The Ringer is Live

He obviously took the easy way out.

 

I'm really not much of a fan.

But the way people hate him for not wanting to spend years covering preps cracks me up.

 

He had some help.

He wanted to be a sportswriter and as soon as he saw what it took, he bailed. Good for him for getting where he is, but don't take quitting the Herald as some genius move rather than a tantrum after not wanting to put in the work after getting a masters just to get the job he found beneath him.

 

Did he not put in the work after quitting the Herald?

 

Literally the only people who hold this against him are folks who spent years covering preps.

There's no great honor is staying in a job you don't like.

 

I used to resent Bill for saying being a white male held him back. I realize now, a lot of that was my own insecurity over sticking with newspapers and trying to grind my way through a flawed system. Bill was right about the Herald. There should have been a place for him there, but he wasn't quite ready to be BILL SIMMONS and the industry wasn't at all ready to deal with what he could offer. Love him or loathe him, he took a real risk in saying screw this, I'll write for essentially a tiny audience of AOL chat room nerds. I wish I'd had the courage to take a risk in my 20s, but I kept thinking the traditional path existed. At some papers it did, just not at mine.

It doesn't really matter if Bill isn't the funniest writer you've read, or if you think his whines too much, or if you think he was petty that he wasn't rushed to the front of the line and given a columnist job at 25. He saw a situation he couldn't stomach and made himself into a brand. That took a lot of work and guts.

Getting to the upper echelon of your field is a sometime messy path. He wasn't always nice, or the best writer, or mature about disputes, and sometimes I wanted to scream. But I still admire the guy. He's sort of the Steve Jobs of Sportwriting. He didn't write code or come up with the first MP3 player. But he understood what people wanted and he figured out way to work with smart people. Sometimes that made him look like a genius, other times like a jerk. I've still come to respect the hell out if his work ethic and ability to reinvent himself three times. I wish I'd spent less time in my 20s grumbling about how he was not grateful enough at his tremendous luck, and more time taking similar risks to chase my own version of what I wanted.

 

But he didn't interview 16 year old cross country athletes.

What he should have done, is stuck with it, created an account here and whined about his pay and the local football coach.

Then he would have paid his dues.

 

How old are you?

I don't know your complete career path, but I feel like you did pretty well, and are in a good situation now.

Why are you beating yourself up? Do you think you might have done it quicker, or made more money along the way, if you had taken more risks?

 

Let me be clear: It worked out great for me in the long run. I got exactly what I wanted.

But I'm confident I could have done it sooner had I not spent two or three years treading water in a miserable situation because I was afraid to fail reaching for something better.

I thought for a long time that if I just did great work someone would discover me. That might happen to some people, but it's sitting around and letting someone else dictate your fate. I should have been sending notes and clips to magazine editors five years prior to getting the job I got. Maybe it would have played out the same, but it was a passive approach that easily could have failed.

I'm not beating myself up. I'm trying to offer some advice to any young-ish writer out there who is where I was once, doing great work at a newspaper but feeling trapped by the backward thinking of TRONC or Gannett or whatever. If you really want something, you have to risk something to get it. Time and energy spent complaining about the breaks other people are getting is wasted. I worked for two years paying health insurance out of pocket (with a baby, then one on the way) before I got a staff job. That was scary. It was also worth it. I bet on myself.

 

Good for you.

You make a number of good points. No matter your profession, you have to sell yourself. No one else os going to do it. You need to do it internally, within your own organization, and externally, within your industry.

Expecting someone to just notice you isn't enough.

 

That's the Truth.

 

Several thoughts:

>>People twist emotions too much and use them as bad placeholders. Resentment was not a particular factor i/r/t Bill Simmons for 15 years. C'mon. I liked his writing just fine, laughed more often than not, thought "hey, this guy's funny!" and I know few people - if anyone - who begrudged him a thing. Fundamentally, the newspaper system of awarding a column to two old white men for the next 40 years is a shitty, "there's only 3 television stations!" mode of thinking, and Simmons exploited that. Good for him!

Has any significant part of the population - and by significant I mean, oh, 1.2% - actually ever said "how dare he leave a shitty job at a newspaper only to end up at ESPN for gobs of money,? How dare he!"

Of course not. One person on a message board here is one person. It hardly rates.

I even applaud Simmons for alighting on the rather obvious idea of 30 for 30 docs. It strikes me, like I wrote, as a rather obvious thing to do, but...apparently no one else thought of it. So, he earns that kudos.

>>Where is changed for me was Grantland - and some level the podcast - because, by that time, gone was the Simmons the regular fan, and in was Simmons The Entitled Liberal Dude With Connections Who Likes Sorta Literary Stuff and Has a Giant ESPN Bankroll.

I didn't think much of that guy. Still don't. There's still some of him around, too, given some of the Hollywood Reporter quotes. I didn't think much of Grantland even if I could see there was honestly good writers and/or writing in it. I saw it as the very idea of a prestige event - touching only dubiously, especially at the beginning, on what readers actually wanted. Grantland probably have continued on in perpetuity, though -- its own little corner of boutique cool - if Simmons hadn't been such an ass.

And anytime someone is entrusted will that much money and those many employees - and he tanks it in a handful of years...yes, I think that's when the irritation comes in. It was horrible stewardship. Especially when he gets a golden parachute out of it with HBO, which seems to be paying him millions to...borrow some of his cool? I don't know.

I mean, I'm decidedly uncool, so it's possible Simmons sits at the epicenter of what cool is.

>>And then we come to his cultural contribution.

Is he Steve Jobs?

Or is he Dave Anderson- founder of Famous Dave's?