UrinatingTree

Steve Linkowski was born on January 17, 1988, in North Hills, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — and he always knew he wanted to talk for a living. In high school, doing the morning announcements, he felt the pull: maybe broadcasting could be a career. He went to college to study it. But the degree came with a side hustle that would accidentally define his creative life — reviewing video games on YouTube, loudly, as a creative release.

His first internet life was pure early-YouTube chaos. Under the name ESchlasser, Linkowski created the character Fat Mann Judgeth, an apoplectic reviewer who screamed his way through Sega Genesis games — his very first upload was a review of the legendarily awful Superman 64 — alongside “Half-Assed Theater,” a series of one-shot parodies of games and movies. The channel eventually went quiet and vanished; fans cared enough to archive the reviews themselves. He resurfaced around 2010 with a new account and a self-deprecating series called “Generic Reviews,” then drifted into a little gaming content in 2016. Nobody — least of all Linkowski — expected what came next.

In the middle of 2016, he revamped the channel completely and pointed it at the thing he actually couldn’t stop thinking about: North American sports. The NHL, the NFL, MLB — with the occasional NBA, college, NASCAR, and even soccer detour. The gaming rants were retired. In their place came something new: exasperated, story-driven comedy about the beautiful, stupid world of sports fandom, illustrated with crude cartoon storyboards and narrated in the voice of a man who has seen his teams break his heart one time too many.

The breakthrough arrived on January 2, 2017. Linkowski uploaded “The Haters Guide to the 2017 NFL Playoffs” to an audience of maybe 550 to 650 subscribers. The next day he had a hundred more — and a video sitting at ten to fifteen thousand views when his uploads normally did hundreds. “I’m just sitting there like, ‘What? Wait, what,’” he later recalled, convinced it was a typo or a glitch. Figuring it was a fluke, he made a follow-up: “The Haters Guide to Super Bowl 51.” It did even better. “OK, I think I’ve drunkenly stumbled onto something and I have to keep going,” he said — and committed the channel, in his words, to shitposting about sports.

The series that grew from that accident became a sports-comedy universe. The Hater’s Guide delivers in-depth, lovingly vicious autopsies of the biggest events and seasons. Lolcows in Sports chronicles proud franchises in states of total disarray, diagnosing exactly how the mighty became laughingstocks. A Legacy of Failure honors the teams and players who have never won it all. Congrats! mocks teams fresh off playoff humiliation — with the occasional genuine congratulations. And This Week in Sportsball recaps the week across the NFL, MLB, NHL, and beyond.

The crown jewel might be Days of Our Steelers, the satirical soap opera he built around the Pittsburgh Steelers’ gloriously dysfunctional 2018 season. Treating the team’s endless off-field drama as daytime television — betrayals, meltdowns, cliffhangers — the series went viral on the strength of its premise alone: the Steelers, as an organization, were already writing the scripts. Linkowski just added the organ music.

The craft is as distinctive as the comedy. The videos are built on MS Paint–style storyboards starring Linkowski’s cartoon tree avatar, a visual language so crude it loops back around to iconic. The narration — that exasperated Yinzer cadence, the nicknames (“Schlasser,” the “Melonheads” fan army), the catchphrases — makes every upload feel like a barstool sermon from the smartest drunk guy at the end of the bar. He guards his privacy behind the cartoon, a deliberate mystique: the Tree is the star, and the man behind it just tells anyone who asks.

The business of being the Tree is gloriously janky. Nearly every video gets claimed by the leagues — the NFL, NHL, and MLB all take their copyright cut — which means the uploads that made him famous barely pay him at all. His Patreon page frames the whole enterprise with perfect Tree energy: “passionate shitposting does not pay the water bill,” so the tip jar exists for food, rent, a swelling ego, and the jinxing of several teams he wants to succeed.

From that precarious base he’s built a genuine multi-platform operation: podcasting and live work with the Clickbait Sports crew, collaborations like The Dumpster Fire with fellow sports-comedy creators, even charity events with teams like the Portland Pickles. The subscriber count has climbed past half a million — the page you’re reading tracks it live — and every upload still feels handmade, furious, and funny in exactly the way the polished sports-media machine never manages.

UrinatingTree matters because he is the fan’s id given a YouTube channel. Where sports television performs solemn analysis, the Tree performs the actual emotional experience of fandom — the rage, the gallows humor, the conspiracy theories, the love that curdles into a three-thousand-word rant about your own team. He says what every frustrated fan is thinking, draws it badly on purpose, and somehow makes it essential. In the attention economy of sports content, the angriest guy in Pittsburgh built the most honest voice in the room.