I finally did it.

As I alluded to in my previous blog entry, my main man Sabin asked me to write the foreword to his upcoming book, and I mentioned that I was nervous, but in hindsight, that word was insufficient. I was terrified.

You see Sabin isn't just my main man, he was the first person I met when I went Hampton back in '92. We've had our ups and downs, we've had jokes galore, but at the end of the day, I love and respect him and the feeling is surely mutual. We are in our mid-40s, we're husbands, we're parents, we have careers and we endure the up and down aspects of life. But the respect remains.

Sabin has been reading this blog along with my other sports articles for a good 15 years now, and he's always encouraged me. In fact at this current moment he (along with my wife and closest friends) are imploring me to finish this book that I've bullshitting about. He likes the way I write, he knows that we share an affinity for music, but when he asked me this foreword to his book, I just felt an unbelievable amount of pressure to not only perform, but to do an unbelievable job. You'd think a concept like that would be a given but it absolutely is not.

When I blog, I don't care who reads, I don't care who judges, and it tends to be a free-flowing, stream of consciousness type of situation. I'm normally giving words to something that has happened or communicating some type of emotion like I'm doing right now. The structure isn't important, I do my best to nail all the punctuation and spelling, but if I don't, I don't lose any sleep over it. It isn't that I'm flippant about it, I just don't feel any pressure.

When I write about basketball, I'm in my sweet spot. I get to watch, analyze and then write about a sport that I have been watching and loving for 40 years. I feel pressure to write intelligently, but at some point, my ego kicks in and I make sure that the final product is thorough, accurate and well-written. That's actually my favorite type of writing right now.

But writing for Sabin combines all of the writing experiences I've done thus far. I've listened to music all my life and I'm knowledgeable about hip-hop. Plus I'm not being asked to write a book (not yet anyway), I'm just being asked to right a foreword, so in some respects, the words and thoughts should be as free-flowing as they are in this blog, and at times they were. But having to stick the landing on a bit of prose--whether it be long or short--for someone you love and respect, was just terrifying man. What if he read it and was like, "damn this sucks!" or "he mailed it in" or "Couldn't he have given me more?"

Luckily for me, after nearly two weeks of writing it in my head and stressing over this, I wrote it, sent it to Sabin, and he loved. When the book comes out, I expect all of my blog followers (all three of y'all) to buy it.