Kissing Suzy Kolber

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

~ the obit ~

On 20 December 2003, during a Jets game against New England, Joe Namath got in front of an ESPN camera very drunk and told the sideline reporter Suzy Kolber that he wanted to kiss her. Two and a half years later a group of people who knew each other only from the comment section of Deadspin started a blog and named it after that moment. Kissing Suzy Kolber launched on 28 June 2006 and won the Weblog Award for Best Sports Blog in 2006, then again in 2007, then again in 2008.

Everybody wrote under a handle. Big Daddy Drew was Drew Magary, Christmas Ape was Michael Tunison, Captain Caveman was Matt Ufford, Unsilent Majority was Jack Kogod. The register was obscene and extremely literate at the same time. Real NFL events came back rewritten as invented scenes with invented dialogue, starring recurring fictional versions of actual players and coaches. It picked fights immediately. Within a month of launching, the writers told the Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King that they had photos of his daughter and would publish them unless he stopped writing about his family in his column. They did briefly publish and then took them down after the reaction, and the episode went into Will Leitch's book about the era.

The cost of a pseudonym came due on 14 April 2008, when Tunison decided to reveal on the blog that he also worked at the Washington Post. The Post fired him inside three days for, in his own phrasing, bringing discredit to the paper. He stayed at KSK. Uproxx bought the site in 2011, and by 2015 he was its editor-in-chief and its only full-time employee.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the beer commercial ~

In May 2015 the site ran a post making fun of Budweiser's #UpForWhatever campaign, which was a genuinely mockable piece of advertising that a lot of people were mocking that month. Senior management told Tunison to take it down, because Budweiser was a sponsor. Around the same time a different post on the same site, about John Oliver making the same joke about the same campaign, was left alone.

That inconsistency is the entire thing he wrote about on 31 July 2015 in a post called Smell Ya Later Forever, KSK. He said he was burned out, being the only person on payroll at a site competing with newsrooms twenty times its size, and that the editorial control had gone somewhere he could not see. A blog that started as a joke named after a drunk quarterback survived getting a writer fired from the Washington Post, and did not survive a note about a beer account.

~ who walked out ~

Almost every remaining contributor posted their own goodbye and followed him out the door. David Rappoccio stayed, because his thing was drawing altered NFL team logos and that worked anywhere. From August 2015 the sports writing at Uproxx stopped being KSK and became Uproxx Sports, which is a different product with the same server.

The commenters did not disperse. In August 2015 a group of them launched Door Flies Open, named after a stage direction Drew Magary used to write into posts about Rex Ryan bursting into the Jets locker room. It still liveblogs football games. A comment section outlived the site it was commenting on, which is the second time that happened in this story, because KSK itself was a Deadspin comment section that got up and walked away.

None of this reached me and the reason is narrower than geography. American football is the one major American sport that never exported. Basketball came to Turkey and stayed. Gridiron never arrived at all, not as a league and not even as a weekly highlights package. A blog whose comedy is built entirely on already knowing who Rex Ryan is has no way in from here. What does travel is the mechanism. Type kissingsuzykolber.com today and you land on uproxx.com, the front page of the company that bought it, which is how every one of these ends.

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