This, the opening post of X Marks the Sport, has been years in the procrastinating.

Yet I must offer my apologies in advance as this post won't be literature. When finished and re-read it still may be raw and not that well-written.

I have wanted to start this blog for quite some time. Having been a participant in sports and a consumer of sports media since as long as I can remember, I believe I have built up a wealth of opinion concerning these subjects. I've wanted to share those opinions regardless of whether anyone agreed with them or even paid attention to them.

At first, I planned on working XMTS anonymously (I would have signed my posts only as X) for numerous reasons, with the primary one being that at the time I thought of the name, I worked for NBA.com. Not only did I have plenty of work to keep me busy there, leaving me little time to write, but also writing outside the network was prohibited. Anything that I started would have had to have been at least pseudonymous or completely anonymous.

Hiding behind that anonymity, I had planned to slash and burn my way through the foolishness and sloppiness I detected throughout sports and sports media. Now, that I no longer work there (which is for another post some day), there's no need to hide.

The slashing and burning, however, will need to wait. Like the BP spill in the Gulf, sports blogging has gushed snark unabated for too long. I don't think the world could take another I'm ironic and cooler-than-you blog. At best, it would be redundant. At worst, annoying.

I also hope that I can figure out a way to ban anonymous comments. I know that may be unrealistic, but if I'm going to put my name on post, you can put your name on a comment.

Why? Because I believe there is room for honest assessment of sports, sports media and the culture around it (specifically the television advertising), that this blog could have plenty of fertile ground to plow through for however long we keep this going.

We? Yes, I've invited some good friends to post here as well. We began working together at AOL in '95 and '96 at Extreme Fans and hope to transfer some of that enterprising free-spiritedness to this blog. Another gent, a former grad school classmate and roommate, was integral in getting the Chicago Tribune online.

They say they're rusty. I say they'll hit their stride immediately.

The time, however, has come. I need to do this for me. I need to prove to myself that my nearly two decades as a sportswriter, the last 15 of which spent online at AOL, FoxSports.com, NBA.com and again at AOL, haven't been a waste.

The result of that need? This blog.

I spoke with someone just after my 40th birthday and asked for some advice. What am I, I wondered to him in an IM.

"When you're 65, what do you want the blank behind your name to be? Rob Peterson, _______."

I think I know.

Writer.