I chose not to attend the game after all, for the same reason that a professional “storm chaser” might not volunteer to plow headlong into a deadly twister: Because journalism should be a profession, not a sentence of punishment.
This is the way of the corporate bully: Try to instill in employees the belief that they do not matter, all while reaping the profit from their toil. Unfortunately for the executives at Defector, I fully recognize the value that I bring to the brand. I therefore felt absolutely at ease making my own decision about whether or not to attend the game, without being troubled by any illusions that I should “take one for the team.” To those who utter such remonstrances, I say simply that I am a member of only one team, and that team is not called Tom Ley’s Wallet. It is called the Jaguars.
Often have I contemplated savoring the sweet revenge that this would entail, imagining the salty tears of my so-called “editors” as regret filled them for their high-handed and dismissive treatment of me. I have never asked to be treated as a star. I embrace the equality of all humans, with certain reasonable dispensations made for the fact that certain people contribute more value to an enterprise than others. But it seems to me that in their quest to ostentatiously embody the self-satisfied values of a worker co-op, some who sit atop the Defector food chain may be isolating the very people who draw so many Jaguars fans to the site in the first place. I do not propose to air the dirty laundry of the tawdry world of football analysis in this public forum; I mean only to offer some small explanation of the situation to the people whom I actually consider myself to work for: you, the readers.
It is quite staggering for me to contemplate the fact that I set out on this journey with no goal other than to create an independent source of football analysis unaffiliated with any professional sports franchise, and yet I now find myself at the heart of a web of human intrigue that rivals any John le Carré novel.