Hello,

It’s me.

I’m alive and I am well. I know there have been a few inquiries out there as to whether I was living or had taken the deep dark dive into the black abyss of death. And I am here to tell you that I’m here, in Detroit, living. And just to be clear only one person inquired…on a Kerryon Johnson photo from May.

I’ve been on a hiatus, let’s call it a sabbatical. Thinking, exploring, wondering, discovering. It’s had up’s-downs-highs-lows and everything in between, and while this is all total bullshit and I’ve just been kind of busy with summer shit and my job that actually pays me real money, it is true that I have had Champagne Athletics lingering in the back of my mind.

Is the site dead? Should I kill it? What do I do? Why did I even make the site in the first place?

And that last question is the one that brought me here today. Where’s that you ask? It brought me back to my apartment, sitting on my girlfriend’s laptop (mine was stolen I’ll tell you about it later), working on Champagne Athletics.

The reason I started this website was to bring a major professional sports championship back to the Greatest American Comeback City of all time, The City of Detroit. Now you’re probably sitting there thinking to yourself How in the hell can some shitty, 20 person following, kinda sports blog thing even remotely help in bringing a major sporting championship to Detroit? 

And the answer to that is clear- I have no idea. But what I do know is that I recently watched the 2018 Stanley Cup Finals featuring the NHL’s favorite notorious failures, the Washington Capitols, and the Golden Misfits in the Vegas Golden Knights. And during Game 5 of the Finals in Vegas, they kept showing the blood-red filled streets of D.C. as fans lined the streets up and down in explosive anticipation of their first Stanley Cup in franchise history.

And it had me depressingly thinking about how it’s officially been a decade since we’ve seen a Champion in Detroit.

Let that sink in.

10. Long. Years. I was 17 years old back in 2008. Not of legal drinking age. Still pretty innocent. So young, so sober. And while being sober or not doesn’t take away even the smallest drop of joy out of those Championships pre-bar-age, I want to know the absolute jubilation of being completely annihilated in Downtown Detroit as our team, our city, brings home either their 13th, 5th, 4th, or god help us, 1st, championship.

Now this may sound silly to some, but, I know there are many out there who feel this pain. I lived in Chicago for 2 years (collective boo’s) and I witnessed that fucking place lose their absolute minds over the Blackhawks in 2015, and caught the beginning of the Cubs craze- and it all sucked. It all sucked because it wasn’t Detroit.

So to all the Champagne-loyals and Fizznatics out there- we’re back. And we’re back with the mission of one day bringing a championship to Detroit City, and doing it shitfaced, because that sounds like an immense amount of fun. If you don’t think so I seriously don’t think we’d be able to relate or connect on any human interaction level whatsoever.

So Champagne is back. Champagne is here. And Champagne is going to stay until we find a drunken championship in this city for the first time in my career as a human being. 🍾

– Frank