The Return of the Champ

It may be temporary, but Bill Simmons reached back and delivered a fastball from his early 2000s days with his column today about PEDs in football.  I’m heartened to believe that he is back with a vengeance.  He actually seems disappointed in himself, which is important, because I think his fans seem disappointed in himself as well.  I have a long history with Bill Simmons’ work, and haven’t sat down to read a column of his in some time.  Today, when I saw that he’d written The PED Question with a provocative picture of stabber/linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens, I knew I had to read it.  I tore through it like a horse too long in the desert without an oasis.

In 2002, I wandered across this writer named “Bill Simmons” writing for ESPN’s Page 2.  I read a few articles by him, and realized that I thought he was pretty damn funny.  The one that sticks out in my mind is the article he wrote as a diary of watching a Tampa Bay Devil Rays game.  A great deal of the article was about how awful the Rays were, but also how stupid putting a team in Tampa Bay was.  He made mention of the Rays’ Mascot pulling a catheter tube out and spraying it in the owner’s face, and I was in.  Pee jokes and pop culture references?  Hell yes!  I started reading his weekly updates.  When I was bored in between his articles, I went back and read older Simmons articles.  In a few weeks, I was all caught up with the ESPN oeuvre of The Sports Guy.

I’ve followed Simmons since he burst on the national scene, which is like saying “I’ve followed Bruce Springsteen since Born to Run!” People who read Simmons’ Digital City Boston pages on AOL when he was in his “Bartending to pay the bills, writing to feed his soul” phase (which is when he purportedly powered through every season of 90210 while he waited for his dial up connection to load clips he needed to watch for his columns) would call me a bandwagon jumper.  But, I saw something in Bill Simmons that I did not see in any other writer on ESPN. I went searching around Page 2 – DJ Gallo, Scoop Jackson (yuck!), I never had the chance to read Ralph Wiley, though I hear he was great, and I was surprised.  Simmons was far and away the breakout star of Page 2.

While he didn’t reinvent comedy, or sports knowledge, he definitely created, for the first time on a national stage, a seamless blending of the two.  He created lists, he made jokes about himself, and he wrote about friends in such an engaging way that his friend House, who is a government employee in DC now has a youtube and twitter following because he can skeletonize a medium size horse in under forty minutes with his appetite, and Jack-O, who is a rabid Yankee fan and conservative.  I felt like I knew these guys, because I had similar friends who I would joke with and tease about sports and life.  He was conversational, yet engaging – instead of tightening his columns into arbitrary word counts, he wrote freely, yet focused.  He would routinely refer to himself as an idiot, yet it was clear that he tore through books with reckless abandon, publishing at least half of a promised “best sports books list” at one point on the Page 2 site.  If anything, he came off as a humble fan, never promising to be unbiased, but always promising to be entertaining. While there weren’t many critics (I seem to remember a website posting a basic form that served as a Sports Guy Simmons madlibs) there also wasn’t much to critique.  The guy was hot.  His misses were still very readable if for no other reason than the jokes.

At some point, however, his longwinded writing style became a bit overblown.  He was spending a great deal of time writing about the memes he’d created, like the Tyson Zone and The Ewing Theory (yes, I know.  He’s not the true inventor of the Ewing Theory.  He is responsible for popularizing it at a national level, however) and all of a sudden became shticky.  The Mad-Libs pinprick seemed to become more and more valid with every passing week.  His fanboys at Deadspin.com, who once published an exit interview with Jason Whitlock which was either prefixed or suffixed by a quote that their next ESPN exit interview get should be Sports Guy Simmons, metamorphosed from referring to him as the “Sports Fella” and relishing the fact that Deadspin.com was one of the few sports blogs Simmons admitted to reading to eviscerating him on a regular basis.

Whenever Simmons tweets things that are heavily Boston-centric, or tries to work things out in his writing by comparing them to the Patriots, Red Sox, Holy Cross, or Boston in general, Drew Magary (Deadspin.com’s resident Bill Simmons in vulgar, envelope-pushing mashup of sports and pop culture blogging) will inevitably excoriate him for it in his Tawwmeee from Quinzeeee persona (Tommy from Quincy, a Boston-centric Neanderthal with a loudmouthed Kennedy impersonation for an accent) saying “OW-AH PAIN IS WORSAH THAN YO-AH PAIN!” or some other overly simplistic, yet bitterly incisive synopsis of his article or comment.

Magary himself actually included as a part of his self aware weekly column during the NFL Season – Drew’s NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo, which is part Chasing Amy, part Simpsons reference (if I were to take a stab at the Dick Joke part of the title.  The Jamboroo part has to be from Much Apu About Nothing) a satirical picks column in which a fictitious version of Bill Simmons, in the guise of an old Nazi, makes self assured picks and then rants about Jews and gays using Simmons well-worn phrases, such as “who doesn’t accept that trade?” and “Stop. Just stop.”  The message was clear: Simmons, you’re tired.  You used to be the guy poking and prodding against ESPN and their ridiculous over the top hype machine, as well as crediting old, hacky sportswriters who stood in your way at the Boston Herald with your decision to quit and start up an internet column where you’d be unencumbered by deadlines and editors, which eventually got you noticed by ESPN.com.

The criticism wasn’t invalid.  Simmons has relied heavily, lately, on either making arguments that are so overblown and long-winded that they end up feeling like a filibuster, as well as lazy writing in which he makes his point by providing a half-formed straw man counterargument to his well-formed point, and then cuts off all inner-monologue style debate with “stop. Just stop” which runs the gamut of too much and not enough, all at the same time. Additionally, Simmons would write from columns that frequently referenced his aforementioned memes that he either created or popularized, such as the Tyson zone, even inventing adjectives like “Tysonic” to further flesh out their existence.  He devoted entire columns of thousands of words to reconfigure his levels of losing columns, and debate whether or not the Tyson Zone should be renamed to the Britney Zone.  It all felt like the snake eating its own tail.

On top of this, he sank further from his old self where he’d make fun of himself, or allow a reader to tease him with some well-placed jokes, instead becoming quite thin-skinned.  He rattled off a really nasty tweet to Charles P. Pierce which basically had the feeling of “Kobe, Tell Me How My Ass Tastes” after Pierce contributed to Deadspin, speaking of Simmons’ second book, the 700+ page behemoth “The Book ofBasketball,” in an unflattering light, blasting everything from the 300 page pyramid hall of fame section to Malcolm Gladwell’s introduction to the book, in which Gladwell fails to convince the reader that Simmons is joking about becoming an NBA GM (something he has twice half-heartedly attempted to maybe jokingly create a campaign for even though he wouldn’t accept it unless they offered it to him because he’s just joking but who wouldn’t turn it down, am I right?  Just stop?) while at the same time failing to convince the reader that Simmons would be a great fit for NBA GM because he writes lots of in-depth columns about the NBA and is close friends with Daryl Morey, Houston Rockets GM.  It was a salient point, and Simmons flew off the handle.

It was also around this time that I met Bill Simmons for the third time.  The first two times, he was gracious and friendly in signing my “Now I Can Die In Peace” book, even having a discussion about my Yankee Jersey with me, as well as discussing Springsteen’s best non-BTR albums. This time, however, Simmons barricaded himself in the back of a terrible Red Sox bar in New York City (Professor Thoms), and the staff so badly bungled the entire signing that it took hours upon hours to get a book signed (I waited for five hours).  When it was time to meet the man, instead of having some friendly banter and joking about the World Series game happening (Yanks-Phils, Game 1, 2009 Series.  Phils bested CC and the Yanks.  It was miserable.) we had to tell some waitress what we wanted written in the book, and what our name was.  She wrote it on a post-it, and then handed the book to an ESPN PR guy.  That guy then handed it to Simmons, who signed it like an automaton, handed me the book back, shook my hand awkwardly, and said “Thanks for coming out!” before turning his gaze back to the TV.  I include this story because it was so disheartening from someone who has met him before, and interacted with him in such a better manner.  And I’ve interacted with him at a bar, as well; not just a bookstore signing with a staff that knows their ass from their elbow!  Also, if this feels like a little bit of cathartic bloodletting, well, that’s fair. I need some Monistat. Yeah, but still.

To give the general gist of today’s column, Simmons wrote that he made a deal with himself a long time ago that he would always write about things he was arguing with his sports friends about, and present his argument in a manner that ignores the ESPN masthead, what it might mean for the company’s deals with major sports leagues (which is one part of his journalistic credo he’s never sacrificed – calling out ESPN or the .com side when he saw a conflict of interest,) or athletes (another thing he’d eschewed from. He made a point a while back that he likes the view from the seats way more than the view from the locker room, worrying about pissing players off with his jokes in his columns) and that he’d gotten away from it a while ago.  It may have been subtle, and he may not have known he’d been doing it.

Tawmee from Quinzeee might have said that a Bill Simmons column is three things BAHSTIN, SAWKS, THE FACKIN’ PATS, and HAWLEEWOOD PAHP CUHLCHA SHIT.  Going back to the MadLibs, it seems like Simmons threw those all into the proverbial Cuisinart and out came his latest column.  They weren’t bad, but they felt so rote after so many years of boundary pushing, funny, insightful writing.  When Bill compares Sports Fan Simmons in today’s column with ESPN Simmons, it’s clear that he’s making a distinction – I’ve been ESPN Simmons for a while.  He is the editor of the wildly popular Grantland.com website, which is ultimately an ESPN and Disney property, but it is an island unto itself.  He is saying that he intends to test how much leniency he is going to get. He seems to want to be Sports Fan Simmons way more than he wants to be ESPN Simmons.

In the actual article, he goes after the sad state of ESPN’s embrace debate banner, which isn’t actually debate, but preapproved talking points and rehearsed “disagreements” that don’t actually get in to anything.  He specifically references first take, and the tired bullshit of Stephen A and Skip Pointless (without naming them) talking honestly about something.  Debating doesn’t mean the two parties always disagree. ESPN is just trying to control the content of the debate so that it seems edgy while really being scripted.  It’s sort of like the WWE in that regard.  In his column, Simmons suggests what a real discussion between the two debaters would look like if one of them actually stated that Ray Lewis may have taken PEDs, something ESPN doesn’t want to talk about (since Ray Lewis will be joining them next year), and posits that it’s damn good television.  At first glance, that seems like a “stop. Just stop.” straw man argument stopper.  But the interaction sounds real (it is scripted, since it existed solely in Simmons head), it is insightful, and it would make for, as Simmons put it, damn good television.

Deadspin (nor Magary) has posted no official comments on the column, but I suspect it is right up their alley in terms of ombudsman style breadcrumbs from the inside journalism that takes a shot at the big guy.  What’s more, it has the credibility of a guy they’d written off as corporate shill, and tired hack treading the same groove like the Boston Herald writer of the mid 90s.  Instead, Bill Simmons has finally figured out what Grantland actually is – it’s the break room with great arguments, top notch writers, lots of white board diagrams, and the motto, reminiscent of David Letterman’s Late Show, of “if it’s interesting, funny, or both, we do it.”  Welcome Back Sports Fan Simmons, I hope to see a whole lot more of you.