This site is all about hanging out with some cool people I enjoy talking with while tasting different teas. I drink white tea, oolong, keemun, green tea, darjeeling tea, blended teas, yerba mate, and some funky herbal teas I make too kill off other people’s colds before they wack me.
I’ve been drinking tea for almost 25-years without really thinking too much about it. Over the last few years I’ve dug into tea a lot more. It’s astounding, if you look at it, how much tea has influenced the world. The tax on tea played a huge part in America telling Britian to go shove it. And as for Britian, tea was really how they came to influence India. Pissed off at having to get everything from China, they wanted their own source. Many of you probably know a heckuva lot more than I do about different teas. And that’s great. Share with everybody. Just don’t be a tea snob here.
Now, I’ve also had a great interest in talking with all kinds of different people. After college, I interviewed a bunch of people to learn and share this knowledge with teens. Through a little chutzpah and help, I managed to interview George Michael (sports broadcast legend), Joe Paterno, James Brown, Walter Payton, Tiger Woods, George Lois (advertising genius), Dr. Denis Waitley, Gary Vaynerchuk and a slew of other people.
As you can see, I’m a little bit weighted on the sports end. I played a lot of competitive sports, including football. I kicked field goals in college – opting to shock people by signing with Bowie State University, an historically black college with the longest losing streak in NCAA history at the time. But I shocked back. I earned Rookie-of-the-Year honors on a team of great guys that completed one of the great turnarounds with a top 10 national ranking.
Still in my senior year, I met Andrew Maynard, the 1988 Olympic gold medalist boxer on a tv show. We were both guests. He was struggling a little as a pro, and asked me to help train him. We met at 6:30am before classes at a gravel pit in Laurel, MD. Just as I finished college, I played a key role in Andrew’s only Cruiserweight world title fight (WBC). Taking the fight on two weeks notice, he lost in a decision in Paris, France.
I’ve done more things in sports, but you get the idea. There’s no way around my love of sports. I get pissed off when the Redskins lose, and even more so with the owner not hiring a real football mind to run the team. That’s another story for another time.
The entertainment end would have to come next. I guess I’ve avoided the entertainment bug for a long time. I broadcast college football and basketball games a little after college, and did my interview program. Actually, in high school, me and some friends did some old school reality stuff in a way. The lure of feeling I had to do something else, get a real job I guess, pulled me in other directions. But enough avoiding. Recently I’ve gotten the video camera out. I started shooting some stuff, and now I’m getting back into the groove.
And while I’m doing some more creative projects, I wanted to get back to just sitting down with cool people doing cool stuff, turning the camera on, picking their brain, and drinking a bunch of different teas. So they’ll be a lot about tea here, but I hope you enjoy meeting some cool people too…and learning something along the way.
Oh…if you’re a tea snob, you’ll have to excuse me being a little ghetto at times. It’s just me. I’m refined at times, and raw and unfiltered too. It’s my DNA. What can I say.
Mark Fitzpatrick
