The Story Behind The Steele Sports Bar
Discover my entire motivation behind launching this virtual community for the everyman sports fan...
Welcome To The Steele Sports Bar!
The online community for the everyman sports fanatic!
Here’s my reasoning and motivation behind the rebrand, and why the launch of The Steele Sports Bar was always written in the stars…
The Story Behind The Steele Sports Bar
I’ve been obsessed with sports my entire life. I’ve also been consumed by the power of the written word for as long as I can remember.
From the first time I could hold a pencil in my hand, I’ve been writing stories and using the power of the written word to express myself in the best possible way.
You could say that sports and writing is all I’ve ever known, and that would be a million percent true. It is. And, from the age of eight, I knew there was only one thing on this planet that I wanted to be…
A sports writer.
And not just any old sports writer. The best damn sports writer I could be.
Now, of course, like any other kid on the planet, I did once harbor dreams and aspirations of actually playing sports and being the one people were writing about on the back pages of newspapers. However, it didn’t take long to work out I had no athletic ability whatsoever.
I mean, have you seen me?!
Finely tuned athlete I am not.
Anyway, I think it was always written in the stars that I would be handed a pad and a pen and empowered to write about sports. It is my gift. My duty. My one true calling in this life.
I was born to write about sports.
And I will never, ever take that for granted.
I also think it was pre-ordained that I would cover sports in America. Originally born in England, I discovered a passionate and deep-rooted obsession with American sports before I hit puberty. Best friends with a kid whose family had ice hockey wired in their very DNA, I vividly remember afternoons spent at my friend’s house being bedazzled by NHL highlights on SportsCenter.
I was hooked.
Having always been somewhat of a black sheep in my family, I leaned into that reputation by devoting my life to covering sports in America, and being the best sports writer that I could be on the other side of the pond.
It isn’t just a career. It’s everything that I am.
Without sports, without writing, I’m nothing. I’m an empty shell of a man floating through life with no purpose, going through the motions like a soulless, lifeless robot.
As the great Adonis Creed so beautifully put it in Creed II, “You wouldn’t be any good to anybody if you didn’t do what you love.”
And I wouldn’t be any good to anybody if I didn’t do what I loved.
That’s writing about sports.
It’s everything I am. It’s all I’ve got. I don’t know nor have the skills to do anything else. Nor would I want to do anything else.
Again, I really do believe that I was born to do exactly this.
Which brings me to The Steele Sports Bar. I spent a lot of my teenage / early adult years obsessively listening to Mike and the Mad Dog, Michael Kay and Dan Patrick, as well as a number of other notable sports broadcasters.
However, the reason Mike Francesa, Chris ‘Mad Dog’ Russo, Michael Kay and Dan Patrick resonated with me so much was that they were diehard sports fans just talking about sports with other diehard sports fans.
The reason why I used to spend hours and hours reading the riveting words of Bill Simmons and Peter King - I still do with the latter, Peter is one of my biggest idols and sources of inspiration on the planet - was because they knew how to connect with sports fans because that’s exactly who they are at their core. They care deeply about the subject they are writing about in depth and, sadly, I think that is in short supply today.
Sports journalism, and indeed journalism in general, has become PR sanitized, social media driven crap where the writer often doesn’t really care about what they are writing about. And, when it comes to sports, that is just plain wrong.
It about damn time sports fans get the coverage of their teams, their heroes and their fandom they so deserve, and that they are severely currently lacking.
I got the idea for this exact kind of site from the slew of hours I’ve spent debating sports with random strangers in a wide variety of sports bars in New York, Boston and Toronto. Those have been some of the funnest nights of my life. Just sat at a bar minding my own business, usually reading a newspaper - yes, I do still read physical newspapers, get over it - when a random voice out of nowhere will initiate a sport debate that will last all night.
It is those fun-filled, beer-fueled conversations that have motivated me to want to run my own sports bar one day. And it is why I’m bringing you The Steele Sports Bar.
If I can’t run an actual sports bar yet, a virtual one is a pretty good start.
Sports is fun. At its very heart, sports should make us feel every single emotion on the planet and it should bring us together under one gargantuan tent. Now, within that tent, you may have some people jumping through tables or spitting obscenities while crushing beers with their jerseys wrapped around their head. Hey, we’re all family here. Anything goes.
But, at the very crux of this site is a burning desire to make sports fun. To make it about the fan.
Because, without the fans, sports wouldn’t be able to function properly at any level.
From The Flying Puck, Foley’s and Mustang Harry’s in New York (God, how I miss both Foley’s and The Flying Puck), to Sullivan’s, Cask ‘N Flagon and the Bleacher Bar in Boston, to The Real Sports Bar and The Loose Moose / Antler Room in Toronto, some of the best nights of my life have come when sat at a bar, cold one firmly clenched in one hand and talking freely about the magic, the beauty and the grace of sports all night long. Like the time I ended up on an all-nighter with a Capitals fan in Toronto after Washington had just won its first Stanley Cup in franchise history.
Now that was a fun night.
And, essentially, that’s my ultimate hope for The Steele Sports Bar.
That this site becomes the one-stop, essential virtual hangout for all sports fans. Where we can all come together, have a cold one and talk about the thing that we all love most.
Sports.
Think of me as your bartender for the night - serving drinks and setting the table for some great sports talk all night long.
For our current readers and subscribers, you are going to love the next chapter of this journey.
For those new around here, I welcome you to The Steele Sports Bar Community.
Now, grab a cold one and come talk sports with us!