A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

Rest in peace Jim

// July 2nd, 2009 // family

Last week a dear friend of mine passed away. His name was Jim Skane, or Skkorpion as he was known on the forums over at ArizonaSportsFans.com. He was an elderly gentlemen, a veteran with some paralysis that kept him confined to a wheelchair.

He was also the biggest Arizona Cardinals fan I’ve ever known. I met Jim up in Flagstaff at Cardinals training camp probably as much as 10 years ago. I was writing for a sports website back then and was covering the team. Jim read my stuff and hung out on my forum, so we just ended up meeting one day while I was up there covering the team.

Way back in 2002, Jim asked me to help him create Arizona Sports Fans. I built it and ran it from a technical aspect (plus pretty much lived on that forum for the next 6 years), while he took care of the other stuff. He even paid me monthly to maintain it for him.

We turned the site into what is probably the #1 AZ sports fan forum on the internet. We met other people from the board, had poker night, all the Cards fans got together for tailgating at games, meeting at halftime, you name it.

The site got so huge, it was starting to cost a lot of money to host it. So last year, Jim and I decided to sell the site to a company that would keep me on to run it, while they made money from hosting it themselves.

Jim…always looking out for me and my family, only took about 10% of the sale of the site, giving me the rest. He wanted me to use it to help get my little family started. Because of that money, I was able to go from a $450 truck payment to a used car with no payment.

It meant so much to me and to my wife.

Once we sold the site, Jim and I didn’t talk much. He checked in on the forum we have, saw some pictures of Lyla, said she was cute as a button, but I hadn’t spoken to him in awhile.

And I never will again.

The guy had all kinds of health problems (even at one point a few years ago his in-home nurses were trying to poison him!), and while I knew he was sick, I didn’t think it would actually claim his life this time. He’d said a few times before that he might not make it through the next week, but always came out of it.

Not this time.

Jim ol’ buddy…you were a die-hard Cards fan and a good friend to me. We didn’t talk much or hang out much, but you impacted my life more than most people ever could. Thank you for that.

I’m attending his funeral tomorrow with what I’m sure will be a ton of people from our message board who are mourning his loss right now.

The note from his family about the service asked everyone to be casual and wear Cardinals stuff if they were so inclined.

I’ll be donning the NFC Championship gear.