Mark The Homer wrote: Mon Jan 06, 2025 3:01 pm
I find it interesting and ironic that Diehard didn't vote for the merge. He was the one with the vision for the site in the first place. And yet he was the one who cast the lone dissenting vote. Fast forward twenty years, and all that hard work is gone forever - because ultimate control, that is, control of the server, was out of reach of the founders and staff.
I didn't understand it at the time. It's pretty heady stuff when the team you love invites you to come to the park and talk about a collaboration. I mean - I don't think you can understand how crazy it was to be having drinks with Dan Snyder's right hand man at the time, and what the team was offering. I wasn't an owner, just a moderator along for the ride. People say the Redskins 'bought ES' but that's totally false. They wanted to buy ES, but the guys asked for access instead and offered to run the site for free as the official site. The Skins accepted.
I probably benefitted from the whole thing more than anyone because Tony was in Canada, Blade was extremely busy with a medical practice, and most of the other guys couldn't reach out to weekend coverage duties. I went to the first minicamp after Gibbs came back (I got to ask one of the first questions of Gibbs, what would he say to this fanbase that's been wandering in the desert for years, and he spent 10 minutes on it. I'll confess my voice was shaking when I asked him the question). Because I was willing to go to any game, any time, I got to cover a ton of them those first couple of years. I got to speak to Sean Taylor numerous times, and just about every Redskins player from that era, got to take photos on the sidelines during games, got to be in the locker room after games, got on-the-field passes to hand out to fans at the ES tailgate, and even got laid out by an Oakland Raiders safety and had concussion symptoms for a week afterwards. My kids thought that was 'cool'. I worked my ass off. Some of what I saw actually made it harder to be a fan, seeing that at least for some of the players, this was a gig not a passion like it is for fans.
Anyway, Tony saw what none of us saw. Because the site was his vision, his baby, he knew that the minute we handed it over to the Redskins, the creative control, something he loved and along with Blade were amazing at exercising, would be gone forever. That seems like a small thing - but it's not. Being able to mold the site, create new features, graphics, etc.. that was a big part of what it enjoyable for the site creators. We lost that. And the thing that most of us didn't realize is that, despite approaching the ES owners about obtaining the site, once they had it, the team could've given a rat's ass about it. Folks wanted to fantasize that the team was directing the staff about thread topics and criticism, but that couldn't have been further from the truth. The team ignored the site completely. They simply didn't care about it. Pretty typical of the Dan Snyder era in general if you ask me. And when the site disappeared, it was still sporting a 'Washington Football Team' logo at the top even thought that hadn't applied to the team for 2 years. They didn't care.
It changed for me after the team took the site over. We had all these ideas but there was no where to go with them. The membership was still awesome, but the site itself became a sterile shadow of what it once was (at least in my opinion). I think Tony (Die Hard) saw that coming and he was the only one who saw it. I understand it better now, having created my own site with help from other former ES staff. 90% of the fun of it is being able to do whatever you want to with it creatively.
Anyway... was it worth it? I would have to say, seeing what happened down the road, maybe not. All great things run their course, and even if the team hadn't acquired ES, there was probably never any going back to it's best early days. Then again, I got to be part of every fan's dream. I got to intimately interact with the team I grew up loving. What fans get to do that? But a bunch of us did. And it was pretty incredible.
