At around 8 years old, I had written some doggerel for a school assignment that passed as poetry: “the teacher is gone/the children hum/now we can all chew chewing gum.” (Who remembers things like that?) But one of my teachers liked it enough to recommend I write some more and submit it to Ebony Magazine, the storied and influential monthly chronicler of African-American life, as part of a young poets’ contest, or something. But I said no, out of fear I wouldn’t win, or that the kids in my school would laugh at me.

Thus began a series of fear-based questions in life: Do I ask that girl for her phone number? Do I try out for the football team? Do I learn how to swim? In my youth, the answer almost always was no, the fear of losing or being rejected was greater to me than the potential thrill of winning. When you’re shy you don’t put yourself out there very often.

But when you get older, you realize that life is short. And that it will go on with or without you, so you might as well do the thing you really want to do. No one’s going to care much one way or the other if you fail. And if you do, you’ll probably learn something in the process.

So, in the mid-1990s, instead of staying in the relative comfort of the sports section at The Washington Post, where I’d been for nine years since getting a general assignment job out of college, I moved on to ESPN. I wasn’t unhappy at the Post; far from it. Since I was a kid, I revered the paper, reading it every day, front to back, engrossed with the daily output of Woodward and Bernstein.

But I went to ESPN, even though I knew next to nothing about television, because I thought the Four-Letter Network was blowing up, and I wanted to be a part of what was coming together there. It was an educated hunch. And it was the right thing to do.

I’ve felt similar comingled pangs of fear and anticipation in the last couple of weeks, having decided to leave Turner Sports — the best job I’ve had in my life — after 14 years as a reporter and analyst, to be in my beloved and so misunderstood hometown, Washington, D.C., on a more regular basis.

Really, on a permanent basis.

I will, in early October, become the editor-in-chief of The Athletic D.C.

No, I can’t believe I typed that, either.

I was the EIC at The Eagle, the student newspaper at American University — in, again, D.C. — and it was a blast. But it’s been a while. (How long ago? Reagan was president. Shut up.)

Not that this is the equivalent of climbing Everest, but it’s a pretty big deal to leave the Chuckster and Kenny the Jet and Shaq and EJ when you were making a good living and your bosses were pleased with your work.

Indulge me for a second.

Jeff Behnke and Jeff Ogan hired me at Turner in 2004 at an especially low point in my career. I had a three-month-old baby, and my wife and I had just signed contracts for a top-to-bottom renovation of our house because I expected to be employed at ESPN for a while. That … turned out to be incorrect. But Turner believed in me. They didn’t try to change me. They believed in my work, and they provided every resource anyone could receive. Everyone there, from David Levy to the newest intern, has been warm and supportive every day. Turner is great because it employs great people.

But when this possibility with The Athletic arrived, it checked all the boxes.

(A caveat: The Athletic D.C. is a work in progress. We announced our outstanding Skins team last week, and we’re announcing additional hires today, with more on the way. We are doing this in real time because the readers have demanded that TADC get rolling, rather than wait. But it’s going to take a bit to fully staff the site. Make no mistake, though — it will be staffed, and staffed well.)

So why make the move now? First, and foremost, I’ve been missing too much of my family’s collective life. My wife and I have two sons, who are growing up way too fast. And I don’t want to keep missing plays and concerts and baseball games. I’ll still miss some of them, but not as many. I’ll hopefully be able to take my wife out more than once or twice a month. There will be a lot of long days and nights, and a lot of games to attend in town, but when the games are over, I’ll go home, not to a hotel.

Second, I’m a man in love with words. Even though I’ve primarily been a television reporter for the last two decades, I still often refer to myself as a writer who appears on TV. My voice comes from my writing. Believe me: I understand the power of television. It produces emotional, visceral reactions.

But I roll with words. And The Athletic is about words — beautifully reported and written ones. And I will write some of them, about everything going on in D.C., from the Skins and Nats to the Mystics and Caps. In some cases, as with the Caps, I expect to listen more than write at first, as I am hardly an expert on hockey though I can spell “Kuznetsov” pretty easily now. In others, like the Nats, I watch almost every game during the year and have had split season tickets with friends since Nationals Park opened, so I’ll feel more comfortable opining right away. And, of course, I’ll have some thoughts on the Wizards.

Still, I wouldn’t have left Turner just to write a column.

I was born at what was, then, Freedman’s Hospital — and what is, now, Howard University Hospital. We lived on Fairmont Street, near Howard, before moving to Northeast. Went to John Burroughs Elementary and Taft Junior High in Northeast. Went to DeMatha Catholic High School, just outside the D.C. line in Hyattsville. Went to AU, in a part of D.C. I had never laid eyes on before my first day of classes there. Lived in Southwest, near where Nationals Park now stands, through much of my 20s. And while I’ve worked at ESPN and Turner, and at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I never moved; I live in the city, as I have, essentially, all my life.

There are two D.C.’s. There’s the federal enclave where politicians and lobbyists and the political media gather daily. This is the “D.C.” that so many who don’t live here think encompasses the town. It does not.

My D.C. is the city of GS10s and bus drivers, the teachers who lived in your neighborhoods, like Mrs. Crusoe and Mrs. Quander lived in mine; the city of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and of Ben’s Chili Bowl; the city of the Uptown Theatre, the Howard Theatre and the National Theatre, the city of the Big Chair and the U.S. Arboretum. It’s Momofuku and Michigan Park; Foggy Bottom and Petworth. And I’ve missed it as I watched it disappear on takeoff from DCA on plane after plane after plane over the years, off to do another game in another city.

Other than covering the Nats’ Division Series against the Cardinals and Giants for Turner, I’ve watched most of the Nationals’ seven-year run with this Strasburg/Harper-led group from a hotel room or on my laptop or phone. Same for much of the Skins’ RGIII/Cousins hoo-hah. And now that the landscape of D.C. sports is changing, with the Caps defending their title and Elena Delle Donne doing work for the Mystics in the WNBA Finals, the market seems to be reaching full maturity.

Not parenthetically, it was the Capitals’ run to the Cup this past spring that helped get me to “yes” with The Athletic.

Watching the crowds at Penn Quarter surrounding Capital One Arena during the playoffs — huge and surging and enthusiastic — I was struck by how young and diverse they were. Long gone are the days when the Caps only had 30,000 or so total fans in the area. Their base is as conversant and intelligent about the team’s fourth line as it is about Ovechkin. It knew the team’s playoff history, and had suffered through all of it, but stayed loyal nonetheless, and grew and grew, just as the Nationals’ fan base has despite similar disappointments. And that is the mark of a real sports town.

I wanted to be part of a team that covers those teams. I didn’t want to play it safe. I love the NBA, and could have covered it for the rest of my working life. But I certainly hope I can do more in life than ask Gregg Popovich two questions at the end of the third quarter.

Thirdly, at the same time D.C.’s base has been evolving, and its teams’ stories becoming more compelling, The Athletic was emerging as the vehicle by which to cover them.

You’d have to be willfully ignorant not to notice what The Athletic has done in sports journalism the last two years, and the people who have gone there around the country. And I came to believe that The Athletic, and the people who are bankrolling it, represent something new — or, maybe, something old that’s being done better. We’ve all crossed the Rubicon where pay models for content are concerned. Almost every newspaper is behind some sort of paywall now, as well as many magazines and legacy publications.

For around $5 a month, you not only get The Athletic D.C. (memo to bosses: The Athletic DMV?) but also all of the site’s incredible local and national coverage. That means Ken Rosenthal and Jayson Stark, among others, on baseball, and Scott Burnside and Pierre LeBrun (and my pal Lisa Dillman in L.A.) on the NHL, and Seth Davis, Dana O’Neil and Ken Pomeroy (yes, KenPom) on college basketball. And it means Stewart Mandel and Bruce Feldman on college football, too.

It means Jay Glazer on the NFL. Let me repeat that: It means Jay Glazer on the NFL. You don’t need me to say anything else, do you? It means Shams Charania, who is apparently an actual person and not a wholly made-up artificial intelligence not unlike the title character in the Pacino flick “Simone,” on the NBA. I’ve taken notice of “Shams,” or whatever it is, over the last couple of years, as he proceeded to break 7,431 stories a week. When I heard he was a 20-something who wasn’t yet out of college and already had half the league on speed dial. … Well, did I mention I’m going to be the editor-in-chief of The Athletic D.C.?

And in D.C., it means a staff that I believe with my heart you will come to love.

You are going to love Chris Kuc, who covered each of the Blackhawks’ three recent Stanley Cup runs, as he comes to D.C. to cover the Caps. You are going to love Tarik El-Bashir and Rhiannon Walker on the Skins, with Grant Paulsen and Mark Bullock providing invaluable insights alongside them, based on years covering the team. Tarik has toggled over the years between covering the Skins and the Caps; he’ll primarily cover football for us, though he will occasionally dip back into Caps coverage when warranted.

Rhiannon has built an incredible resume for someone so young, having spent the last two years at The Undefeated, where she’s done really smart work (like this on Dusty Baker, post-Nats, in Cali.) She will bring so many of the people in Ashburn to life in her coverage. Grant, of course, started covering sports when he was four, and he will continue doing his morning radio show on 106.7 The Fan while writing for us. Bullock, somehow, mastered the intricacies of NFL offensive line play from England. But he’s been brilliant the last few years dissecting the game in dispatches for the Post, and we’re thrilled he’s going to bring that level of sophistication to our coverage.

We are going to have Fred Katz lead our Wizards beat coverage. Fred did great work covering the Thunder for years in Oklahoma City and has been on the Celtics beat the last few months in Boston. Eamonn Brennan, already a contributing writer at The Athletic, will be our conduit to the college hoops scene. We’ll be bringing in Lindsay Gibbs to cover the Mystics during the WNBA Finals this week. Pablo Maurer will lead our D.C. United coverage and write about other soccer items that tickle his fancy (as he did here).

And our TADC staff provides a great segue to the final reason that I’m doing this.

Alex Mather and Adam Hansmann, the co-founders of The Athletic, have put their (substantial) money where their mouth is getting this enterprise up and running in 40 cities in the U.S. and Canada (including en francais in Montreal). And, they’ve hired me to run one of those cities. That opportunity is not afforded to people of color very often. Any look at the TIDES’ annual survey of the demographic makeup of print/digital sports departments nationwide will show you how white and male most of them still are, at all levels.

And, out of the gate, The Athletic looked like more of the same. But Alex and Adam worked on improving it. They had representation at the NABJ convention in Detroit in July and worked closely with Sherrod Blakely, the chair of our NABJ Sports Task Force, on better identifying the available talent out there.

And so Lisa Wilson, one of the best editors in the country, is now running our NFL vertical. C.L. Brown is covering college hoops. Colton Pouncy is covering Michigan State for The Athletic Detroit. Arif Hasan covers the Vikings in Minneapolis, Michael-Shawn Dugar the Seahawks in Seattle. And on and on. It’s not finished, or perfect. But it’s a lot better. And I feel very comfortable trying to help make it even better going forward.

Adam has been a partner in staffing TADC, and I’m happy to say many of the people we’ve hired have been as much his idea as mine. Our staff has both hard-won experience and the energy of youth, and it has diversity based on talent. I want to keep the door open for writers of color and women and others who’ve struggled to get a foot in the door, be a mentor to our young writers on the staff, and learn not only from them but also from everyone.

That includes you. When we write something with which you disagree tell us — respectfully — and we’ll listen. Doesn’t mean we will always come around to your point of view, but we will listen. I will respect our readers; I ask you to send the same respect back.

Some of you may be waiting for me to take a shot at the Post, the 8,000-pound journalism gorilla in town. It will not be forthcoming. The Post is a great paper, and I am, and always will be, a proud alumnus of the institution. It is doing vital work in this era of attacks on the free press specifically and our democracy in general. My feelings about it will never change.

But no paper is so great that it couldn’t use some competition. No medium is so important that it should have a monopoly in any city on intelligent, aggressive coverage.

We are not going to put The Washington Post out of business. We know that. And if that was the charge from Adam and Alex, I wouldn’t be here.

But I do pledge that The Athletic D.C. will try to win every day when it comes to covering sports in my hometown. And we will win a lot of days. And when we don’t, we’ll be right back at the front of the line the next day, ready to get after it again.

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