Hi, readers! My name is Oren Basse, but I simply go by the nickname “O”, as in the title of this blog.  I am originally from the suburbs of Detroit and come from a family of sports fans. My fate was sealed early. We were fans of all the Detroit teams, but the Lions were #1 in our house. We had season tickets for years, back in the days of the old Silverdome. I saw most of Barry Sanders’ home games in person.  While these eyes were blessed with that, they also were subjected to plenty of heartache, including a certain Brett Favre-to-Sterling Sharpe TD bomb in a Wildcard game to knock the Lions out of the 1993 playoffs.  And I was there for the first ever regular season game in the new stadium.  Through all the bad years, I have stubbornly stayed faithful.  These last couple years are making it all feel worth it.  I promise you all tears when my Lions finally break their “glass ceiling” and reach a Super Bowl.  2024 will be the year!

I attended Michigan State University, as did both my older siblings, from 1998-2002, a four-year stretch which saw some great successes for our athletic department.  There were three consecutive Men’s Final Fours including the 2000 championship; I attended the Final Four and Championship that year in Indianapolis.  There was Nick Saban as the football coach for my first two years, leading the program to one of its greatest ever seasons to that point in the fall of 1999 before he left for LSU.  There was the “Cold War” hockey game where Spartan Stadium was turned into an outdoor hockey rink to host the highest-attended hockey game ever (record since broken), and of course I attended that as well.  To this day, I remain a die-hard Spartan fan, and that is actually what led me to my first job in sports journalism.  I am a writer for The Only Colors, an SB Nation site dedicated to Michigan State.

I am big into soccer.  It all started in 2010 when I just happened to be backpacking in South America during the World Cup (South Africa was host that year) and everywhere I went, the game was on the television.  The passion I witnessed in everyone watching the daily games hooked me.  So much so that four years later I traveled to Brazil for their World Cup, spending a full four weeks there taking in as much of the competition and the festivities as I could.  I did not make it to the Russia games as I had scheduling conflicts and I did not go to Qatar because it was not clear if I would be able to enjoy a beer at the games.  But the next version in 2026 will be here in North America and I am already planning that out for myself.  Back to me, over the past year I have taken up playing soccer in a co-ed adult league having never played this sport in an organized setting before.  I am playing against people who are mostly ten to twenty years younger than me and who have played their whole lives.  Basically, I’m a fish out of water on that field.  But it’s fun.

I also enjoy watching tennis, UFC, and the X-Games, so don’t be surprised when I write about those at some point.  On the contrary, I can probably guarantee you that I will never discuss baseball, motor sports, and most Olympic sports.  Probably.

Aside from sports, traveling is huge for me.  I’ve got 30+ stamps in my passport so far and will add more this summer.  I’ve lived in five U.S. states, at least one in each time zone, and one foreign country.  I’ve been to 46 of the states (Alaska, Hawaii, North Dakota, and Arkansas have eluded me); my dog, Delilah, has been to 43 of them.

I have mentioned that I write for another blog.  That was not the beginning of me as a writer.  I actually am a novelist and have self-published three novels, a trilogy, which you are welcome to purchase on Amazon if you are interested in reading more of my work.  A fourth novel, a separate story from my trilogy, has been started but it will be a while before I complete that and release it.

And lastly, bringing this back to sports, I am the co-host of a podcast called “dOllar betZ” along with my buddy, Andrew “Z” Zeoli.  The two capitalized letters in that title are for our nicknames. You can listen to episodes here.

Thanks for being a reader!