After I spilled the beans and gave some insight into who I am and what makes me tick, Big D suggested that we should have all the authors do the same, if in less detail. What follows here is a short (Ahem… very, very long) breakdown of each of our authors, in their own words. And maybe even some more pictures.

Okay, enough from me. Enjoy, and please don’t rip us to shreds in the comments.

Who are we kidding – you’re gonna have a field day.

Unmasking… HuskerDawg: My real name is Parrish and I chose HuskerDawg for my pseudonym because I grew up in Lincoln, NE and am a huge Husker fan, but I went to school at UGA (University of Georgia) and am also an avid Bulldog. I love all things college football, the NBA–specifically the playoffs–and the NFL (go Falcons!!). I became interested in blogs when I realized that I could say pretty much whatever I wanted and get away with it (albeit without getting paid). I found the gents at Spartyandfriends via The Big Lead comments section. TBL was kind enough to make me the college football “intern” in 2008, giving me a voice in the vast blogosphere, and for that I am eternally grateful. One quick email to Sparty and a few Duke bashes later I was a part of the team.

Sadly for me, this is not my real job (damn money). In reality I work for a small newspaper in Atlanta, GA as a sports editor, eagerly awaiting my big break when I find out that Mike Vick also fights infant children in his basement (though judging from the backlash towards him, you’d swear that’s what he got pinched for). When I’m not covering rich high school kids from swanky private schools, I love to play trivia, tennis, basketball and cook. I am an avid reader, but 99% of said reading comes from articles and magazines, not books. I am a recently married man (April, 2009) and I have the coolest dog in the world. I guess that pretty much wraps it up.

Unmasking… Big D: First things first – the “D” is for Dave. Or if you’re related to me, “DAVID – if we wanted you to be called Dave we would have named you Dave”. My college friends gave me the Big D moniker mostly because I’m a big dude and my name starts with a D. My friends aren’t the most creative people on Earth. I’ve been a sports freak since birth – as a Massachusetts native, it’s kind of in the breeding. Sox, Pats, C’s & B’s… friends often joked that I watched four TV stations – three starting with ESPN, and the fourth being NESN.

After growing up as a multi-sport athlete (baseball at a very high level for ten+ years, basketball for about eight years – nice to be 6′0″ at 14 years old, not so nice to still be there at 27 – soccer, golf, tennis, and more) for most of my younger days, I made the natural transition to writing baseless opinions and conjecture after my body started failing my athletic aspirations. Writing my own blog “The best seat in the house is the view from the couch” for over five years, I opined on topics ranging from Boston sports to Boston sports, occasionally touching on Boston sports, and even reaching way out there every so often for a story about playing poker. I probably owe my humble writing beginnings to Aaron Bleepin’ Boone, but if you ever ask me about it I’ll deny everything and blame it on an alcohol-fueled blackout after that game.

In July of 2008, I joined the founding staff of Sparty and Friends full time, closing up shop on my own blog and bringing all of my Boston sports love and general gambling knowledge to the bright lights and bigger audience Sparty had to offer. I was originally one of the commenters over at the DanShanoff.com and DSCommenters websites, but decided to move somewhere with more readership and (surprisingly) more access to the sporting world for information. Since that time, I have been a regular contributor to the S & F section of the blogosphere, penning articles on everything from NFL gambling to NBA gambling, Boston sports teams and… well, not much else.

However, like every other author here, this is not my full-time gig (even if I spend most of my “work hours” reading and writing pages on the site…) I’m also a general movie and technology geek, writing for a second blog in my spare time and amassing a DVD collection that would put most small movie rental stores to shame. I’ve spent the past five years as a Medical Simulation Technician/Specialist in medical and nursing schools or hospitals around the country, taking a year off to indulge my competitive nature and feed my ego by playing poker professionally. And if I could achieve one non-athletic dream, it would be to get a spot on Jeopardy! so I could break that smarmy Ken Jennings’ 74-game winning streak. He’s got nothing on my knowledge of completely useless trivia. You can reach me at bigd@spartyandfriends.com.

Unmasking… MikeyChx: Mikey…code name for Mike…uninspiring, I know. CHX = Chicks Beach...where I became me. Chicks Beach is the local beach in Virginia Beach where no tourist goes. Think Hawaiian local beaches without the ass kickings for the tourist. Kinda secret….but not really. Chicks Beach is where all of my best friends still reside to this day….even though I am stuck in California.

I came to Sparty and Friends after I realized my Cubs Blog was going nowhere fast. Why? I am not nearly delusional enough to run a Cubs blog. So I shilled for a job with Sparty, and he bit…hook line and sinker. I joined the staff about four months after the blog started..I was never a Shanoff commenter so I rarely get the inside jokes. I found Sparty via Major League Jerk,via, The Big Lead.

I was born in Chicago making me a Cubs fan…I used to be a Bulls fan until Krause broke up the dynasty. I moved to Ocala, Florida as a kid and went to Bucs games …but never to see the Bucs. When they became relevant, I had a soft spot in my heart for them….and I still do to this day. After living in Memphis, Virginia Beach, and now north of Los Angeles (Ventura)…I find myself a sports vagabond….liking teams that don’t make sense to most of you, liking sports that would seem odd to others. I do not follow Sockey or Hoccer. Teams = Lakers, Cubs, Buccaneers, Cowboys (saw Emmitt @ UF as a kid more than once)…this means UF as well.

I think I may be the oldest author here in Sparta at 37. I am the resident photoshopper. I am either here or gone most of the time as I own a couple of different businesses. This means I am either a full time blogger or making excuses why I am not writing. I work hard at not working hard….this formula has worked for me since 2001.

At the end of the day….I am the night time commenter / moderator…I invented things like Happy Hour and the Seventh Inning Stretch….hopefully soon – The Drive Home. Maybe if I lived on the east coast I could write original material more….but by the time I get out of bed – the story is already history.

I used to play a mean game of volleyball as a kid and proved that short white guys could jump. At my peak I had about a 36″ vert….not bad for a 5′9″ guy. Now I spend my time playing sports you can play while drinking a beer. Golf (11 hcp), Darts, Pool, Poker, Bowling, Horseshoes, Fishing….if you can hold a beer and compete….count me in.

When I am not blogging you can find me doing high end home entertainment systems for the fine folks of Southern California. I own a Control4 dealership. I also consult on high end business jets. In case you are wondering…high end is not good business these days, but somehow I am getting by. Distributed video and audio systems are under rated and I wish you guys could all have a system in your house. Pressing play on the BluRay and the lights dimming is nice….watching football on a blow up movie screen with your projector piping the game in HD is nicer. I should do a post on his one day. Stay tuned this fall.

Wow…I just read this back – and wanted to change it but I didn’t know what I would write differently. I am a has been. I am okay with being a has been….it is better than being a “never was.”

Unmasking… GatorTrey: Why GatorTrey? Just “Trey” couldn’t be used on WordPress for some reason…and of course, I went to the greatest sports and academic institution in America. The University of Florida. I actually grew up on the campus (literally on campus housing) while my father was completing his postgraduate degrees in the 80’s. Needless to say, I’m as orange and blue as they get. Again literally. My hair is orange (red really…why do they call it red?) and I occasionally wear blue shirts (but NEVER pink).

My real name is Joseph, although I have never gone by that in my almost 30 years of existence. You see I’m the third Joseph, and rather than create some confusion my parents immediately started calling me Trey. (True story, Pat thought I was black). I was born in Orlando, but grew up all over the south, Claxton, Ga.; Gainesville; Charleston, S.C.; Little Rock; and finally back to Orlando. As you can clearly see I’ve got some diverse culture…In 2007 I married my longtime girlfriend who is Canadian and Jewish…so the South Park movie rags on everything my wife stands for…No kids yet, but I’m 99% sure my dog is 10 times cooler than Parrish’s (HuskerDawg).

My favorite sport is college football…Growing up I knew Saturdays in the fall were special…especially living on a big football campus. For this reason I hold season tickets to the University of Florida (which I buy through an ancient booster). I haven’t missed watching a Gator game in years, and don’t plan on it anytime soon. I still hold a place in my heart for baseball, although I follow a few teams, namely the Yanks (more so) and the Rays (they’re local!). Professionally, I am a die hard Magic fan, they’re my passion in professional sports. No, not because they’re bulldozing through the playoffs now. Ask anyone who knows me, I had an AIM screen name that was contained the word Magic, and in the lean times people mistook it for some type of love for Magic the Gathering…which I’ve never played. I’ve watched their games since they were the Tragic..all three times…I even own a Rony Seikaly jersey. I bet you didn’t even know he PLAYED for the Magic.

I think most of you know for my real job I am a criminal defense attorney in Orlando. This came after making one of the craziest decisions in my life…going BACK to school and moving to Dayton, OH. There are cleaner urinals at the jail than that city. My whole life I wanted to work in baseball, this was after I discovered I was too small to play the damn sport at any advanced level (I stand a towering 5′4″). In 2001 the dream came to fruition when Mr. George M. Steinbrenner III (Also a Trey) hired me to be the player personnel intern for the New York Yankees player personnel/scouting department. I spent the summer there as well as a good chunk of 2003 doing much of the same. While the experience was definitely jaw dropping and something I’d love to do again, maybe one day…

Unmasking… Mizerle06: I hate talking about myself. So, instead of just copying “Unmasking…GatorTrey” and replacing all the GatorTrey’s with Mizerle06’s, I’d like to reference an excerpt of an interview that I conducted with myself upon accepting the job to write at Sparty & Friends:

Q. So, tell us your name and something internet-worthy about yourself.
mizerle06: My internet name is mizerle06 and I derived most of my initial fame from commenting at The Big Lead and Major League Jerk. My huge break came when Mr. Big Lead allowed me to do a post on Notre Dame’s schedule strength. I became an internet sensation overnight…

Q. Why are you working for Sparty and Friends?
mizerle06: I have an intense hunger to educate the masses with my wealth of knowledge in NASCAR and pro bass fishing. Sparty recognized the potential in the untapped blog market catering to these topics and when word reached him of my availability, he jumped immediately. (Actually, the big boss read my post at The Big Lead and was looking to kill some space at his blog so he offered me a job. His main pitch was something like, “the benefits are terrible and the pay is even worse.” With an offer like that, how could any self-respecting man refuse?)

Q. What topics will you be writing about at Sparty and Friends?
mizerle06: My favorite sports/leagues are college football, NFL, and college basketball so most of my sports-related writing will revolve around those. As you can probably tell by this interview so far, I’m an excellent orator and have mastered using English as my secondary language (southern Appalachia is my native tongue) so I may also be writing on a few non-sports topics every now and then.

I’m a passionate college football and basketball fan (football is king, though), and especially a fanatic for the Tennessee Volunteers. I grew up approximately 100 miles from the Knoxville, TN campus in the very northeast corner of Tennessee, a town of 50,000+ called Johnson City. While I attended and graduated from Tennessee, you will also periodically experience my Memphis Tiger basketball homerisms due to my time spent in grad school at Memphis. I also I’m also an unapologetic baseball non-fan. However, my favorite broad topics to think and write about are our sports perceptions – whether false or true – and how they influence the way we look at sports locally and globally. For this reason, you may periodically read something baseball-related with my name attached. And, as anyone that has ever read one of my posts knows, I also like to use numbers to look at trends and will almost always reach as far as possible to work in a spreadsheet or two into whatever topic I happen to be spewing about.

In my real life, my name is Mark and I’m a structural engineer. You may be asking yourself what the heck my internet name means or where it came from. Short story, I lost a foosball tournament…to my future wife. See, while I was in Memphis attending grad school, my then-fiance and now-wife bought me a really nice Foosball table for Christmas. We played several times a week for almost a year and a half, sometimes multiple times a day. Needless to say, we got pretty good. We would play best-of-7 series and place wagers that the loser would have to pay up on. There for a while, she had actually surpassed me in Foosball talent and was regularly whipping my rear. She proposed the stakes for one of our series as winner having the exclusive rights to pick our last name after we were married. Not wanting to be a wuss and back out, I agreed…and promptly lost in 7 games. She decided it would be funny to mix our last names, and that turned into Mizerle (pronounced “My-zer-lee”). Now, even though she won fair-and-square and had every right to demand the spoils as the foosball victor, she didn’t actually make me change my last name. But, Mizerle has been my nickname for 5-and-a-half years now! Oh, and the “06″ part of “Mizerle06″ comes from Wordpress being retarded back in the day and not just accepting “Mizerle” by itself; since ‘06 was the year the knot was tied…seemed appropriate.

By the way, Miz is a redneck.

Unmasking… PatPhish: I was born a poor black child. See, this is me living up to my finest accomplishment since joining Sparty and Friends: the day Big D welcomed Huskerdawg to our staff and said I was “probably the funniest guy we have here”. I actually was born a lower middle class white kid from Hartford, Connecticut. I can be pretty funny, (I have a few things in common with a lot of comedians-think Robin Williams or Richard Pryor, not Bill Cosby) but really I think I come from a long line of great story tellers, it is part of my New England Irish heritage.

My stage name is PatPhish, which is pretty easy to explain. Patrick by birth combined with Phish, the dirty stinky hippie jam band I spent most of the 1990’s following around. I spent my first 26 years in Connecticut going by Pat and the last decade in South Florida being Patrick. The crew here calls me Pat out of laziness, who the hell wants to write 5 extra letters. Hell, we shortened Big D to just D.

I grew up playing hockey and baseball, the first being my passion, the latter was where my talent was. My ability to do the “hardest thing in sports” was very good and I grew up in a crazy baseball town filled with talent. I also was “blessed” with the awesome Irish growth gene. I was 5′ 7″ in 7th grade. Today I stand………………….5′ 7″. My father and grandfather were both huge sports fans and voracious readers, 2 things I inherited at a young age. I am a news junkie and I spend entirely too much time on the internet.

College sports are my passion, Notre Dame football in the fall and UConn hoops in the winter. I recently married a great girl from Penn State and she is a passionate Paterno disciple. My dad was a huge Nittany Lions’ fan, so I have always had a soft spot for them, and Saturdays at my house are a lot of fun. Don’t underestimate marrying a girl that loves college football, she understands the 4 hour sacrifice that takes place on Saturdays in the fall. It matters. I also love baseball (Mets) and the NFL (Jets). I no longer have much interest for the NBA, I watch the playoffs but the lack of defense and hustle and the inconsistent refereeing really turn me off.

I am the only writer here that was personal friends with Sparty before the blog, we worked together for years in an office full of non-sports fans. We would banter back and forth for hours until he left here and moved to Jersey. He got me reading The Big Lead and we would send TBL links all day hoping they would blog about them. When he started this crappy little blog, he sent me an invite, figuring I would spew Notre Dame love he could then crush. He was right.

I have several sports truths that I live by. I don’t need to defend them, because they are truths, not opinions. They include: The 1985 Bears are the greatest team ever. The 1994 PSU team is the best college football team I have ever seen. Notre Dame got jobbed in 1991 and 1993. LeBron>Kobe. I would rather eat glass than see the Miami Dolphins win. Doc Gooden had the best modern season ever in 1985. Uconn basketball fans are the most passionate in the country, it is the Connecticut state religion.

Finally, I hate Duke.

GuyInTheCorner has chosen his continued anonymity over actually giving us any insight to what makes him the man he is provided us with generic information about his life! I will tell you what we know about him from our e-mail conversations: He’s from the Washington DC area. We have no idea what he does for a living outside of this blogging business, though we have never seen GITC and John Hollinger in the same place at the same time. He believes the 2002 Maryland Terrapins are, at worst, one of the five best NCAA Men’s Basketball Champions of the past twenty years. He may or may not really exist outside of our collective imaginations. While we often joke that he is akin to a male version of Carmen Sandiego, it occurred to me that he is much closer to The Riddler – complete anonymity, often posing questions and theories that make absolutely no sense to anyone but him, etc. GITC also originated the NBA Studs & Duds series here on S & F, as well as the “Things Dan Got Wrong Today” back on the original DSCommenters blog. He is most well known for the GITC Expectorant Theorum of NBA analysis, and the requisite seventeen memes at the end of each post or comment.

Wow. As much as I love that paragraph, I feel I should give a little bit more to our loyal readers. I do like my anonymity and there are reasons why I use it. I’ve used fake names before, I’ve set up random e-mail addresses, but writing is what I really like to do. I won’t reveal anything new, rather save people the trouble of looking through the entirety of the archives of here, us at blogspot, DSCommenters, and Dan Shanoff’s website. I started this whole chain while I was working for ESPN in 2004 in DC in the same office building as Dan Shanoff, Around the Horn, and PTI. I met Dan a few times and started reading the Daily Quickie at ESPN’s Page 2. I was even in the control room for Dan’s famously horrific appearances on ATH. That led me to following Dan’s writing off of ESPN, and eventually to here. I know the NBA like the back of my hand, and I’m also big into the MLB. I love the X-Games and do our stuff for that. I’m a huge fan of the Olympics, the World Cup, Tennis, and even the occasional Tiger appearance. I follow the NFL a lot but will never have an expert’s grasp because I never played the video games or serious organized ball with pads and headsets and stuff. I’m not big on hockey, but I watched a bunch of games this year.

I played basketball, volleyball, tennis, and soccer in high school. I was the captain of both the soccer and tennis teams. I went to Israel after high school where I coached our school’s football team, as well as played, and also played for the baseball team. I have the gift of hand eye coordination and athleticism that allow me to pick up pretty much any physical activity in 15 minutes. I love the Redskins, Orioles (no Nats when I grew up), Wizards, and Terps. My father, grandfather, and great-grandfather went to UMD before I did and I love attending basketball games to this day. I hate the Cowboys, Duke basketball, the Yankees, the Spurs, Notre Dame football, and the Colts. I have a strong dislike for the NYFG, the Eagles, the Pistons, the Knicks, the Steelers, the Raiders, UConn Basketball, and Florida State football. That should get my biases out of the way. I am famous among people around me for picking the NCAA basketball champion before the start of the tournament for 12 straight years now. My friends and I take a yearly trip to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA., which is friggin’ awesome by the way. This year I might even post from there. And if you want to reach me it’s gitc@spartyandfriends.com.

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