Worthwhile Will Leitch essay on Bill Simmons

my SS got me simmons' basketball book (thank you, very much, jande). through 30 pages, and i'm hooked. i relate. i relate because the way he talks about his celtics, is the way i felt about the lakers. he captures moments beautifully, aand those are the same exact moments i was living in LA. he is taking me back to special times, tappping into seminal memories that erode over time, yet he is polishing them now, and it feels like the nba finals 1987 all over again.

but bill, dude, enough gratuitous ripping on the lakers. "wilting like pussies"? "blowing each other"?

yeah, great shot bird, uhh, missed, dude. yeah, you know the shot. hahahahahha 8)

splendid reading so far.

 

just got to the sleepy floyd screwup (it was 29, not 33, and happened in '87, not '88). but his point still holds enough water about not being able to defend small guards who could create their own shot. it was an issue in '87, and it was an issue in the '88 finals with isaiah.

a proofreader should've caught thosw 2 factual errors.

also, love him meeting with thomas in vegas and talking about "the secret", though the secret behind the secret isn't all that revealing. it's how i would run an nba team, too.

 

To his credit, Simmons has a webpage listing the mistakes in the book.
http://thebookofbasketball.com/

He mentioned this site at the end of the book as it was going to have youtube clips of a lot of the games mentioned. I went to it after getting the book and it wasn't even a real site. Looks like he took his old blog, where he was posting some old columns when mad at ESPN, and turned it into this site. Still, he gets credit for listing all the errors.

 

Why would you buy a book on the history of the NBA where the author is admitting upfront that it was poorly researched? This is exactly the reason why Simmons is so off about the 70's.

He should have just started with the Larry / Magic era.


"Obviously in a book of 700-plus pages that was researched and fact-checked during a whirlwind span of about 2-3 months, I figured we would end up with a few errors of the "total brainfart" variety, as well as some research errors and maybe even answers to things that I admittedly couldn't figure out in the book. The over/under was 50. Well, we hit the over. The majority of errors happen in the last 250 pages, when we were speed-rushing the book to meet a printing deadline. The other problem I didn't anticipate: in certain cases, I was working off research (either a book or a magazine article) in which the information was originally wrong, then, I repeated the wrong information in my book."


I wonder if this is the same standard that David Halberstam used.

 

You expected, maybe, Gay Telese?

 

Well, I have read reviews about, say, the book 1949 that say it's littered with errors. A friend of mine just finished The Echoing Green on my recommendation. He liked it, but was frustrated by the numerous factual mistakes he found in it, ones I would have never noticed. They do happen, no matter how literary the nonfiction work.

 

So is it Simmons' fault when he did research, but the research he found was faulty?

Also, I have little issue with him saying Sleepy scored 33 (when it was 29) or that it was '87 and not the '88 first round. A year's difference in the point he was trying to make doesn't make a huge difference. He was comparing a Lakers' squad that, by and large, was the same both years.

Anyway, ploughed through another 65 pages, and it's riveting. The whole breakdown of why Russell is better than Wilt doesn't disappoint. There are zero stones he leaves unturned in making his case. I think a lot of people already feel that way, but I can easily see how those in the Wilt camp would want to rethink their positions.

(His footnotes, by and large, are funny. Only 1 or 2 so far that made me think, "OK, Billy, that was a stretch." But they add nice color nonetheless.)

 

Yeah.

I've proofread more than one non-fiction book in my time, for pay.
It's not a living for me, but I'll do it
when the book involves a subject I know cold.

Found a dozen or more serious errors on each and every occasion.

You can give Simmons a pass on some ancient game-by-game scoring totals for individuals. I understand that, though it reflects a marked lowering of standards, through the years.

I wonder how many times Bill went over it, himself, before he let it go.

I'll bet the number's pretty goddamn low.

 

Is there a category for books somewhere between fiction and non fiction?
To me it seems like the standard should be a lot higher for a book than Simmons set.

SI and the NYT get killed week in and week out for factual errors. I am surprised that Simmons is getting a pass from many here.

 

I've written three non-fiction books. Every time, I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that I had every single fact checked out. Every time, my proofreaders (and they do God's work, believe me: the stuff they found both grammatical and factual were incredibly precise) vetted it to within an inch of its life.

And every time, there winds up being a customer review on Amazon that starts thusly: "Despite some errors of fact ..."

Simmons wrote a 700-page book; that's 200,000 words (more, with footnotes), and good luck to anyone to make it through that many words without making mistakes. He never makes any claim to be Jesus, and thus makes no guarantee of perfection. I think it's one of the great literary innovations I've ever seen to actually devote a website to the acknowledging of those errors, and I salute it.

-- Mike Vaccaro

 

Free hint, in terms of finding stuff you might otherwise overlook:

Read it backwords . . . not so much word by word, but graf by graf.

You'll be amazed.

 

Vac

I am a avid reader of your work and one of the things that has always stood out to me is that you do not play loose with the facts. Specially when you are writing about an era of teams that you did not witness first hand. A good example was the column you did on Dave DeBusschere when he passed. One of my favorite columns that completely and accurately captured the '69 / 70 Knicks.

Here is the publishers description of Simmons book:

Product Description
There is only one writer on the planet who possesses enough basketball knowledge and passion to write the definitive book on the NBA.* Bill Simmons, the from-the-womb hoops addict known to millions as ESPN.com’s Sports Guy, is that writer. And The Book of Basketball is that book.

Nowhere in the roundball universe will you find another single volume that covers as much in such depth as this wildly opinionated and thoroughly entertaining look at the past, present, and future of pro basketball.

From the age-old question of who actually won the rivalry between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain to the one about which team was truly the best of all time, Simmons opens–and then closes, once and for all–every major pro basketball debate. Then he takes it further by completely reevaluating not only how NBA Hall of Fame inductees should be chosen but how the institution must be reshaped from the ground up, the result being the Pyramid: Simmons’s one-of-a-kind, five-level shrine to the ninety-six greatest players in the history of pro basketball. And ultimately he takes fans to the heart of it all, as he uses a conversation with one NBA great to uncover that coveted thing: The Secret of Basketball.

Comprehensive, authoritative, controversial, hilarious, and impossible to put down (even for Celtic-haters), The Book of Basketball offers every hardwood fan a courtside seat beside the game’s finest, funniest, and fiercest chronicler."

To me with a description like that there should be a pretty high standard of editing. Not "we rushed through the last 250 pages and hope we got it all right."