Written by Chris Barker
It was an interesting and bittersweet week for those who’ve followed Bill Simmons’s career. He was a bartender; a sports writer for ESPN beginning in ’01; and a comedy writer for Jimmy Kimmel in ’03-04.
Courtesy: deadspin.com
The online opinion-leadership has not been kind to the ‘loser’ of this particular palace coup. Media reactions have included forays into tell-all—Deadspin, Time, and Vanity Fair—aka “Firing Day Diaries.” There has also been off-kilter pieces, too, opining that “Simmons was done evolving as a dude and as a writer” or simply that “he was a ‘bad writer.’” It was Simmons as enabler of ‘bro culture’ … or… Simmons as ‘false idol’ lagging behind gendered times … or… whatever Simmons said about his daughter’s soccer team….
Is that really what we’ve concluded from the almost four years of Grantland and almost 15 years of Simmons at ESPN? A legitimate source of confusion regards what Simmons was doing. Was it journalism? Pop culture fabulation? Or was it an American version of French cultural deconstruction?
Sooner or later, Simmons will fight back and seize the high ground, defining his legacy and divulging plans going forward. Don’t expect him to reflect elegiacally on his ESPN years. But, if he does, the test of Simmons’s talent is whether his ESPN epitaph will be as skimmable as many of those other pieces.
For those who didn’t notice, here’s a surprise: men are interested in ambition and greatness, and they’re willing to try hard to do whatever it takes to keep up with the Joneses. That leads us down the path to pro wrestling, shoddy Reality TV, and other directions.
Courtesy: deadspin.com
That was, and is, Simmons’ main theme: ambition. He traced our commitment to it via sports, music, and film. But he was more (and perhaps only) effective as a hungry climber. You can’t thematize ambition as someone who has “made it.” That’s because the entire theme is what philosophers call the “teleology of striving”: trial and effort are the end.
When the end is fame and money, the reader can no longer relate. To bang against the Simmons piñata is to grasp this psychodrama of ambition in some vague way. But it’s a mistake to argue that Simmons wasn’t worth the candle because you are ‘too serious’ to digest this clownish writer. Scanning the American media landscape—I see you, Charlie Rose, Gwen Iffill, Judy Woodruff, and Robert Siegel—you see those who help to explain the contours of domestic politics and world events.
But I’m not chary of granting a spot to someone whose podcast makes the gym a more beckoning place and who makes the car ride in rural Kansas something that includes Zach Lowe on the NBA. Simmons’ editorial vision is one that I find defensible. I skip the sophomoric wrestling stuff, understanding that no one is forcing me to consume that content. Of the rest, much of it I enjoy. That’s because everything that’s small and disposable about comedy is also revealing and implicitly critical.
Courtesy: believethehypenba.com
Comedy is a delicate frostwork–manic and nervous. When it works well then it has energy, surprises of recognition, and reversals–all aspects of tragedy. Comedy brings you to say to yourself: “I didn’t know that I was going through this. And, just as importantly, I didn’t know that others knew.”
The rub is that the comedian sees you, in the crowded stand-up show, sitting in the front rows or sitting in front of your computer. You are there because you want to be seen, even to be criticized—to recognize and understand yourself. Simmons was most effective at producing comedy from within the familiar conversation of friends. Amazingly he was able to speak to an enormous audience of younger and older men (and women, too, but first and foremost for men) by dialogues.
Most often it was two friends talking together or a son talking with his dad. The success of alleged ‘bro writers’ in writing effective dialogues can be measured, on one hand; and Simmons has a claim to be more culturally creative of momentary, fragile, and successful encounters than, say, Judd Apatow.
Courtesy: fourthandfifty.wordpress.com
Witness, for instance, Adam Carolla’s bizarre encounters with Simmons. They were good comedy—a relation between friends—pointing out things that are relevant because the emotional experiences have been seared into us, sometimes so deeply that we can’t talk about them.
When something happened in Boston, or to Boston, Simmons would try to ‘out’ that experience into words. Comedy creates intimacy. It may be false intimacy—if we believe the current backlash against Simmons’ writing—but it’s a feeling of being-oneself-together that men shared. Despite a certain lack of growth in his personal brand of sports commentary, there will be one less place if he were to retire from the field.
Courtesy: webmarkisp.com
When the initial controversy broke about Simmons’ words about NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (in September 2014), it seemed like a category error for ESPN to hold Simmons to a journalistic standard on his podcast. The podcasts are Opera Buffo, not Bach.
Call it demagoguery, but the proof of good writing is in the effect produced on the audience. By that populist measure Simmons was the most effective ESPN writer. True, Simmons would make loose judgments that didn’t stand up particularly well when set beside new, younger colleagues, but he also created a data-savvy atmosphere at Grantland that empowered cool intellects that clashed with his popular base and personal style.
He may have used his editorial power to create a team that looked as if it didn’t need him. That’s an interesting and fraught legacy to bequeath (involuntarily) to Grantland and to ESPN.
As a matter of legacy, I couldn’t help but think of this Simmons-esque joke.
Courtesy: bigbadbaseball.blogspot.com
During last Saturday’s NBA coverage, Jalen Rose asked whether there was a sponsor that could cut all his bills in half—not just his phone bill. That, of course, is what happened to Bill Simmons, presented by John Skipper in two bloody halves in the public square like a Game of Thrones extra.
In homage to his love of references, another that came to mind was Stalin’s conversation with Boris Pasternak about Osip Mandelstam. After hearing Pasternak’s defense of his friend, Stalin–who held the power of life and death in his hands–allegedly remarked: “If I was a friend of his, I could have done better.”
Mandelstam’s plight is on another level of seriousness: he didn’t make it out of the Gulag in 1938. Still, I’m waiting for Simmons’s friends, colleagues, and protégés to break their silence and to explain his legacy as a writer and editor–as n exponent of men to men–better than he could.
That would be the true test of “Value Above Replacement.”
