2015 WFNY Author Spotlight : Best of Dave Sterling

WFNY is proud of our assortment of writers and are especially grateful to be blessed with its daily readership/viewership. As part of our year-end festivities, WFNY has put together an Author Spotlight series to allow the readers to get to know the writers a bit better by pulling back the curtain on their thoughts and pulling in some of their favorite pieces from the year.

We hope you enjoy a quick look back at Dave’s 2015 year and maybe find something you like that you missed the first time around. Have the Hap, Hap, Happiest New Year you can and we hope you continue blessing us by reading the site. Thank you.

Who is Dave Sterling?

Dave Sterling is a life-long Cleveland sports fan.  He made posters of a dog attacking John Elway before the 1986 AFC Championship game, he remembers watching “The Shot” and hates the Florida Marlins as much as anyone should.¹  Dave isn’t a typical WFNY writer in that he doesn’t actually write much, but after having Craig on his movie podcast Anything to Add Monty he was invited to be on the WFNY podcast.  After several guest appearances he became the second podcast host.  He leans towards humor over statistics and satire over strategy, but what drives him is an undying optimism that he feels is the only way to approach sports, because in Cleveland, reality is too hard to take.

Works that best describe Dave Sterling from 2015

Origination : Governor of Brohio Hot Dog Race Fixing Other than a few headlines, the first real input I had for WFNY that wasn’t podcast related was participating in the April Fools Day festivities at WFNY. I was fascinated by the Governor of Brohio, and I thought it would be funny to put him into a pickle typically faced by real politicians…plus i was able to grab him making the perfect face to photoshop into a press conference.

Feel the Hate : Casual fans guide to hating the Celtics After April fools day, I wanted to do something special for the playoffs. I remembered back in the LeBron 1.0 days how much you grew to hate a team over the course of a long series. I started with Boston and after watching the first game I had plenty of material to go with…and this was before Kevin’ Love’s shoulder.  I skipped the Bulls because I feel like we all knew enough to hate the Bulls. I brought it back with Golden State and it helped me develop a persona that I went on to use later for the podcast.

Fumblerooski : A few days before the Brown’s season opener…way too short of a time, to be honest, I decided that I wanted to do a weekly light-hearted Browns podcast. We’d recap the previous game, preview the next game and take a light-hearted look at the Browns news. As the season went on, our light-hearted podcast turned into more satire. Fake news stories, fake guests, fake facts, and more roster name puns than any other podcast in history. As the Browns season plummeted, it became harder and harder to find humor in everything, but we persevered. Eventually my “character” started a decent into madness where he was talking to the posters on his wall of Bernie Kosar and Handford Dixon. Luckily with a Browns win over the 49ers that insanity was cured. And, after a non-productive and contentious “interview,” Dave and Dylan were also very vocal about their demands that the Browns fire Roy Farmer. While it has been a lot of hard work for me and my co-host Dylan Price (@dylanbprice), it has been very rewarding, and we think we’ve made some quality humor. Special thanks to Will Gibson and Chris Clem for being our stable of characters, and thanks to Craig for giving me the green-light and audience to do something different.  Also for pretending to be mad at us on one episode.

Explanation of works

Contributing to WFNY is something that I had always wanted to do. I was a reader of the site and listener of the podcast for a good amount of time before I reached out to Craig to be on my podcast. A few weeks after Craig was on the movie podcast I sent him a semi-aggressive tweet asking when I was going to be on the WFNY podcast. Craig apologized for being a terrible producer and had me on. After we finished recording we talked for a long time about podcasts and the future of the WFNY podcast. We agreed to do more work together, and when Craig got super busy, I offered to host some podcasts of my own. Craig agreed and the rest is history. Interacting with the staff at WFNY has been nothing short of incredible. I’m not sure how this team was assembled, but it is one of the best teams I’ve ever been a part of, and I am thankful to be a part of it.

1. Editor’s note: bonus points for refusing to refer to them as the Miami Marlins. [↩]