Bill Simmons: A Begrudging Appreciation
In some small part, I owe my career to Bill Simmons. Not in the sense that many professional sportswriters will tell you – that Simmons pioneered a style of writing for peers and fans that no one had seen before, which seems like an odd assertion if you went to college in the 1980s or 1990s and read a single zine dedicated to anything.
No, despite writing about 400 longish blog posts and occasionally getting an “attaboy” from pro sportswriters, what finally got editors to utter the magical phrase “we would like to give you some money” was something I wrote over a couple of beers, hit publish on and went to sleep. Bill Simmons was about to launch Grantland, a vanity website about sports and culture, and I looked at him and at the site’s soft launch and said, “Bill Simmons sucks, and so will this.”
Five years later, Simmons is gone. ESPN president John Skipper announced that negotiations have failed, and his contract will not be renewed. In the meantime, I got to be wrong many times over. Not just wrong, but delightfully so, from a site whose depth of contributors not only surprised almost all the critics but won them over. And if Skipper wants to be true to the wording of his official statement, he should keep surprising critics like me for years to come.
Like a lot of people, I really enjoyed Simmons for about a year. Then I started noticing a lot of catchphrase and self-branding repetition (like the Ewing Theory) and enjoyed him less. His everyman pose grew from an affectation to an insult as he started playing video games with Tiger Woods, (almost) clubbing with Manny Ramirez and getting great seats to any sporting event that interested him. His updates grew infrequent and more reliant on gimmicks. Whole sea changes in sports went unacknowledged until they had a direct impact on his life (Sabermetrics famously only became relevant when someone kicked his butt in fantasy baseball by drafting Ben Zobrist), an unforgivable solipsism for someone styled as a fanalyst.
From a social standpoint, the bro-targeted enthusiasms got more grating the further I got from age 21. Having MTV’s Road Rules as your cultural barometer is really weird when you’re old enough to drive and get out of the house and drink and think about anything else. Likening NBA stars to 1980s TV actresses’ long-term fuckability is either shallow or gross, and The Book of Basketball is simultaneously one of the most thoughtful fan histories and the most brain-dead misogynist high-five anthology I’ve read. But there was a large market for this – sports fandom is still pretty sexually unevolved, which is why every comment section’s go-to insult is to liken someone to a woman or her parts – and one got the sense that this would never change.
So, at the time, a sports-and-culture website from Bill Simmons looked to fare about as well as, to borrow one of his oft-repeated references, a new movie “from the demented mind of Danny DeVito.” It’s not that there was anything wrong with the project; you just wanted almost anyone else at the helm. The site famously hired human Thought Catalog archive Chuck Klosterman, along with Dave Eggers – the latter penning this blowjob of Wrigley Field before disappearing in a puff of meta-reflection. The soft launch didn’t help much. Katie Baker’s Knicks piece could have run as a feature on any sports site in the English-speaking world, and seemed like the sort of thing that got roped into the Simmons orbit simply because he could say gimme. Molly Lambert, whose default offerings ever since veer from the “merely” thoughtful to the excellent, penned a summer movie preview that in retrospect reads more like a junior writer knuckling under to an editor’s bad idea.
Then came the launch: Chuck Klosterman on a junior-college basketball game he saw; legendary Bourbon Bastard and under-acclaimed craftsperson Chris Jones getting the lede of his first column, about the date he lost his virginity, wrong; Wright Thompson writerly writing about a place writers drank and talked about writing. It looked for a while there like the site would be a hater’s turkey shoot at slow-moving targets grown bloated from too long at the banquet table of the Writers’ Self-Suck Society, where the first step in the initiation is to change your Twitter bio to, “Raconteur, flâneur, globetrotter, life-quaffer, collector of life stories. New book ‘Mal Aria: How One Man Lived Three Weeks on an Airboat in a Swamp’ out by HarperCollins.”
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