Jones/ESPNMAG

Please explain how I am contradicting myself.
"You write where you're asked" -- I am hypothetically asked by NR to write something for 20K Not being rich, I accept.
"you do good work" -- I will assume, for the sake of argument, that I do this. The point of view may not be what NR expects, but this can come as no surprise to me or them. (And, remember, Boom, you are criticizing Jones only for the fact that he wrote for ESPNmag, not for what he wrote there, so don't come back at me with the notion that what I write has to be what NR expects ideologically. That's not the basis of your argument on this thread, and do change it now would be cheap and stupid.). They run it and pay me or they kill it and pay me. All books in balance.

 

And this is, of course, an out and out lie.

 

This is also an out-and-out lie.
That's two.
On one thread.
New. League. Record.

 

Can I get back to the Mag itself, which has undeniably been the subject of countless threads here over the years related to its ubiquitous self-promotion and remarkable failure to reflect credibility despite the top talent on its staff, so it's hard to understand the sudden burst of love and admiration for it:

Looking at the current issue. Eighty pages long. Before you get to the first actual story, but the very great Dave Fleming, you have to slog through 40 pages of (in this order) Simmons, StephenA, Stuart Scott, mailbag, 10 pages of 'Page 2' (which includes Mike & Mike and a feature on how hockey ice is made.

Now I'm on page 38, whipping past an unreadable spread that turns out to be the intro to Fleming's piece, but because the text amount to single words on separate black blocks, randomly strewn around the page, I assume it's another Mountain Dew and just keep going. Flip flip flip, until I realize I've flipped past the actual magazine, and now I'm on Reilly. Tip your waitresses, we'll be here all week!

I don't get it. I can't believe anyone gets it.

 

OK Fenian - point blank - did you find the Jones piece to be herculean or one of the best pieces of sportswriting you've read in a long time? Yes or no.

 

This is my take, and whether it's "right" or "wrong" I don't care ...

In '99 at the White House, Armstrong could've been satisfied with his 7 minutes with Clinton, but he saw something that captivated his attention (the magnolia tree) and finagled another 38 minutes.

So it's about creating something more than what you've been told you can have or do. What's relevant about Armstrong in 2008 is that he announced he's going to ride again. What we forgot 2 years later is how goddamn golden, unstoppable, king of the world Armstrong was on that bike. But this time he's not riding to win another Tour de France because shit, he won 7 in a row and could've won 12 in a row had he not retired, the same way Jordan would've won 8 titles in a row had he not retired. Or maybe he does want to win some more; he is a competitive dude. The same way he extended those 7 minutes on the throne with the prez into 45 minutes because he noticed the beauty of a magnolia tree is the same way he's furthering his biking career because he wants to cure a segment of the world of a disease that almost killed him. Of course we'd never forget Lance Armstrong the great cycling champion. But perhaps we'd forgotten the reason Lance Armstrong won all those yellow shirts in the first place, and he's the only one who can keep the world from forgetting about testicular cancer. Had he not gotten cancer, he never would've seen that magnolia tree.

It's a slightly different circumstance with Tyree, but still the same fight. He will not allow one catch (lucky as it was) to define an embryonic career. He can't let that singular moment be the last thing people remember him by even though it wouldn't be the worst thing to be remembered by. He got to see the same magnolia tree when the champion Giants visited the White House. But Tyree is lost in the land of nowhere right now, forgotten, and is goddamn desperate to play another set of downs -- his extra 38 minutes so to speak. Not so much because people would footnote him as the guy who made "the catch" -- but because we'd forget everything else about him.

Like I said, that's how I tied everything together through a theme Jones may have been going after. Who knows. I'm just one person with one interpretation.

 

21, this thread is not about ESPNThe Rag. It is about Jones' piece.
Try not to stoop to the level of stupidity usually reserved for your ersatz boyfriend.

 

I'm sorry my post was too stupid for you, I didn't know how low I had to stoop for you to understand it. I'll go lower next time.

 

Sirs, Madames, others,

This has become the Friars' Club with seats next to the podium reserved for drunken hecklers.

o-<

 

I found it to be one of the best pieces of magazine writing I read last year, and probably the best work in that genre I've ever read, including Rushin's magnum opus about life during the SI era.
I found your performance on this thread to be one of the finest examples of incoherent, impotent raging at one's betters that I ever likely will see.
Didn't figure we'd get an apology for the lying there, either.

 

One's betters? Really? So what - I'm 3/4th a person or something?

Wow - is it cold up there on your mountaintop?

 

Lynch, I gave this more thought that it certainly deserves, but that's also, in essence, a perfect summary of this entire board. So here goes.

I wondered this morning why I was actually tempted to take you up on your offer to come to Worcester, walk into a bar and kick your fucking ass (something I'm pretty confident I could do) and I realized it's mostly because Chris Jones is my friend. And so what feels like mindless criticism of his work, oddly, feels somewhat personal. And I suspect the same is true for jgmacg, who I'm also lucky enough to consider a friend. Really good, narrative, literary journalism is hard. (A lot harder than blogging; I know because I've done both. And I like many blogs, including, occasionally, your own.) And good literary journalism seems to be appreciated by fewer and fewer people with each passing month, and so while we probably shouldn't be bothered by someone taking what feels like cheap digs at work that is not our own, we do. It feels personal on several levels. And of course, that's a little silly, now that I think about it. Why would I want to fight someone I don't know, from the internet, just because they're arrogant and trying to tear something down I enjoyed? I shouldn't. That's the sort of bullying I deplore, practiced the kind of tough-talking cowards who have run this country into the ditch the past eight years and I have seen you defend many times. So for that impulse, I apologize. I no longer wish to punch you in the face.

To attempt to address your criticisms of the article seems like Sisyphean task, considering the way you responded to Fenian's honest attempt to address your points, but let me take a crack at it. If you feel the article is a stitched together mess, that is very much your right as a reader. But your main purpose here isn't to find answers, or to ask people to help you understand why this piece works for us while striking out for yourself, it's to mock and belittle, to tear down something for sport, in part because you don't like Jones and don't like the adoration he receives here from many posters. The story isn't about forgetting as much as it is about the way we remember people, and what they remember about themselves. If you wanted to ask these questions in a way that didn't come off like a complete prick whose only point was to act like the knucklehead in the back of the classroom ripping apart someone's personal essay even though they possessed neither the talent nor the discipline to write their own, you might actually gotten a real discussion here. It's pretty easy to mock sincerity with cheap cynicism. Jones' piece was not the single greatest piece of sports writing I've ever read. I wasn't not even my favorite piece he's authored. But it was artfully constructed, worth the time it took to read, and gave me several vivid scenes that made me think about many events I'd witnessed this year differently. The image of Yogi Berra scratching his head over wearing a yellowish Yankees jersey was a perfect one. We remember Yogi mostly through archival footgage, wearing a jersey that's not quite white because that's the way it looked on film. But Yogi lived that. He didn't need film footage to remember his career. And when he played, the jerseys were white and gray, and they'll always be that way in his mind. So in the way, our memories and Yogi's memories will always be different. Just like our memories of Thurman Munson, and what we hold onto, will always be different from what his son holds onto.

Your comments to Fenian and shotglass, where you mock the praise this story has received as hyperbolic ass kissing, proves to me it's not so much the story that annoys you as it is the adoration many of us have for Jones' talents. It would not bother me at all had you asked, with some measure of maturity, why the article moved so many people when it rang hollow for yourself. Instead, you and Boom teammed up for some cheap digs. Had this story begun with a tale of a 12-year-old Chris Jones watching Jim Rice while eating cold polish sausage from the bleacher seats in Fenway park, I suspect you might not have been so quick to mock and belittle.

It's a shame you struggle so mightily to keep your assholish tendencies in check here, because I do enjoy your insight into baseball and occasionally your sophomoric humor. But it's sad the way you pop up occasionally, after months away, to voice petty complaints about a craft many of us care deeply about simply because you seem to so loathe any attempt to write about something with any sincerity. I like numbers too, and I like snark occasionally. But I like what Jones did here a lot more. I wish I could write this well and get paid to do it. You, obviously, feel differently. Why you hang around a board populated by writers when you seem to dislike what most people consider to be real writing, I can't begin to understand. Which is fine. But it's fairly obvious there are other factors in play here besides how you feel about Lance Armstrong and frozen pretzels.