batug.com

» see batug.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Basketball was never my sport and Turkish sports forums were never my corner of the web, but the shape of this thing is one I recognize completely. A site with a masthead. A dozen people writing for free, in their own voice, about a league none of them would ever get press credentials for. That was the standard unit of the Turkish web in the 2000s, and in my case it was hardware boards instead of the NBA.

The site started around 2001 and its tagline was kafaya göre, which means roughly according to the head, or as you like, and worked as a license to publish whatever the writer wanted at whatever length. The front page from 2010 lists what it was carrying: NBA power rankings written every week by Mete Acar, team columns filed under headlines like sanmayın Kobe kambur, a Euroleague column, a glossary of basketball terms in Turkish, and a section on the history of the game that used sepettopu, the archaic Turkish word for basketball nobody had said out loud in fifty years.

It was organized like a magazine and not like a portal. Writers had bylines and pieces had titles that were jokes. There was a wallpapers page and a mailing list, plus a block of links asking whether you had helped a child or an animal that day, each one ending with the word tıkla, click. The editorial address was at batug.org rather than batug.com, which tells you how carefully anybody was thinking about domains.

And in the corner of the front page there was a column headed RIP, with dates. Bruce Paltrow and Hunter Thompson are on it, so are the sportswriter Ralph Wiley and the coaches Arnold Auerbach and Chuck Daly. Two Turkish names sit among them, and one is A. Alparslan Evcimen, 1934 to 2007, sharing a surname with the man who ran the site. A basketball zine that kept a permanent memorial column in the furniture of its own homepage is not what I expected to find while researching a site that ended by writing its own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the masthead ~

The writing model was the interesting part. Nobody at batug.com was a journalist, and the site never pretended otherwise. Turkish sports media in that decade was newspaper columnists and television panels, all of it built around football, and the NBA got covered the way a foreign hobby gets covered, which is badly and once a week.

So a group of people who watched games at three in the morning wrote about them instead. There were team-by-team columns and a power ranking that arrived on a real schedule for years, and the consistency was enough that Eurosport, covering the closure, called the site a turning point for basketball coverage in Turkey. That is a generous line for a zine, but the alternative in 2003 was a wire report translated by somebody who did not know what a pick and roll was.

~ the stone ~

On 24 May 2011 everything came off and one page went up. The title bar still says kafaya göre. Under it an h1 reads bitik, finished, and below that a farewell runs down the page as unpunctuated lines separated by dashes.

It opens: bu bir mezarın taşı, this is a gravestone, a corpse that wants no mourning, lying restless right there in our yesterday. Then yas değil yaz, which is either not mourning but summer or not mourning but write, since the word does both jobs and the site would have known that. The magazine we shared was breath, it says, and the cleanest thing is the thing that costs nothing, that is what we were. We were the selves we could not be anywhere else, we went comfortably mad and could cry in the open, and if it is crying now it is from having laughed so much.

Then the funeral formula, bent: öldük kaldık, hepimiz birbirimizden razı olsun. We died and stayed dead, may we all be satisfied with one another, which is the line said over a coffin in Turkey with the deceased swapped out for a website. It closes with two instructions to the reader. Dikkat edin noktasızdır, pay attention, there are no periods in it. Sonu başındadır ve elbet kavis çizecektir, its end is in its beginning and it will certainly draw an arc. Signed batuğ evcimen, 24.05.2011.

Eurosport picked it up within the week. That is the entire press coverage of the closure as far as I can find, one sports-site piece quoting a farewell that had already said everything better.

~ where it went ~

Under the signature the page gives one address: arsiv.batug.com, the archive. The site's last act was pointing readers at its own back catalog, which is the correct instinct and did not save anything. The domain serves a small parked page today.

What survives is in the Internet Archive, and it is a lot: ten years of front pages with working links to columns nobody has read since. The RIP list is still on those pages, still short a name, since the site never got around to adding itself.

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