A wonderful profile of Bill Simmons (aka Sports Guy), one of my favorite columnists.
My favorite paragraph:
Along the way Simmons has become sports’ moral arbiter. He speaks with the authority of a particularly thoughtful bartender. He inveighs against “sports bigamy”embracing two rival teamswith no exception even if one marries a fan of a rival team (which, Simmons speculates, is bound to be a loveless marriage anyway). To be admitted to Simmons’ universe, you must have a stunningly high level of sports literacy. It is not enough to be familiar with the current players. It is imperative to knowand these are actual examples from recent columnsthe starters from the 1984-85 St. John’s basketball team, the major and minor figures on the professional wrestling circuit, and the cast of the film The Bad News Bears. But the payoff is an intimate bond with the reader, whether in the frequent “mailbag” feature or the diatribes that he often prints in full. There is not a sports columnist on the planet generous enough, or perhaps secure enough, to share his platform like this.
Absolutely true. Go read the whole thing.
(via Steve Silver)
While I love TSG 90% of the time, I can’t read anything he writes about the NBA. While I respect his preference for overpaid whiny gangsta thug basketball, I don’t want to read about it. And it’s made worse because he rarely, if ever, writes about college basketball, which as we all know, is where God lives.
But I love his baseball columns.
(And all I’m going to say about the Red Sox is, if the White Sox win, well, when you least expect it, Terry Francona, EXPECT. IT.)
I pretty much stick to his baseball columns myself – and anytime he writes about pop culture. I love his “best sports movies” series. Very funny.
I don’t read his football stuff, because i’m not really a football fan – and so – it’s way too detailed and autistic for me to get anything out of it. With baseball, I can follow right along, but football – nope. It’s like reading a highly specialized dissertation on some random molecule or something. Without a nice background in it, I would get totally lost.
“It’s like reading a highly specialized dissertation on some random molecule or something.”
Hey, now, I resemble that remark.
Yeah, the movie/tv columns are the best. And the “mail bag” ones, too.
Obviously nothing against such dissertations. But I sure as hell don’t want to read them. I would need to have a whole different undergraduate degree to even understand the first paragraph!
I love the mail bag ones. What a crack-up!!!