The Simmons Site

The lost-my-virginity thing makes me wince. Lost mine with an Elvis movie on TV, but I'm not sure I'll be working that into one of our annual Elvis Festival stories.

 

"100 times? I'm just getting warmed up..."

 

A few years ago in SI, Thomas Lake wrote about the same thing as Klosterman did in his Grantland debut. Of course, Lake wrote about a completely different game, but it was the same deal, and done much more masterfully. It made a BASW.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1149384/index.htm

So it was disappointing to see that on launch day, the two biggest names on the site (sorry, Jones!) wrote derivative articles: Klosterman on a 3-on-5 JUCO game and Simmons with a Sports Guy column.

 

I'm just going to assume that any and all criticism of Grantland, any of Grantland's writers, Grantland's mastermind, or the very concept of Grantland, is because everyone is jealous.

 

Maybe. But is it hipsterdom or percentages? Klosterman was never a beat writer, not in sports at least. He didn't cover North Dakota State football or Akron's Zips. He's not - as far as I know - Mizzou, so he hasn't been to 23 Super Bowls, 12 World Series, 11 Final Fours and 8 NBA Finals. Most of the games he's witnessed in person were probably high school athletics, UND hockey, some college hoops and a spare pro game here or there. A game ending 3-on-5, and the team with three guys pulling it out, in a sort of surreal setting with almost no fans, which you witnessed when you were a kid, which certainly adds to the romanticism of the moment, doesn't seem like a stretch to be someone's greatest event they've witnessed. It doesn't really seem like an attempt to be hip, especially with Klosterman, who, despite the glasses, has never really - I don't think - come off as someone who's going out of his way to be hip. He's constantly writing about how he dislikes people who like things ironically, which surely loses him some street cred. The guy actually grew up on a farm; if he wears a shirt that says Keeping it Rural, he's not like the hipster doofus in Williamsburg.

ANYWAY (if I may), to me it seems more like a game he's remembered for a long time and thought would be a good story and finally welcomed the chance to tell it.

Other thoughts in a 5,000-word post that will maybe earn me a spot on Grantland or at least annoy someone here who will say they couldn't get past the first two sentences...

* I think I was the first person on sj to make The National comparison, back when the site was first announced (it was me or I stole it from a Woody Paige column). Of course there are huge differences - Grantland is not going to fail because they can't get the products to the trucks in time on the West Coast. But there are certainly similarities. I think the primary one was with the primary editorial forces: Deford and Simmons. Both had grown a bit bored with their lot in life; Deford talked about how he felt like he was writing the same takeout pieces time and again. Simmons had long ago grown beyond just being the guy who wrote 5,000 words comparing the 1985 NBA draft to Karate Kid Part III. The podcasts, 30 for 30, he was obviously looking for a bit more. They're both going way out of their comfort zone and taking risks, although both are backed by big-money guys - Simmons can at least be assured his will be around for awhile.

Both are trying to do a something different, whether it's being a national sports newspaper or a place online where longform sports writing has a home. Both places did bring in some big names, the difference of course being that the ones on Grantland get to keep their day jobs, for the most part, although not all of them.

* The comparisons to the beginning of Page 2...obviously there aren't genre-altering legends like Halberstam and Hunter S. on the masthead right now. They were huge hires back then for Page 2. At the same time, their tenures at Page 2 were not exactly the highlights of their legendary careers. Both wrote some interesting pieces. But honestly, neither was built for the venue and both were in the twilight of their careers, Thompson especially - as far as I know, most people don't display his collection Hey Rube on the same shelf as Fear and Loathing (Halberstam was at least still producing incredible books, but the online columns weren't spectacular). I don't see how anyone could denigrate Grantland because it doesn't have Thompson or Halberstam at its launch. If you want to denigrate Rolling Stone now for not having anyone like THompson circa 1972, that makes sense. Same thing if you want to comment on the Times' war coverage and compare it to Halberstam's work in Vietnam. But Grantland has plenty of big names, and, more importantly, big names in their primes.

And comparisons to Slate and Salon, I mean, yeah, those places right now are probably better (although Salon...). Then again, they've had a 15-year head start. On the other hand, I'm guessing - hoping, praying - we won't see too many Slateish pieces on Grantland like, "Why Jim Brown wasn't as good as you think," "25 reasons the 1986 Masters is the most overrated golf tournament in history," and "Eric Dickerson: A better sideline reporter than you remember."

* I'd hesitate to make too many sweeping generalizations or predictions after one issue, or, in this case one day. I know, when you put a countdown clock on your Sugar Daddy's homepage, announcing your launch, you're sort of asking for it and setting people up to expect perfection right away. And Simmons is a big boy. With as many shots as he's taken at media people and publications over the years, he has to be willing to be on the receiving end. Still, I think it's wise to give new publications time to grow. Maybe they don't wow right away, but these things do take time, it will evolve. Hopefully into something great. But even the best publications anywhere don't exactly come out with guns a blazin'. Even places backed by publishing empires sometimes take time to find their footing.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1128337/index.htm

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1128339/index.htm

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1128302/index.htm

* I also think that it was pretty much impossible for the launch to match the expectations of everyone, or even most people. Even if the first-day launch included "The Toughest Coach Who Ever Lived," George Dohrmann's piece on tutors taking test for the University of Minnesota, The Death of a Racehorse, Simmons' Roger Clemens is The Anti-Christ and Klosterman's essay about the Celtics-Lakers rivalry, someone would have posted, 15 minutes later, "pretty underwhelming, really."

I liked two of the stories on the first day, which is a decent percentage.

 

Jones' article is very good.

 

Plenty of penis envy can be found on this site, no doubt.

My attitude, though, is more one of pleasant befuddlement.

 

It's certainly not weiner envy after today's release.

 

I want to expand on this because I think you saw it in action on opening day.

First, let's say you have Chris Jones' immense talent for writing and reporting at your disposal. And, let's be frank, you also have his ambition at your disposal. If it's me, I say "Hey, we'd love to have you cover baseball and the AL East, and you will do that, but this first piece is going to open our site. So give me a profile and treat it like it's sudden death in the national magazine awards, you against Gary Smith, and give me 5,000 words of your nastiest, most brilliant prose." And Jones would try pretty damn hard to do just that.

Because what Jones did write - while funny and sharp and all that - is a second course. I have no doubt he did just as he was told, too. But it's a second course.

Next - Klosterman. Same deal here. Love/hate him, Chuck has a wheelhouse and he hits it consistently. The North Dakota 3-on-5 story is fine, good. But it's minor league to lead off a Web site. Once again, if you know what you're doing, you say "Chuck, make me piss my pants then make me think." That's was Klosterman does. He is not Liz Merrill or Wright Thompson, both of whom could have written this story better than he did.

Now, Simmons. His opening column is not surprising in the least but a misuse of his self-indulgence This is Simmons' Charles Foster Kane moment. He bought all the best writers in town. He's going to run that town. This is the moment where, for once, you set aside the sniping and Marlboro Light memories and say "fuck it, let's roll." A little bravado, of which ESPN, the consummate pinstripe network, has almost none on its Web product.

What readers got was one of those stories a guy tells where he says "well, in order for you to understand any of it, you gotta understand this first." As a listener, I don't like those stories much. As a reader, I hate them. It's like reading a lede of "Last week, the committee on sump pumps met to discuss xyz. Now, today, the committee on sump pumps voted on xyz." The first sentence never sees the light of day before the second one. The second one is the story. The first one is the background. It's sub-moronic to switch them around.

And it's not the story you tell on day one. Maybe you tell that after two weeks. Or maybe you just keep that idea on the shelf. You write the "welcome" column. You write the hell out of it, but you write it. You get people excited for what's to come. This column is a long, irritating meander without preamble or overt point (obviously the parallel is implicit, but the point - about the face, I guess - is not).

The other two blog posts were, well, whatever. I actually liked the Walsh dispatch although it was not particularly relevant to anything. Other than he answered his phone.

The site has a clean, simple look. It's not busy. Good there. But the content, while not bad, was rooted in B-/C+ ambition. That works fine for the 30/30 series - which isn't as good as it's made out to be - but it doesn't so much in writing.

Simmons has considerable work to do.

That said, it may not matter. Simmons readers don't really have standards beyond "Did he write it? OK, is it funny?" Like Lady Gaga's fans don't have many standards for her actual art, which is consistently average. She could poot on snare drums and people would dance to it. Simmons has come to stand for something in the sports journalism bigger than his middling work. You wish, at some point, newspapers would recognize and start deploying more talented people to do what he does.

 

You assume wrong, at least in my case.

 

Am I missing something or is there zero advertising? Simmons mentions "sponsors" in his column, but I am not seeing any.

 

The business model was beyond impossible. They weren't going to make it on paper sales alone, and the ad support was glaringly-insufficient.