of the fun of following the Celtics has been reading first-rate coverage of the team, and several years ago, I decided to apply for a vacancy at Red’s Army—a freewheeling, no-holds-barred, unapologetically partisan blog at the fringe of Celtics coverage. I wanted an opportunity to polish my writing skills and maybe contribute an occasional post that was actually worth reading.
When Red’s Army shut down over the summer, Jeff Clark gave me the opportunity to write for the premier online Celtics community, and I took it.
flceltsfan: I fell in love with the Celtics in 1969. That team had so much heart and grit and they just won me over. I’ve loved the Celtics ever since, even through the lean years. Along the way, I fell in love with the Celtics community and feel that without a doubt, Celtics fans are the best in the world and CelticsBlog fans are the best of the best!
I love contributing here because I love giving back to the Celtics community that I feel such a bond with! I write because I love the Celtics and I love my Celtics’ fan family.
Keith Smith: I’ve been a CelticsBlog reader for a long time. When it could be hard to find regular updates on my favorite team, I could always count on CelticsBlog to have them.
I’ve written about this before, but I moved away from Massachusetts for good in the summer of 2002. I’m now closing in on having lived away from home for as long as I lived there. That’s both wild and scary.
Anyway, I had been writing about basketball and doing some behind the scenes stuff at RealGM for a while. My online presence started to grow, and with that, people noticed my attachment to the Celtics. Because of my love of the salary cap, transactions and roster-building, I got connected with many Celtics writers over the years. When they had questions about the cap or the roster or anything like that, we’d interact and figure it out together. That led to friendships with Kevin O’Connor and Jared Weiss. When Kevin left CelticsBlog, he recommended me to Jeff and Bill and off we went.
But that’s how I got here. Not why I’m here.
I’m here because I love writing about the Celtics. Even when the fans drive me crazy with wild overreactions (“Best team ever!” to “Fire everyone!” in the same game, anyone?), I love the passion. I live in Orlando. People here like the Magic. A handful love the Magic. But it’s not like the fans love of the Celtics back home.
Or the fans love of the Celtics anywhere really.
That’s why I do it. Because of the passion. I’ve yet to post an article on here that someone didn’t have feelings on. Often those comments come with some of the overreactions I mentioned before. But that’s fine. Better that than no one caring at all. That’s why I CelticsBlog. Because of you, dear reader. You make it all worth it.
Bobby Manning: I always read and loved CelticsBlog during the late Big 3 era, before I started blogging toward my sports media pursuit at 14-15 years old. Around the time tickets fell to $13 and I could go to about a dozen games during the early Brad Stevens seasons, I had been writing about my high school football team, blogging about the Celtics and Boston sports for several sites.
I’d sneak to the media section routinely to meet, chat and get advice from various writers and broadcasters. One was Kevin O’Connor. I told him my goals and aspirations, thinking I’d love to write for CelticsBlog in a few years after college. He and Jeff gave me a chance as a high school senior, and I’ve been here ever since five years later.
From wondering whether the Celtics should win games that first year to joining Mike Gorman on the lost take that Boston could challenge Cleveland in that 2015 first round and on to years of various levels of contention. I’ve gotten to podcast and cover games with CLNS and alongside various mentors — really, family — at CB. Long story short, I love Boston, the Celtics, basketball and all the stories all three share.