Yahoo Sports: 20 wild, fascinating, ridiculous, magical years
“Who is Yahoo Sports?”
We got that question a lot in our early days, back when our page was little more than a static, gray-and-more-gray list of scores and game recaps. Back then, in the distant monochrome past that was the dial-up era of the internet, we threw down that exclamation point — Yahoo! Sports — and not much else. But that exclamation point, posted up right there in the middle of our name like a seven-footer amongst a group of middle schoolers, was our pivot point.
We turned on the lights in December 1997. Remember 1997? Let’s set the stage for you.
Our first stories included recaps of NFL games from the day before: Steve Young, Brett Favre and Dan Marino had led their teams to victories, while John Elway’s soon-to-be-champion Denver Broncos suffered their third loss of the year. Barry Sanders ran for 137 yards and a touchdown in (of course) a Detroit Lions loss, and a fiery quarterback by the name of Jim Harbaugh helped the Indianapolis Colts win just their second game of the season. Over in the NBA, Allen Iverson had just dropped 27 on the New York Knicks, while a 19-year-old rookie named Kobe Bryant came off the bench for the Los Angeles Lakers and scored 21 against the Cavaliers. The Florida (not Miami) Marlins were the reigning World Series champions, Michigan’s Charles Woodson edged Tennessee’s Peyton Manning for the Heisman Trophy and 21-year-old Tiger Woods had just been named the PGA Tour’s player of the year. We offered up all that info on the brand-new, text-only site … and, honestly, not much else.
It’s tough to remember a time — impossible, really, if you’re under 30 — when the internet wasn’t the driving force in sports media. But when we turned on the lights here at Yahoo Sports, “internet sports site” was an only slightly more reputable destination than, say, “truck stop pharmacy” or “freelance clown college.” There was ESPN, and there was your local newspaper; who was going to bother sitting down at a computer, dialing up through the sound of gravel in a blender, and typing in h-t-t-p-colon-backslash-backslash-sports-dot-yahoo-dot-com just to get a few scores? Anything important was going to be on “SportsCenter” in a few hours, right?
But what Yahoo — and, to be fair, a bunch of other fledgling sports sites — recognized early on is that the limitations of print and television simply didn’t exist on the internet. If we wanted to wax philosophical on Michael Jordan or Barry Bonds for 3,000 words, hey, there weren’t any space concerns or time constraints. The information superhighway was wide open.
You can’t just cover sports from the couch; you’ve got to get out there where the action’s happening, and early on, that proved tricky. We had to convince a lot of skeptical gatekeepers that, yes, we were a legitimate site, and yes, the internet is going to be a space for serious news. Getting credentialed to cover games, getting calls returned, getting taken seriously — all were challenges in those lean early years.
Then, in the spring of 2006, Yahoo Sports reporter Charles Robinson knocked on the door of a 3,000-square-foot house on the corner of Apple Street and Luther Avenue in Spring Valley, California, and everything changed.
Robinson’s inquiry into the home — which was owned by a would-be agent, but occupied by the parents of then-USC running back Reggie Bush — helped kick off an investigation that resulted in the NCAA stripping Bush of his Heisman and USC of its 2004 national championship. That put Yahoo Sports on the map, and further investigative work — by Dan Wetzel on the Aaron Hernandez murder-suicide saga, by Robinson and Wetzel on booster crimes at the University of Miami, by Eric Adelson on performance-enhancing drugs in the NFL, by Jeff Passan on the untimely death of the Marlins’ Jose Fernandez, by Pat Forde on the college coaching cabal, among many others — helped establish Yahoo Sports as one of the premier investigative outlets in sports.
But we didn’t just stop at deep-dive investigations. By the mid-2000s, Yahoo Sports was rivaling ESPN for web supremacy, enhancing coverage beyond just the pro and college games with acquisitions like the Rivals recruiting network. The Yahoo Sports blogs, started in late 2007, helped form the foundation of the sports blogosphere, a world where fans could enjoy sports as the often-ridiculous entertainment they are, not as stern morality plays or humorless slogs. The blogosphere led straight to today’s always-on, social media-driven world of memes, GIFs, tweets and snaps, and Yahoo Sports was there at the very start. One example of a hundred: Yahoo’s Big League Stew blog runs a regular video feature entitled “25-Year-Old Baseball Cards,” where the sport’s biggest names open packs of old baseball cards and reminisce. It’s been duplicated across multiple sports and websites, but never surpassed, and it all started right here.
And the hits kept on coming. Adrian Wojnarowski’s “Woj bombs,” NBA news dropped first and fastest, turned sports reporting on its head. Puck Daddy, Yahoo’s NHL blog, established the model for an all-things-to-all-fans sub-site, wielding enough power to get a journeyman defenseman named to the All-Star Game. From a Louisiana prison rodeo to a sin-soaked Kentucky Derby-to-Talladega weekend, from Tom Brady’s private post-Super Bowl hell to a video tour of remote Russia in advance of the Sochi Games, Yahoo Sports has brought you both the biggest and the strangest stories in sports.
For those of you — and there are many, so very many — not content with just reading about sports, Yahoo rolled out a little game in 1999 called fantasy baseball. Since then, we’ve added half a dozen more sports, and in 2015 joined the daily fantasy market. Yahoo also pioneered widespread fantasy sports advice; “Fantasy Football Live” kicked off in 2006 and has saved the games, leagues and trophies of countless players since then. We now offer thousands of player predictions across football, baseball and basketball every single week, so if you’re still losing every year, well, we’re doing our best to help you.
October 2015 marked another high-water mark for Yahoo Sports. When the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars kicked off in London, we were there, the first website ever to exclusively broadcast an NFL game. The little site that once just parroted a list of NFL scores was now a worldwide presence, broadcasting an NFL game live and free to the entire planet. The next year, Yahoo Sports’ livestream coverage of the NBA draft trumped the actual television broadcast, once again showing the strength of the internet against more traditional media.
From a tiny northern California sports ticker, we’ve grown to report stories from nearly every continent on Earth. From the sideline of the Super Bowl to the podiums at the Olympics, from the infield of the World Series to the hardwood of the Final Four, from the 18th at Augusta National to victory lane at Daytona, from the glass at the Stanley Cup to the confetti-covered fields of college football’s national championships, and a thousand fields, courts, tracks and locker rooms beyond that, we’ve brought you the very best stories of the last 20 years.
And you, sports fans — you’ve been there with us. Readership numbers that once took us a month to amass, we soon notched in a week, then a day, then hours, then minutes. You came for the stories, and you brought your opinions — vocally, and in large numbers — on everything from the Patriots’ deflate-gate drama to Tiger Woods’ transgressions, the state of LeBron James’ heart to the NFL’s anthem protests. We wouldn’t be here without you, and we’re grateful for the time you’ve chosen to spend hanging out here over the last two decades.
Who is Yahoo Sports? It’s us. It’s you. And we’re all just getting started.
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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports and the author of EARNHARDT NATION, on sale now at Amazon or wherever books are sold. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or on Facebook.
