Now that the Heat are champs, let us review the dumbest "fan opinion" article ever written

Deadspin is generally fucking worthless, but it does a good job of dumping on the silliness that is ESPN First Take.  Not that First Take is hard to dump on (although let us never forget that Skip rules all shit), but I appreciate the way Deadspin covers it. For example, on Tuesday, they posted this.  It's a great demonstration of the absurd contrarianism First Take tries to cultivate, while looking incredibly silly in the process.  So you think that with as good as they are at pointing out that First Take is idiotic, they would never publish something like what you're about to read.  But you'd be wrong.  It is the most embarrassingly bad "Hey I'm just a fan and this my opinion on what it means to be a fan" piece I have ever read.  I'm sure you could pick up the topic from the title or first couple of sentences, but I'll just let you know that it was posted Wednesday morning in response to the (rightful) laugh America had at the expense of "fans" of the Heat who headed for the exits when Game 6 was still well in question.

In Defense of Leaving Early

by Bobby Big Wheel

I do not want to put on my Bill Simmons hat (fortunately I don't even have one) and try to write my own little manifesto about when it's OK to leave a game early and when it is not.  Instead, before we get into the substance of the article, let me just address Tuesday night's situation with as much tact and sophistication as I can muster: If you are a Heat fan (as opposed to some lucky piece of shit who doesn't care about the Heat or Spurs and just stumbled into Finals tickets and decided to go on a whim--this is not addressed to you) who was not having a medical emergency and you left that game early, you're a fucking idiot.  A fucking.  Idiot.  Period.  You deserve to be laughed at forever.  Now, let's give Bobby the floor, to explain why what I just said is wrong, because something Hartford Whalers something traffic.

I always hated leaving Whalers games early. 

Someone has their communications degree, or at least a minor.  "Establish credibility with the audience by acknowledging the validity of the opposite viewpoint of the one you're about to take.  If possible, connect with that opposite viewpoint via a personal anecdote or story so as to make your acknowledgement more authentic."  You're welcome, I just saved you $500 in devry.com online lectures.  

Maybe if they were down three goals I could be coaxed out of my seat when the PA announcer said, "Oooooooone minute left in the period." But it would take all of my father's cajoling to get me to leave the Hartford Civic Center before the crush of 10,000 people parked in the same three garages made his trek home a nightmare. He didn't spend five minutes backing a Mercury Grand Marquis into a too-small parking spot just to get stuck afterward in a 15-minute line of cars crawling toward a cash-only booth.

Surely that anecdote is very relevant to the way parking is handled at American Airlines Arena in Miami in the year 2013.

I won't pretend he had to clock in at the steel mill the next morning. He had a white-collar job at an insurance company, one that paid well enough for him to afford Whalers season tickets. 

Simmons, if given the chance to write about that same situation: "My dad was barely making ends meet!  He thought about selling our playoff tickets to put bread on the table for another week, but he just couldn't do it. Those moments are too special.  Later, he was fired from the steel mill for consistent absenteeism.  Fortunately he also had a job as an investment banker, so we ended up doing fine."

But he faced the same problems the rest of the 99 percent faces. Nobody has a pension; 

What?  Please get back on topic.

nobody has a guarantee; and raising three kids takes a big bite out of your nest egg. He had to be in the office the next morning around the same time that I had to be at the bus stop, and getting home at 11 p.m. would've just made everything even more of a hassle. So fuck it, we were going home, even though we were down only 3-1 to the Penguins.

That's fine.  It's worth pointing out that the difference between getting home at 10:45 and getting home at 11:00 is really pretty tiny, but I will honor his point and acknowledge that his dad did save some time in this madeup story.  On the other hand, here's something pretty fucking important to consider: the Whalers never met the Penguins in the playoffs, nor did they ever play any NHL team (other than the Canadiens, in 1986) in any round of the playoffs other than the first round, so the above anecdote about leaving during the 3rd period of a 3-1 game most definitely did not happen during the Stanley Cup finals.  Say, in game 6.  Say, with the Whalers down three games to two in the series and down by a single goal in the game.  So really, Bobby Big Wheel's attempt to establish credibility regarding the Heat's game six early exiters has failed miserably, because: it's not even close to the same fucking thing.

It's easy to make fun of Heat fans for leaving Game 6 

Oh yes, it's very easy!  I'll even link to Deadspin without making fun of them again, to prove my point: look at these people!  They look (and sound) like fucking assholes!  It's hilarious!

when it'd looked like all was lost. 

Oh, but here's the thing.  To a fan with any knowledge of the game, as well as the knowledge that this is a "win or season over" game, all was never lost.  They were down five with 0:28 to go, but had the ball.  Then they were down three with 0:19 to go, but again had the ball.  Neither of those are "whelp pack it in, it's over" moments.  Maybe down seven with 0:19 and without the ball, having just fouled.  At that point I'd say all is almost lost.  Other team makes the free throws, pushes it to nine, all is lost.  You are free to go.  But where the Heat were on Tuesday night before Ray Allen's big game tying three?  Nope.  

Even local TV reporters, a class of professionally unembarrassed people, said they were embarrassed, that the stereotypes about Heat fans were true, that Miami was a Bad Sports Town. 

All of these things are true.  Doesn't make Miami a bad city, but they are definitely true.

But fandom isn't the same thing as slavish devotion. 

/watches Bobby Big Wheel climb onto rickety soap box

Your favorite team doesn't pay you, and it doesn't owe you anything. 

And how do you know this?  Please stay on topic.

I learned that lesson when the Whalers left for North Carolina. 

/rickety soap box collapses, leaving Bobby Big Wheel bleeding on the ground

Let's be very, very clear about this: realizing that pro sports owners are assholes who will sell out fans to make a buck has goddamn nothing to do with whether or not you, if you are a real fan of a team, should leave a playoff elimination game while the outcome is still in question.  Fuck you.

Sportswriters easily forget that for most people attending a game is a hobby, a fun diversion, not a job.

That's fine, I agree that you don't have to be a diehard to attend a game, but to get tickets to a possible championship deciding game, you're either a rich prick or a very devoted fan.  I didn't look at the prices on StubHub on Tuesday night but I'm sure the cheapest nosebleed seats were hundreds of dollars.  There were no groups of friends there who said on a whim "Hey I know none of us care about the Heat, but let's go to the game anyways, could be a fun evening!"  Everyone who was there was, again, either a rich prick who can handle being mocked, or someone who had one of the most telltale signs of ostensibly serious fandom: spending gobs of money to see the team play.  Spare me your pathetic sermon about how IT'S JUST A GAME PEOPLE SHEESH LIGHTEN UP.  Yes, it is just a game.  Doesn't change the fact that the people who left early are bad fans and complete tards.

Expecting fans to stay until the end of a game reeks of the same fogeyism that bemoans kids checking their phones all the time. 

In fact, I AM a kid who checks his phone all the time.  The people that left are still fucking assholes who deserve to be mocked.  I am repeating myself, but one more time, just to be clear: game 6 of the NBA Finals with the Heat down three games to two and down five points with 0:28 left is not on the same fucking planet as the Whalers trailing the Penguins 3-1 with four minutes left during regular season game #19 in December 1991.  

Maybe in the '50s—when we all had pensions 

Why again with the pensions?  Stop it with the pensions.

and a union, and the day could more easily be carved up into eight-hour blocks of sleep, work, and leisure—maybe then sports fans could be expected to devote four hours to watching a game in-person. 

It would be much easier to do it then, I agree.  It's still very possible to do it now, ESPECIALLY FOR GAMES LIKE THE ONE IN QUESTION.

But this is 2013—the friction of everyday life is far too great to expect total devotion from all but the obscenely wealthy or the totally unemployable. 

Here's the coup de grace, folks.  While I earlier noted (correctly, I would think) that everyone who could afford tickets to Tuesday's game was probably rich or a serious fan, here is Bobby's knockout punch: in fact, the only people who should bother with staying until the end and dealing with traffic are those same richie riches and people who are really dumb.  

Fans already endure the indignities of wretched traffic, overpriced concessions, and the potential for heartbreak when they attend a game in person. 

You know why they do it, or at least why I do it?  Because if the team wins, it's awesome!  And if they win a historically great game, like game 6, it's even more awesome.  And if you leave when they could still win because you feel like beating traffic, you deserve to be mocked.  Not too hard to figure out.

Don't they at least deserve the option to look away when things go sideways and maybe get a good night's sleep, too?

Down twenty with three minutes to go is sideways.  Down five with 0:28 to go is not.

At least some of the Heat fans who left the game early were doing the same back-of-the-envelope math that my father used to do. 

When he made you leave a meaningless regular season game early.

(Down 5 + 58 seconds left) x (10 minutes to the car + 30 minutes of traffic) / (Joey's math homework + an 8:30 conference call) = we're headed for the exits. Look again at the fans leaving early. 

Thanks, I will!  What a bunch of bozos!

You don't see a lot of the chinstrap beards and glass earrings we expect of our Heat stereotypes. I just see a bunch of weary-looking people who were at a basketball game less than nine hours before they had to leave for work the next morning. It's like they don't even listen to Pitbull.

The Pitbull line is actually pretty good.  Unfortunately the sentence before it is one of the most idiotic in this post.  Less than nine hours!  Why, some of them probably only got six hours of sleep!  What is this world we live in???????

As last night reminded us, sports are fun. At least, they're supposed to be. But you have to fit them into an already cluttered life, and sometimes the fit isn't perfect. The Heat fans who left the game early were playing the percentages. They surely regret their decision today, but it's not an indefensible one. 

Your attempt to defense it looks like the Hindenberg landing right now.

Sports intrude on everything now—on your workday, on your mood, on your taxes, on your cable bill.

Uh... if you let them, I guess?  A lot of people don't, but they're still going to get fired the fuck up if they pay big bucks to see their team in person in a championship round game.  And most people who do let sports intrude on everything are the kind of people who would kill to be at a game where their favorite team won the way the Heat won on Tuesday.

Nothing wrong with fans exercising their diminishing prerogative to check the fuck out. 

If you were in attendance on Tuesday night, and are a Heat fan, and said to yourself with 0:28 to play, "Eh, you know what, I've followed the Heat closely all these years, but I'm so tired of sports being such a big part of my life.  Now is the exact correct moment to fight against that trend.  I think I'll leave right now", then I hope you get mangled in a parasailing accident.  The end.

Deadspin writer not named Drew Magary attempts to talk about the NFL. Of course he fucks it up.

As you may or may not remember, last Sunday, the Texans played a meaningless game (for them) against the Titan and fucked it up in comical fashion in the closing seconds. No big deal, right? Not so said Deadspin writer Timothy Burke.

Wow, so apparently the guy in charge of Deadspin on the last day of the NFL season didn't know that Houston had no stake in the game. The post was quickly deleted and Burke offered this explanation on his Twitter.

I really enjoy the condescending tone he takes. No need to tell me that I'm horribly wrong because I obviously know I made an error. I just happened to write a blog post, which included a video, and hit publish before realizing it. Brainfart, lol.

Part of me feels like I'm nitpicking, but this is also Deadspin, a website that rips into ESPN, NBC, or any other sports news outlet if they happen to make a slight mistake in any one of the million graphics they use in a day. Not only that, but it'd be one thing if Houston had only clinched minutes before on some vague Strength of Victory tiebreaker, but the Texans made the playoffs WEEKS ago.

I just can't get over Burke's stupid sounding explanation "this is what happens when I don't get to have lunch." Wrong. Writing "their" instead of "they're" is what happens when you don't get to eat lunch. Getting a well known fact wrong is what happens when you're a writer who's more worried about impressing your legion of snarky, dipshit commenter fans than actually following the league you're writing about.

Monday Morning Grab Bag

Item 1. The NBA playoffs are over. Feels like they just started yesterday, no? Chris W agrees I'm sure. Anyways, ss the final seconds of the Heat/Mavs game ticked away, ESPN announcer and obvious MENSA member Mark Jackson had some great ideas for Miami's front office (forgot to DVR, quote is approximate).

If you're Miami, you know you got close this year. So this summer you make everyone on the roster available. You've got the pieces for a championship team, but you need to move them around and get the right combination.

First of all: what in the fucking fuck are you talking about? Make EVERYONE available? You realize you're not talking about the Pacers or the Jazz, right? Second of all, even if we were to try to make this quote intelligible by assuming he meant "make everyone except Wade and James available," what the fuck are they going to get in return?

For Bosh you could probably get another incomplete player with an undeserved max contract. Joe Johnson, come on down! For Mike Miller or Udonis Haslem you might be able to get something of fair value. For the rest of the team you could probably get exactly jack diddley fucking poo. HEY GOOD NEWS FOR TEAMS THAT NEED A REALLY UNREMARKABLE POINT GUARD, I HEAR MARIO CHALMERS MIGHT BE AVAILABLE FOR THE RIGHT PRICE.

What a weird, weird, weird (and wrong) thing to say. If there's ANY team that isn't going to do anything significant with its roster this offseason it's Miami. And the Knicks, because the Knicks are screwed six ways to Sunday in terms of the salary cap and the only guy in the management side of the organization without his head up his ass just left town.

Item 2. Deadspin continues to a good place to catch breaking news and watch funny/cool videos. And it also continues to publish editorial material that's so thunderously stupid it makes me wonder how the site got to where it is. Even Barry Petchesky hasn't said anything as dumb (in the last two weeks) as what Tommy Craggs had to say about Grantland Rice. And just to clarify, I'm not some Rice fan. I don't give a shit about him. But really, look:

He was a pandering mythmaker who wrote verse and prose the way Thomas Kinkade paints carriage lanes ("The Hills of Fame still beckon where the Paths of Glory lead …"). Reading him today is not unlike looking at your maiden aunt's collection of Precious Moments figurines. Moths come flying off every word. He was responsible for a lot of the worst pathologies of sportswriting today, and the fact that a major web site now unironically carries his name tells me we've done to Rice what Rice did to so many ballplayers over the years.

Right, because he wrote 80 years ago, when audiences demanded that kind of stuff. There was no TV, no internet. Either you read about the game in the newspaper or you had no fucking idea that it even happened. Using purple prose made a lot more sense back then. It reads awkwardly today, but do you think people back then demanded it in part due to the fact that they never got to watch the events of a game unless they attended it? Do you think critics back then appreciated it more than critics today do? I'm going to guess that if the answer to either of those questions was no, then no one would know who Rice is today. This criticism is akin to talking shit about baseball players from the 19th century because most of the hitters couldn't hit home runs and none of the pitchers threw sliders.

An older Rice wrote: "Only those who looked upon the spectacle today can know what it means. One might as well attempt to describe the glory of the Grand Canyon or the peak of Mount Everest at dawn."

Rice was covering the fucking Olympics.

Wow, how fucking ignorant about 20th century history can you be? Yeah, the Olympics. Which were the biggest fucking deal in the world of sports at that time. I'm kind of surprised Craggs didn't immediately move on to attack Rice for failing to cover the Super Bowl. GOD, HOW COULD YOU EVER ACT LIKE THE OLYMPICS ARE A BIG DEAL? How about if you wrote about them when one world war had just ended and the foundation was already being laid for another?

Four years later, he called the success of American blacks at the Berlin games "Darktown on parade" and wrote: "America will be okay until it runs out of African entries. ... We may have to comb Africa again for some winners." Elsewhere, Joe Louis was "stalking" his prey, a "panther" with the "speed of the jungle, the instinctive speed of the wild." (He once said of Louis, "Sportsmanship should be the very mortar of an athlete but never an entity in itself for conscious display," and a modern reader might hear the same harp music that played over all those preposterous stories about Kevin Durant's humility.)

Right. He wrote a lot of really racially insensitive stuff. JUST LIKE EVERY SINGLE OTHER FUCKING SPORTSWRITER OF HIS ERA. Doesn't make it right, of course. Just makes it completely unremarkable. But don't tell that to Deadspin, the sports blogosphere's leader in 1) general cluelessness about sports/everything and 2) desire to sensationalize shit that isn't sensational. Hmmm, have we seen this before?

The standard defense here, that Rice was only as bigoted as his time, is probably accurate.

Dumbass.

Item 3. Speaking of Grantland, I decided to head over and check out Simmons's project as it launched. I checked out two of his posts (because much as I bellyache about him I'd rather read his tripe forever than read a single word from Malcolm Gladwell or Dave Eggers, especially if they're writing about sports or pop culture). If you haven't checked out his "welcome to the site" post, I'll summarize it for you: Hey, I was a writer for Jimmy Kimmel when he launched his late night show! Pretty neat, huh! /name drop name drop name drop

Not yet fully deterred, a day later I checked out an article he wrote about the Boston Bruins. His shameless frontrunnerism when it comes to the Bruins has been discussed here before, so I was pleasantly surprised to see him admit to such right up front in the post's title. And then I started reading the body of the post, and there it was, right at the top-

My father had three things left on his Sports Bucket List:

And that's as far as I got before I remembered: you can take Bill Simmons out of the formal ESPN mainframe but you can never get him to stop being Bill Simmons.

And of course, as always, let me throw in our boilerplate Simmons disclaimer. I am insanely jealous of Bill Simmons. I only write about him because I wish I had his job (and that he was my dad).

Does anything sum up deadspin better than this post?

Today, the "Shocking news" that the KKK tried to have an outing at a Cincinnati ballpark...in 1924.

Look, we all hate the KKK except for Dan-Bob who is a member. But does anything sum up Deadspin's

a.) General cluelessness about history/sports
b.) Desire to sensationalize things that aren't sensational

than this post? Look--the KKK is a terrible thing. But anyone who knows anything about baseball or United States history knows that the KKK asking to have a ballpark day in 1924 isn't particularly shocking. I mean, for fuck's sake, you don't really have to even know anything special about baseball and history to know that a racist organization asking to be officially recognized by a public figure or institution pre-1950's isn't that big a deal.

But the more you know about history the stupider it is that Deadspin thinks this is interesting. Let me be brief: in 1924 the KKK was not necessarily known to be the terrorist organization it is today. Between its inception in post-Civil War America as an group to bully newly freed blacks to the height of its murderous prominence in the 1950's and 1960's south, the KKK was really just a social organization. A racist social organization, a la the John Birch society, but nothing the average person--not even the average American would be particularly embarrassed to belong to. It was just a group of men whose intended purpose was American/WASPy "patriotism" which carried with it racist and anti-semitic attitudes. That's shitty, but how many public and private groups and institutions in the 1920's were racist or anti-semitic in some way or another? Many of them. Not to "excuse" the KKK--since we know what they became in the 1950's and 1960's, but let's face it: to the average person in the 1920's the KKK's racist and anti-Jew sentiment was probably looked on about the same as the average "Anti-Immigration" group is looked at now, except without even the whole "beware history or be doomed to repeat it" thing hanging as a stigma over the whole ordeal.

Furthermore baseball itself was full of KKK members, not all of whom were racist. Sure, Cobb was rumored to be a Klan member and was certainly racist, but players like Tris Speaker (who was almost certainly NOT racist, at least not in late-20th century terms) were members because, as said above, it was generally looked at as a social group.

So why is this even worth posting? What is interesting about this, if you have any sort of sense of perspective about US history? Oh, and the comments are, of course, predictably stupid and unfunny. So glad Deadspin is the premiere name in non MSM sports!!!!!