RIP Whitney Houston

Who is the 'us' Simmons cites? The 15-year-old Simmons?

 

What is interesting about his answer is that arguably the best singer to ever come out of American Idol, finished seventh the season she was on.

I like Kelly Clarkson a lot. I think Carrie Underwood is very, very talented.

I don't think either can touch what Jennifer Hudson can do.

 

Then consider "us" to be him and I. Because I think he absolutely nails this.

 

We were driving to church yesterday and we flipped to four different radio stations. On a normal day, one is top 40, one is 80s, one is alternative and the other is rock. All four were playing Whitney Houston songs...

 

I think he nails it too... I remember seeing that when he wrote it a few years ago and more than a few people accused him of being racist for pointing that out.

 

This is an athlete, not a celebrity, but the Hank Gathers death rocked me to my very core. Seriously. I don't ever remember being that affected by any death, before or since. I was in a fog all day at school. It was so upsetting to me, the first time that my burgeoning adolescent sympathies were met head-on with an actual event that sprung them into motion. The day Hank Gathers died was the first day that I was forced to think about mortality, about the fact that this young man was running up and down the floor one minute - and didn't exist any more the next. First time I remember thinking about how irreversible death was. How random. In a way, I can remember how I felt that day. But only as a memory. There is no way I could again conjure the actual feeling of that morning, nor would I want to.

A couple years later, I actually saw someone die on the floor in a high school JV game, and it didn't devastate me anywhere close to Gathers.

 

John Candy. I remember waking up on a Saturday morning and finding out Sam died.

 

That wasn't directed at you, Shotglass. That was an honest question about Simmons and solipsism and the habit of every generation to claim the "greatest"(s) for itself.

 

That's funny ... it had not registered to me that all five were black.

I understand that, Az. But a 15-year-old Simmons and a 30-year-old me were two different generations, and we held the same opinion on that ...

 

Az, I should warn you that I have a Grantland piece coming out touting you as the greatest message board poster of all time.

 

It's the 'us' that bothers me, Shot. The assumption on Simmons' part that everyone alive at that moment held the same things to be universally true. Or that Simmons is the representative of his entire demographic cohort.

For everyone who thought that Tyson or Murphy or Gooden might become the greatest ever, there were three people who would have argued you to death over Ali, Chaplin and Koufax.

 

If nominated I shall not run. If elected I shall not serve.