The Simmons Site

The National piece was great.

Makes me want to spend a night drinking with Charlie Pierce, which I imagine would be exceedingly memorable up to and including the point at which it would all go south abruptly and violently amid a political disagreement.

 

Sounds as if at a certain point in the evening, neither of you would remember anything.

 

But the scars would last forever.

 

Yes, dummy.

 

YB... I have spent a night drinking with Charlie Pierce (actually, he was drinking, I was listening). Well worth it, if only to feel like the elementary school kid in the graduate school class.

 

An anonymous sports writer who tweets under the BigSportsWriter handle posted a lengthy rant about Simmons, the hatred of Simmons and the Simmons fanbois.

 

Some of that was thoughtful. A lot of it was also beyond incoherent.

He makes a point I've seen repeatedly the past few days, about how brilliant Page 2 supposedly was back in the day. Ralph Wiley! Hunter Thompson!

Seriously, did anyone actually read their stuff for ESPN? Wiley was down to about an 85 mph fastball, and Thompson was pathetic.

 

Maybe with 30/30 and Grantland, Simmons is trying to pull a Carnegie by upgrading his legacy from one that would have been considered mixed

 

So this national website is a forum that will allow people to write almost whatever they want with little to no boundaries.

I would think everyone here would be hoping for its success. This seems to be a pretty watershed moment for sports journalism online because if this site does not work, in the eyes of investors, it never will.

 

I would think the question here is one of sustainability. It's a long season, and say, two months from now, will the site have expanded its base of writers, or will it be depending on the same folks to crank out those trillion word pieces? If the latter, it's screwed, because NOBODY has that much to say about sports, as Simmons' own writing shows. I will say that the site was prepared with stories worth reading to make a splash when it started, so perhaps it and its organizers (I really don't know who's involved besides Simmons, but there have to be some others) have thought that far ahead.
The members of this board are part of the target audience here. We are, by and large, people who read everything about sports we can get our hands on. We are to sportswriting what high rollers are to Vegas. And what Grantland is akin to those super-fancy restaurants in casinos opened by celebrity chefs. Are there enough of us reading whales to sustain the writing equivalent of $500 bottles of Bordeaux on a daily basis? I doubt it, but I hope I'm wrong. Do the writers have enough $2000 meals in them to keep us feeling satisfied? Again, I don't know.

 

Some of these pieces are TOO long. And I still don't know how I feel about Klosterman doing sports, which isn't his specialty.

And this still doesn't make me a big supporter of Simmons ... he is still writing these long diatribes that could nearly be cut in half the wordage. His "opening letter" made him sound as if he was Columbus embarking on the voyage to the other side of the world, when in reality this is definitely not the case.

 

Health could fast become an issue if the Grantland writers want to continue to live like their bourbon swilling, chain smoking heroes of yesteryear.

To sustain itself Grantland needs to change the paradigm of the sportswriter. Instead of Elaines, the new talisman should be Robeks. Instead of Makers Mark, the beverage of choice should be pomegranate juice.