I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, on a date that no "This Day in Sports" archive I have found has shown to be significant in any way. Oh well; at least the Brewers won that day.

My parents were, as is the case with almost all children I think, the primary determinants of which sports teams I was going to root for, and being that they were both raised in Milwaukee and attended Marquette University, I was pretty much destined to become a prototypical Cheesehead; a lover of all things Wisconsin from the college teams to the Brewers to the Robert-"Tractor"-Trailer-for-Dirk-Nowitski Bucks to the Green Bay Packers. Growing up in Vegas, I didn't (and we still don't) have any local pro team to back, so I backed the Wisconsin teams, in addition to UNLV, the AAA Las Vegas Stars (and their then-affiliated parent club the San Diego Padres, though both the name and the affiliate have changed since then; we're now the AAA club for the Blue Jays via the Dodgers, and are currently called the 51's), and the carousel of minor league teams that had runs in the city that varied from one to about five or six years, including the Posse (CFL), Dustdevils (CISL), Thunder (IHL, and by far the longest tenured), Outlaws (XFL), Bandits (IBL) and more recently the Gladiators (AFL) and the Wranglers (ECHL, and the only team I mentioned that is still in the city).

Sports became a big fascination of mine, particularly football, as the Packers won the first of their two Super Bowl appearances over the Patriots with my parents in attendance at the Super Dome in New Orleans. This big stage win at a very impressionable age probably assured my love of pro football over all other sports (though now I think it's a very close race between it, hockey, and college basketball). The Packers weren't just my favorite team; they were my team, a fact that was put on paper when a share of Green Bay Packer stock was purchased in my name in 1998. Since then, I have been Tom, Co-owner of the Green Bay Packers.

I left Las Vegas in 2005 to attend the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania for my college education. Since then, UPenn basketball has also become my team; I was a season ticket holder and Line member for my first two years, and have since made the jump to the other side, becoming a manager for the team. This and UNLV's imminent return to prominence as a basketball power have strengthened my love of college basketball.

Also, due to the influence of one of my roommates and a lack of a "horse in the race" before that point, so to speak, I picked up the Philadelphia Flyers as my hockey team of choice. Hockey, which wasn't really on my sports map coming out of Las Vegas (where we have maybe three public ice rinks in the whole city) with a Wisconsin heritage (which has plenty of ice, but no NHL hockey team), has risen in a small period of time to be one of my three favorite sports.

Thank you very much for reading all of this, and welcome.