Grantland so far

Is he writing a book about the Pistons or the Bobcats?

 

An excerpt from "After Friday Night Lights," Buzz Bissinger's follow-up to ... well, you can figure it out:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7829415/an-excerpt-buzz-bissinger-follow-friday-night-lights

 

Alma, I'm guessing you're referring to Bartholomew's Pacific Rims book. I suppose it might be obscure, in that almost all hoops books are fairly obscure compared to ones about baseball or football. But the book came out in 2010. It's just listed as part of his biography and the column can hardly be seen as being only written as some type of subtle propaganda to promote a two-year-old book.

 

It looks like Dave Meltzer is on board now. It makes sense. As far as I'm aware, Bill Simmons was a long time subscriber to the Wrestling Observer, and when Meltzer finished up with Yahoo I heard several people suggest that he'd end up writing pieces for Grantland.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7829692/will-alistair-overeem-rule-ufc-#8212-bring-down

 

I like Meltzer's stuff. His newsletter is also probably popular enough that he only needs some freelance here and there, I would think.

 

I would think that Meltzer does very well out of the newsletter. I've heard some numbers that are truly staggering. How legit those numbers are I don't know, and in the end it's all just speculation. That said, personally, I figure that he isn't hurting for cash. Put it this way, a one month subscription to his website (http://www.f4wonline.com) costs $10.99. His forum, which is behind a paywall, currently has 7077 registered accounts. I don't know how many of them are active at anyone time but it gives you an idea of the kind of revenues he could potentially be taking in.

A four issue subscription to the print version of his weekly newsletter is $12 (website subscribers get access to the newsletter as part of their deal). How many print subscribers he still has I don't know. If he has, even, a 1000 that's $12,000 a month.

 

Buzz and Boobie seem just about equally pissed off in that excerpt. That passage was also more about Buzz than Boobie.

 

Take this with a grain of salt, but a friend of a friend who knows Meltzer fairly well says he easily clears six figures annually. Not bad for a guy who struggles to put together a coherent sentence and built his readership using a typewriter, copier and single-spaced 8 x 11 pages that weren't broken into paragraphs.

 

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7834061/terry-bowden-akron-plight-mid-major-college-football-program

I don't post here as often these days, but this bothers me on so many levels, I had say something. A few excerpts from this surefire first-ballot entry into the next edition of the Grantland Quarterly:

Reading this raises the question: Who's working on the copy desk over there?

And the Packers play in the NFL league, right?

Yes, Temple was so successful in MAC football that it made a grand total of zero appearances in the conference championship game.

I suppose researching that claim would be out of the question.

Stay classy.

 

Story today on the "Chipmunks" of sportswriting:

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7878532/larry-merchant-leonard-shecter-chipmunks-sportswriting-clan

 

Only a sportswriter would think that any sportswriter owned a baseball locker room -- let alone the Yankees' 1962 locker room (did they not call them club houses back then). The '62 team had Berra, Ford, Mantle, Maris, Skowron, etc. -- but George Vecsey, and a couple other young sportswriters "owned" the locker room? Yeah. I'm sure.

And, Jimmy Cannon, was once the "King" of it? Cannon may be a legendary sports writer, but his royalty would probably be news to former Yankees.

If any non-Yankee player/manager was the "King" of the room, it would be Pete Sheehy, not a group of "chipmunks".

More navel gazing from the undisputed champ -- the "King" of it, you might say.

 

Same here. Only even considering reading about Sarah Phillips sent me searching for the gaspipe.