The Ringer is Live

Fuck Malcolm Gladwell.

 

Yeah, I dunno that I agree with Leitch there - tho I'm sure Leitch agrees with Leitch, if that makes sense - in part because Simmons never was a true columnist. He was more of a humorist or an essayist - a Sedaris of sports, perhaps. He wrote about a handful of things, interviewed virtually no one in doing so, wasn't remotely objective about any of it, and wasn't, in any particular way, a steward of ESPN's brands or anyone else's in the way many columnists are.

A columnist's life outside the games wouldn't probably look like Simmons life. It'd look like catching up on life that you missed while you were busy telling the stories of athletes.

It's just a journey that Simmons never really took - didn't have to take -- and I think, in a bizarre sense, he resents he didn't take it, he knows he didn't take it, and he knows, deep down, he mostly is where he is today not solely because of his talents, or earned credibility, but the time in which he worked (that is, the Internet age), the company he worked for and the teams he happened to love, which all were great in a 20-year period of time.

Grantland was nothing short of a Gatsbyesque quest to create a damn online literary journal - replete with quarterly printed versions! right out of 1980s MFA programs! - to buy the intellectual credibility that, somehow, he didn't think the 30 for 30 series gave him. Simmons himself has said it: He has "good taste." I think him thinking he has good taste - I don't know that that's actually true, and I'd lean toward it not being true - is enormously important to him. It's part of why he surrounds himself with people he thinks are indicative of him having good taste. Gatsby.

But Simmons is not Frank Deford, or Bob Ryan or Peter Gammons, and he isn't ever going to be. If I had to guess - and it's merely that - he is the king of an empire full of adherents and sycophants that he mostly disrespects, and perhaps loathes.

 

Hold on. Now we have a bigger problem. There are people who don't know who Shea Serrano is? He went from writing for a Houston community newspaper to Grantland to the NYT Best Sellers list in the span of a few years.

Background: How Grantland's Shea Serrano Became a New York Times Best-Selling Author

 

Meh, not really.

He's funny, though.

 

Go on...

 

I've had two editors who wanted to be public figures more than they really wanted to be editors. One modeled himself after Simmons, the other after Hunter S. Thompson. My current editor is a nice guy, interesting in his own right, and isn't trying to be the face of the website. After reading this thread I want to send him a muffin basket.

 

I'd never thought of it this way but this would explain the constant griping about how he never got a chance to make it the old-fashioned way. Maybe he knows he wouldn't have made it anyway.

Again, if it were me, I'd be able to get over that b/c I have millions of dollars in the bank and the 30 for 30 series on my resume. But that's just me.

 

He had the chance to make it the old fashioned way. He didn't want to spend a few years covering preps for the Herald before he could be a beat writer.

 

What a jerk.

 

It wasn't like he quit the Herald with the knowledge that he could succeed at doing something different on the Internet. He didn’t want to put in the time because 'it was too hard' and he trashed some colleagues for schmoozing with the senior writers, implying that is how they got ahead and went on to be beat writers. He was then, as he is now, a petulant bitch.

 

Yeah. Like I said, a total jerk.