Portland Sportsman
Portland Sportsman was an independent sports blog covering athletic culture in Portland, Oregon. It ran from 2009 to 2014 and was co-founded by Mike Merrill and Zach Dundas, shortly after Dundas published his book The Renegade Sportsman. The site covered everything from backyard tournaments to major-league Portland events, with a particular focus on the city’s DIY, amateur, and independent sporting scene.
Origin
The blog grew out of Dundas’s book The Renegade Sportsman, a work about independent and unconventional athletics. Merrill and Dundas started Portland Sportsman as a continuation of that reporting focus, pointed at their shared home city. Jen Wick was hired to design the logo.
Merrill’s interest in the project was less about sports themselves and more about sports media: the conventions of beat reporting, press credentialing, photography, game coverage, and the whole apparatus of how athletic events get turned into stories. This reflected a broader, earnest love of media as a form, a thread that runs through his career from PMUGYG through Urban Honking and beyond. Portland Sportsman was a way to participate in the craft directly.
Editorial scope
From the site’s own about page:
Thank you for reading Portland Sportsman: a new voice of independent sporting culture in the urban crown jewel of Cascadia.
The sportsmen and women of Portland are reinventing the American athletic ethic, creating a microcosmic world of DIY leagues, independent adventure and fun-loving endeavor. Beyond the legendary Oregon outdoors, Portlanders embrace a wide range of sports and games: from the glorious mud of cyclocross to the asphalt thrills of skateboarding to the urbane combat of croquet. At the same time, the city’s sporting public, its brio on display at every Portland Timbers match, its passion defined by a 40-year affair with the Trail Blazers, redefines modern fandom.
Portland Sportsman aspires to provide a new form of independent coverage to match the city’s vibrant sporting scene. From backyard tournaments to major-league stadia, we strive to capture the enthusiasm and creativity of athletic Portland at every level.
Contributors
The masthead included Merrill, Dundas, Dan Woytek, Carson Cistulli, Josh Berezin, Thomas King, Starr Ahrens, and others. The division of labor was informal. Merrill routinely posted video coverage. Berezin contributed photography alongside his writing. Cistulli, a baseball writer who went on to FanGraphs and MLB.com, brought a national-caliber sensibility to the otherwise hyperlocal site.
Press access
Despite being a two-person-plus-friends side project, Portland Sportsman was credentialed as working press. The site obtained press passes to Portland Beavers games (the city’s Triple-A baseball team, which relocated to Tucson after the 2010 season), Portland’s professional lacrosse team, and other events. The credentials gave a group of enthusiasts the same sideline access as the daily papers.
Legacy
Portland Sportsman ran for five years, ending in 2014. The domain is no longer active, though portions of the site are preserved in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
The project fits into a pattern of Merrill collaborations from the late 2000s and early 2010s that treat media as a playground for small groups of friends with specific enthusiasms. Urban Honking did this for blog culture. PMUGYG did it for alt-weekly readership. Portland Sportsman did it for sports fandom. In each case, the question was the same: what happens when you take an existing media form and run it with just enough rigor to be legitimate, but with none of the professional pressures that grind the fun out of it?
See also
External links
- Portland Sportsman (archived) — Wayback Machine, December 2013 capture