We Made Up With The Mean Dressage Guy

On Tuesday, I told you about my encounter with Ken Braddick, proprietor of Dressage-News.com and the guy who haughtily dismissed my request to use one of his photos. I called Ken an asshole, because, frankly, he was acting like an asshole. I had no problem with his refusing to allow us to use one of his photos; it was how he refused that got under my skin.

Anyway, he seems to have gotten under your skin as well, loyal Deadspin readers, and some of you even went ahead and emailed your own thoughts to Mr. Braddick.

Well, today he wrote me the following email, and it turns out that he's a pretty good sport:

As much as I do not like the abuse heaped on me, you guys sure have dedicated fans.

Whatever I say will no doubt bring more abuse.

Obviously my response came over as being (choose whatever description you want from those who sent emails—there were a lot and not one was polite) so I'll take my lumps.

I apologize for being (see above for choose your description).

You were polite enough to ask—which is a heck of a lot more than most do. You were the fourth person to ask yesterday to use material—a pomy club in a small community in Norway (they have two riders going to the Olympics) , Cherokee Nation's Phoenix newspaper about a Cherokee dressage rider I'd written about. And there were seven equestrian sites that simply pirated dressage-news.com material, most without attribution.

I'm not a corporation. I fund everything myself. I dn't have any marketing, advertising or any other infrastructure. The site pays for about 25% of the costs. Dressage-news.com is the only equestrian site that personally covers events as extensively as we do. The material gets ripped off numerous times every day—not because it's any great shakes but frequently is the only site reporting anything and using our own photos and, not to the same degree as you do, but nevertheless is willing to tackle some of the b.s. It's my stupidity that I continue to produce it since founding it in April, 2009, as a replacement for an equestrian magazine I sold.

You can tell your fans—I wish I had some like that who are so fervent—I got the message.

So, you see, Ken Braddick's not such a bad dude after all. Not many people would take kindly to getting snarked by a shit-eating Deadspin intern. I'm sure we've all learned some kind valuable lesson here.

And yeah, please don't send any more mean emails to the guy.

Horse drawing by Tommy Craggs