Some jackass wrote a puff piece about Simmons for Rolling Stone, and it's horrible (part 3)

First of all, I meant to include this in the initial post in this series but forgot.  Check out the photo accompanying this piece, which presumably took up a full page in the print edition of Rolling Stone.  Look at it.  It's magnificent.  HE'S SO EDGY.  Nothing says "Authority on Sports" like an awkward dad wearing a douchey LA outfit about to throw a basketball at you.



This is your favorite "sports" columnist, America.  Good job.  You assholes.

In his columns, Simmons embodies the precise average of American maleness: He loves sports, 

Fine.

movies, 

Women love movies too.

fantasy baseball 

Much as I enjoy it, fantasy baseball is not that popular.  

and hot actresses, and is not unfamiliar with porn. 

YEAH!  THAT'S TOTALLY ME!  OMG I SHOULD WRITE HIM A LETTER AND TELL HIM AND MAYBE I'LL GET PUBLISHED IN THE MAILBAG!  YEAH TITS HIGH FIVE BRO

"I don't have a shitload of hobbies," he says. "I'm not very complicated."

You don't say.

Once a year, he goes to Vegas with several friends — 

 But why????  Tell us, Rob Tannenbaum!  Why would anyone go to Vegas?  It's hot there!

to gamble. 

No fucking way.

This is so shitty.  Why is this an article?  Even for Rolling Stone, this sucks.  Would it have been "controversial" if he went there to visit strip clubs?  More importantly, does anyone give a flying fuck why this simpleton goes on vacation?  He could be going to Vegas to check out its public library.  Who cares?  Is any of this relevant?

"He's much more interested in playing cards than in seeing naked girls," Jimmy Kimmel says, with a tone of disdain. 

OK?  I guess Kimmel is razzing him?  Is this relevant?  Come to think of it, it might be relevant, because if he's as bad at cards as he is at picking NFL games, man, he's going to have some financial problems.  

On his podcast, Simmons often talks about betting on games — up to $1,000 on individual games, or $2,000 on futures bets, he tells me. "I love gambling. I wish it was legal. But I never bet a lot, even in Vegas. Unless I'm really drunk."

HIGH FIVE AGAIN BRO!  REMEMBER THAT TIME YOU WERE SO BOMBED????  Bill Simmons is a 17 year old boy who somehow makes 7 figures a year.

He won't say whether or not he has a bookie in L.A., which means he likely does. 

SPICY!  SALACIOUS!  Who is reading this and going "Wow, I gotta keep going.  There might be something EVEN BETTER further down the page!"

And if he offers you a bet, you should probably take it — last football season, he won only 108 out of 256 picks against the spread in his column. "It was kind of a bummer," he says, though he points out that in 2006, he had his wife Kari make her own football picks in his column. "And she beat me. So if I had credibility after that gimmick, it was an accident." 

Another surprising display of self awareness.  Fair enough.  Although I suspect he is only saying this because he feels he has to, and still is 100% confident in most picks he makes.  THAT SPREAD IS WAY TOO HIGH.  THANKS FOR THE FREE TWO POINTS, VEGAS.  /team Bill didn't bet on beats spread by two touchdowns

(Kari was also at least as funny as her husband. 

Not a chance.

She said Lindsay Lohan would "look like a leather purse in 25 years no matter how much Proactiv she takes," and theorized that Katie Holmes "had her ankles removed" so she'd be the same height at Tom Cruise.)

Watch out, Joan Rivers!  Someone's coming for your "queen of celebrity bashing" crown!  Actually, now that I re-read the first part of that parenthetical, I totally agree.  Bill's wife IS about as funny as he is.

Simmons will always be associated with New England — he might love Tom Brady and Larry Bird as much as he loves his wife and two kids — but he's unsentimental about his roots. 

Wrong.  I can't wait to see how he spins this one.

"I don't think you could get him to go back to Boston at gunpoint," Kimmel says. 

If he could maintain his current role at ESPN while doing that (which of course would be impossible if he wanted to stay on NBA Countdown and he obviously does), I'm sure he'd do it in a second.  TOO MANY LAKER FLAGS ON CARS.  GOD THOSE FANS ARE JUST INSUFFERABLE.  FACK YOUUUU!

Simmons is credited as an Internet visionary, but he went into new media only because old media rejected him. 

That is completely correct.  While this article does suck, I like that it's being honest about Bill imperfections.  It's not that in 1990whatever he was like "I know exactly what the internet will be in 2014, so I'm getting on the train early."  It's that he's a bad writer and allegedly insufferable to work with, so he couldn't get an old media job.  Just because he stumbled ass-backwards into success by being good at making pop culture references appreciated by people as dumb as him (and I was that kind of person until 2004 or 2005, I admit, but I was also a lot younger and dumber then) doesn't mean we need to pretend like he invented the idea of blogging about sports.

"Boston," he says, "is where I failed."

Well, Los Angeles is where you continue to fail, but yeah, I get what you're saying.

He began his career as a lackey at the Boston Herald, the lesser of the city's two daily papers, "organizing Chinese-food orders" and covering high school teams. 

His co-workers could never understand what he was saying due to the huge silver spoon in his mouth.  I wonder how many other "applicants" he beat out to get that job?

He stood outside the Herald building on the Mass Turnpike, smoking cigarettes and "wondering what the fuck I was gonna do with my life."

Bill Simmons is, and always was, a boring clod.

Except for the addition of tall buildings, Boston hasn't changed since Paul Revere bought a horse. 

Still as racist as ever!

TV anchors and newspaper columnists keep their jobs for decades, and at the Herald, "mediocre writers were blocking my way," Simmons later wrote. 

Just as they should block the way of any sub-mediocre writer.  You know, I hate that all those guys who play minor league baseball are blocking the way and preventing me from playing major league baseball.  They've got a lot of nerve!

"I didn't do myself any favors," he adds now. "I was probably too arrogant, 

NO WAY I DON'T BELIEVE IT NOT EVEN A LITTLE BIT

and could barely hide my disdain for some of the writers." After three years, "frustrated to the point of insanity," he quit and worked as a bartender. At 24, he began smoking pot, 

MORE SCANDAL.  I BET HE HAD A BOOKIE TOO.

and soon owned a four-foot purple bong. (In L.A., he discovered West Coast weed was way more potent, and one night, ended up "hiding behind the curtains in my living room for 40 minutes because I thought somebody was watching us. After that, I phased back big time.") 

BUT DOES HE LIKE STRIPPERS?????

He considered going into commercial real estate 

Dear sweet baby Jesus, can you imagining negotiating a contract with this guy?  My head hurts just from typing that sentence.

with his stepdad before he came across a new website, AOL, where even a Herald reject could write.

What if he had somehow caught on and stayed there, rather than moving to ESPN?  Would ESPN still be as cool as it was in the 90s, with AOL's sports wing filling ESPN's current role of "purveyor of incredibly shitty and celebrity-obsessed sports content?"  I guess it all depends on who gets bought by Disney in this hypothetical world.  Fuck Disney.

He wrote with a fan's dismay and delight, rejecting the idea of being objective (a Boston partisan, he openly despises the L.A. Lakers and any team from New York), 

Here are all the teams from New York he can name:

1) YANKEES!  FACK THE YANKEES IN SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER!

2) Knicks (but really, why hate them, they're not really worth hating)

3) Nets INSERT MIKHAIL PROKHOROV/YAKOV SMIRNOV JOKE HERE

4) They might have another baseball team, but I don't follow the minor leagues

5) /Bill eats paste

and attacking local sportswriters by name. No team would give him a press pass, so while newspaper guys padded short articles with boring quotes from athletes, Simmons distinguished himself by mixing in references to bands and movies (especially Shawshank Redemption and Karate Kid), 

Thank goodness.  Someone who really had their finger on the pulse of America's tastes.

and by writing long: "85,000-word essays about Rocky IV," Kimmel jokes.

OK, I will back off a little and admit that I like Rocky IV.  Non-ironically.

Simmons' early work had flaws — bitterness, cheap cracks about the manliness of female athletes, praise for the Counting Crows — 

Please delete the word "early" from that sentence and change "had" to "will always have"

but it was also funny, fresh, expansive, and even sentimental, especially when he wrote adoringly about his dad and their sports bond. 

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

That's the secret element of Simmons' success: He's the most emo sportswriter around. 

I wouldn't call it a secret.  I'd call it an unfortunate and insufferable reality.

He once penned a 3,000-word column describing how his dog Daisy died of lymphoma. It's the Fall Out Boy of sports columns.

In that it's terrible and no one should pay attention to it?  Gotcha.

In 2000, when ESPN launched Page 2, a site that mixed sports, pop culture and humor, Simmons waited for his phone to ring. "That was probably the lowest I sunk, when ESPN didn't hire me for Page 2," he says. 

What an entitled little shithead.

He was in his early thirties, still borrowing money from his parents. 

But those mean people at the Boston Herald were mean and didn't let me write whatever I wanted to write!  It wasn't fair!  I didn't want that stupid really hard to get job anyways!

A few months after the launch, he wrote a column mocking ESPN's annual awards show, and his taunts got noticed. "I was on the floor laughing," recalls ESPN's John A. Walsh. 

John Walsh is a fucking dummy.  He certainly comes off as such in Those Guys Have All the Fun.

Soon, Simmons had his first ESPN assignment. If there's a moral, it's this: Bite the hand you cannot kiss.
I'd say the obvious "moral," if you're going to give the story of Simmons's success that much gravitas, is to appeal to stupid people.  There's a lot of them and they're easy to please.  His rise to power at ESPN is idiocracy in corporate media form.  I'll give him this, though--he's probably less of a shithead than Mariotti.

I'll wrap this up later.

Some jackass wrote a puff piece about Simmons for Rolling Stone, and it's horrible (part 2)

I hope everyone did their homework since Sunday night, and read all of Simmons's greatest columns as linked by Rolling Stone in the first part of this article.  Like I said, I didn't even bother looking at what they listed, but I'm sure his column about his dog dying is at or near the top.  That's always where people who like Bill go when I tell them I think he's a shitty writer.  "But did you read the one about The Dooze?"  I sure did.  And I'm not going to make fun of him for it, but I'll tell you this much: that piece helps my case more than it hurts it.  Anyways, back to Mr. Music Critic Man and his in-depth analysis of America's least important pop culture critic.

Simmons has 2.6 million followers on Twitter. Many can't wait to tell him what an idiot he is. (The Simmons brand has a strong ripple effect: Even his wife, known as the Sports Gal, has 25,000 followers, despite not having tweeted in almost a year.) Sports Twitter is a mire of stupidity, homophobia, and violent threats.

That's an odd way to describe all the scorching hot taeks out there IMO

It's probably the most inane culture on Twitter; at least on Politics Twitter, you occasionally come across a fact.

If you're getting anything other than breaking news and jokes from Sports Twitter or Political Twitter, you're a certified dumbass with a tiny attention span.

Simmons uses Twitter almost exclusively to promote and link to Grantland material. 

No.  That is flagrantly untrue.  Simmons uses Twitter to opine (moronically) on basketball, football, and gambling, to pretend to be a baseball fan if it's September/October and the Red Sox are good, to complain about allegedly bad refereeing that goes against Boston teams, and about a dozen other things just as often or more often than he uses it to promote Grantland stuff.

He doesn't reply to people who think he's a douche, or want to punch his face. 

Well, there are only 24 hours in the day.  Come on. 

He also writes fewer sports columns than he used to, partly because TV and movies occupy more of his time. 

That's the weakest attempt I've seen anyone make to justify the fact that Simmons doesn't write, and knows nothing regarding the subjects he does find the time to write about.  TV and movies occupy "more" of his time?  More than when?  Back in the 90s, when he obviously also watched a shitload of movies?  It's not like he became a big time consumer of visual media in the last five years.  (Hey, I can relate!  But I don't get paid for this.) The guy is just out of ideas, and likes recording podcasts because that's way easier than writing.  I don't blame him for any of that, but--oh wait yes I do, fuck him and fuck his podcasts and TV appearances.

The Internet 

This isn't 1994.  I don't think we need to capitalize it.

gave him a career, an audience, wealth, 

True, true and sadly, true.

influence, 

Over what/who?  America's least informed and most obnoxious sports fans who aren't actually sports fans?

and fourth-row seats for the Clippers. 

As long as the Clippers continue to make the playoffs.

But lately, Bill Simmons is kind of over the Internet.

OOOH!  SO 21ST CENTURY AVANT-GARDE!  BILL WILL NOT BE CONSTRAINED BY THE MOST IMPORTANT AND FAR-REACHING MEDIUM IN THE WORLD!  NO!  HE WILL BROADCAST HIS PODCASTS VIA CARRIER PIGEON!

Bill Simmons' Top 10 Go-To Writing Moves

Another mid-article link.  Still not going to click on it, but I have no idea how they found ten items for that list.  Maybe they separated out "References to mediocre movies" into six or seven separate items, going movie by movie.

On a Friday in January, Simmons and his Grantland staff scheduled a celebration: drinks at a glamorous hotel, 

Maybe there will be some famous celebs there so Bill can rub elbows with other Hollywood elite!  Hey Jack Nicholson, is it alright if Bill calls you "Jackie Baby?"  He's got some ideas to share about how you could have been better in The Departed.

after work, to celebrate the site's redesign. He and I talked for three hours in his undecorated office 

NO FENWAY PARK POSTER ON THE WALL FOR THIS GUY.  HE'S A MAN OF THE PEOPLE.  Either that, or he's just too fucking simple minded and boring to do anything interesting with his office.  My office, on the other hand, contains a day-by-day The Onion calendar, a coffee mug featuring my hockey team's logo, and a printout of my baseball team's 2014 schedule taped to the wall.  Please, pretend not to be impressed.  

/Larry B continues to be lonely for good reason

at ESPN's downtown L.A. complex, and a few times, he described his ambivalence about the effects of online culture.

"I totally don't let anything affect me," he didn't say, since it's well documented that he's hilariously thin-skinned.

Before the site launched, he decided Grantland wouldn't run slideshows, which draw big traffic but are dumb, 

A fair perspective on listicles.

or print reader comments, which breed idiocy. 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA that is a lie.  A big, dirty, ugly lie.  Yes, comments do breed idiocy (just look at the comments on this blog!), but they also make a site significantly more fun and worth re-visiting.  The reason Grantland doesn't print comments is the same reason so many other popular online forums don't: it thinks it's intellectually superior to its readership.  How sad.

"Everybody was saying, 'Articles have to be short, because people have short attention spans.' And I felt like the opposite was true."

Which opposite?  That articles have to be long, because people have long attention spans?  That articles have to be short, because people have long attention spans?  That articles have to be long, because people have short attention spans?  This man is editor-in-chief of an entity that produces written content.

He built Grantland around long-form articles, the opposite of Twitter's enforced brevity, 

Yeah, that's clearly what Grantland was: a backlash to Twitter.  Where did that come from?  Where are you going with this?  God this article sucks.

and hired writers known for their cleverness and insight, 

OOH LIKE CHRIS JONES AND KLOSTERMAN!  HOORAY FOR NAVEL GAZING!

particularly with sophisticated sports statistics, rather than their snark: Jonah Keri for baseball, Bill Barnwell for football, Katie Baker for hockey, and for basketball, Zach Lowe, whom Simmons poached from Sports Illustrated by relentlessly pursuing him.

Those are probably the four best writers at Grantland.  I have to give it to the author of this piece for trying to pass them off as representative of the entire Grantland staff.

Unlike almost every other site, Grantland doesn't pick fights. 

What?  What the fuck are you talking about?  Which sites, besides tiny blogs like this that are read by no one, "pick fights?"  Are you talking about Deadspin?  They're a dumb tabloid, but they're not out to start "fights" with other sites.  This is a loaded comment with absolutely no substance.

"There's a mean-spiritedness on the Internet that we've stayed away from," Simmons told me in his office. 

"Mostly because I'm not clever enough to engage in it or understand it."

"It seems to be getting angrier — especially Twitter, which is full of coyotes, waiting to attack the next victim." One false move, he added, and you find yourself in "a 24-hour shitstorm."

Here comes the Dr. V stuff.  Those damn "coyotes," holding Bill and Co. accountable for doing something insanely irresponsible and dumb!  Who do they think they are?

His thoughts about vengefulness took on a different meaning only a few hours later, when the shit-stirrer was now in a shitstorm of his own. Two days earlier, the site had published a story, "Dr. V's Magical Putter," about Dr. Essay Anne Vanderbilt, a female physicist who had invented a new, possibly superior golf putter. When writer Caleb Hannan investigated her background, he learned Vanderbilt was a transgender woman. Despite having agreed to her demand that he not write about her life, Hannan told Vanderbilt that he'd discovered the secret she clearly wanted to keep private, and he outed her to an investor. In the third-to-last paragraph of the story, Hannan revealed that Vanderbilt had committed suicide. It was a fascinating story, but also cruel and irresponsible.

Just ask a really smart professional journalist guy!

The initial reaction was favorable: other writers called it "a great read," and "mesmerizing," as they shared the link on Twitter. Richard Deitsch, a reporter at Sports Illustrated, said Hannan's article "might be the best I've read this month," an opinion he regretted four days later, after the article had been widely condemned. 

Good to see so many other sports journalists are just as ethically clueless as Simmons and Company.  Although Deitsch is an alright dude.

Unlike the controversy over Joe Johnson, there were genuine stakes in play. 

Well, there WERE genuine stakes in play.  The limited brain cells involved in the creation and editing of the piece kind of kicked into gear a little late to prevent a horrible thing from happening.

A political reporter called the "Dr. V" piece "absolutely, stunningly unforgivable." One Tweeter called Hannan "a fucking shit head and a murderer," and another said to him, "you harassed a trans woman until she killed herself."

First guy: taking it too far.  Second guy: just about correct.

On that Friday night, Simmons dismissed the furor — just more "mean-spiritedness on the Internet." 

HAHAHAHAHAH that's fantastic.  As much of a lamewad puff piece as this is, I love that that's included.  "HATERZ JUST JELLY THAT MY WEBSITE CONTRIBUTED TO A SUICIDE."

Oddly, a master of new media was badly misreading what was happening. 

Let me fix that for you: the fact that Simmons badly misread what was happening is an excellent piece of evidence suggesting that he is not close to being a master of new media.

The next day, he took his daughter to her soccer tournament, and during a break between games, looked online, where the angry reactions had continued. "That's when everything turned," he says, "and I started to think we'd made a serious mistake. It snowballed over the weekend, and I started going into deep self-hatred."

"At first people wanted to hold me accountable and I was like 'Fuck that.'  But then they didn't go away after 24 hours, and I actually had a moment of reflection and self-awareness.  It was strange."

The story's misjudgment was not the result of malice. The Grantland staff is more diverse, in gender and race, than most publications ("God forbid we ever get credit for that," he grumbles), 

What a fucking asshole.  What a raging cunt.

and when I talked to him in the thick of the anti-Grantland tempest, he was clearly morose and regretful. "People hate our site now," he said.

This guy needs PR training in the worst fucking way.  "People hate our site now."  That's your reaction to people being mad at you for using poor judgment and ultimately contributing to a person's death.  Wow.  WHAT ABOUT OUR BRAND?  WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

But Simmons also didn't fully understand why people despised the article. "Crazy" and "hysterical" responses on Twitter had made him "embarrassed for mankind," and he didn't agree with me that Grantland never should have mentioned the fact that Vanderbilt was a transgender woman. 

Jesus, I may have to stop calling this a puff piece.  It got dark and confrontational really quickly there.

Like a lot of people, especially people in the sports world, he's amiss in issues of gender and sexuality; a few weeks later, during a podcast in which he discussed Michael Sam, a college football player who came out in February, Simmons used the offensive phrase "sexual preference" – not out of hostility towards Sam, but out of ignorance. 

I'm going to have to bookmark this article, I am getting tired of having to Google for it when I need to link to it every few weeks.

Simmons wrote a lengthy apology for the "Dr. V" story, which Grantland posted the next Monday. 

Which, predictably, he turned into an essay about himself.

The article, he admitted, lacked empathy for Vanderbilt, and should not have outed her posthumously. His apology was thorough and almost self-flagellating, 

Because it was probably insincere, to the extent it wasn't genuine remorse but rather a plea for people to forgive his website.

but was also mitigated by his defensiveness, which ESPN Executive Vice President and Executive Editor John A. Walsh told me he found "unfortunate." In addition, Grantland published a stinging critique by ESPN baseball reporter Christina Kahrl, who is a transgender woman; she denounced the story's ignorance and "casual cruelty." "By any professional or ethical standard," she also wrote, Vanderbilt's past "wasn’t merely irrelevant to the story, it wasn't [Grantland's] information to share."

HATER.  MEAN-SPIRITED.

And ESPN ombudsman Robert Lipsyte, an accomplished 76-year old writer, added his own column, in which he called the article "inexcusable" in its "unawareness and arrogance." He described Simmons as "a talented, overextended 44 year old" with "considerable vision and celebrity." Lipsyte did not intend "celebrity" as a compliment.

And hopefully Jimmy Kimmel's comparable comment was also sarcastic.  You're never going to match up to my future wife Le Anne Schreiber, Robert Lipsyte, but that's a tasty burn.

More soon.

Pat Forde + Logic = Train Wreck

See if you can find the problem with this sequence of ideas. (Re: 41 year old American Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, who just finished an amazing Olympic trials in which she set several personal records and even one American record even though she's coming off of multiple surgeries.)

Torres has never tested positive for any performance enhancers to my knowledge. She's requested random blood and urine testing from the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and said she wants to be "an open book."

Torres met with USADA CEO Travis T. Tygart last year and, according to a report in The New York Times, decided to volunteer for a pilot program under the agency that "tests more broadly" for doping through blood and urine samples.

"Can USADA give Dara or some other athlete the stamp of cleanliness?" Tygart asked the newspaper. "No, the science isn't there yet." But he added, "I think a dirty athlete would be crazy to volunteer for this program."

According to the report, Tygart has yet to release any of Torres' results, but she told reporters here at the trials this week that she has been randomly tested "probably about 12 to 15 times since March."

But locking up a stunning fifth Olympic appearance on the Fourth of July by winning the 100-meter freestyle makes me wonder whether too good to be true is the same thing as too good to be clean.

It's true. I'll address it in detail at the end of the post, but it's fine to feel like that about something like this. It's only natural. However, don't justify those feelings like this:

Baseball and other sports have poisoned the well to the point that Torres' late-career renaissance reminds me of too many fraudulent fairy tales that have been foisted off on the gullible American public.

We were supposed to believe Roger Clemens was a dominant pitcher in his 40s because he trained harder and smarter than everyone else. We were supposed to believe Barry Bonds was capable of hitting 73 home runs at age 37 because he was simply that good and had worked tirelessly to build his body naturally. We were supposed to believe these miracles of human preservation, but we've since been given reason to believe they really were lying cheaters instead.

Hey, DUMMY- there's a key difference between the drug testing Olympic athletes go through and the drug testing MLB players went through prior to 2005. (Actually, there are still a lot of differences between the programs, but let's just say the gap has been narrowed at least a little.) Google it and see if you can sort the situation out.

Listen, I'm all for skepticism when it comes to extraordinary athletic accomplishments in this day and age. There's no way around it- the proliferation of PEDs means that anyone who does something incredible is bound to come under some degree of scrutiny. That's fair. I have no problem with it. So in that sense, I have no fundamental problem with Pat's article. What she's done is pretty unbelievable... maybe too unbelievable to be clean. As Chad himself says, no one has ever swum like she just did at this age. But here's the problem- if you're going to write an article about this kind of sports-related skepticism, comparing an Olympic athlete's allegedly clean accomplishments to the allegedly clean accomplishments of MLB players in the late 90s/early 00s is fucking preposterous. Really? Being Barry Bonds, and just saying you're clean, is the same thing as Dara Torres and volunteering for an extremely rigorous pilot testing program? At least compare her accomplishments to Floyd Landis's, or something.

And yes, I know that there is no testing routine that's anywhere close to perfect or comprehensive. A very decent sized chunk of the athletes competing in Beijing this summer will be dirty, and almost all will get away with it. I'm just saying... it's fucking ridiculous to say that it's hard to enjoy Torres's accomplishments specifically because of untested cases like Bonds and Clemens. Go jump in a lake, Pat Forde.

Special thanks to last Friday's anonymous commenter for tipping me off about this article.