Worthwhile Will Leitch essay on Bill Simmons

i was looking forward to pippen's pyramid entry, and it was terrific. so many of them are. anyway, i've always held that '94 "quitter" moment against pippen; i appreciate the way simmons broke it down. also amazed how bulls management raped pippen financially, basically his entire time in chicago.

... on to 23,, isiah. should be fun.

 

Judging by the success of "Air Pip" after his basketball career, you might think Pippen enjoys being had.

 

poor arkansas boy. maybe he ain't done known betta ... .

**

the dr. jack 19/18 breakdown of barkley/malone is superb, the best of the pyramid breakdowns, and i loved the dr. jack breakdown of sam jones/gervin as well as cowens'.

isiah's was a letdown.

 

Finished the book this morning. If you love basketball, it's a fun, fulfilling read, with so much to chew on. And I liked the Walton part, especially when he admits that he's tried a half-dozen times to read Halberstam's book, but just can't (I've got to get that book).

Were there mistakes? Sure. But nothing interrupted any of the theses he tried to put out there for the die-hard hoops fans. Never even got a sense of his Boston homerism. And even then, I have no issue with him calling the '86 Celts the best team ever. I was on the Left Coast, smack-dab in the middle of Showtime v. Celtics back then. The C's were that fucking good even though we only got to see them a handful of times (twice regular season, Finals). I loved his idea on blowing up the Hall of Fame as we know it and rebuilding it in French Lick and with all of his specs for the different levels. His pyramid offered some wonderful insights, history and poignancy (the end of Oscar Robertson's especially). Except for a few corny ones, his footnotes were goddamn funny (the blondafroperm jokes made me laugh every single time, as did about 98 percent of the coke jokes). He introduced me to Bob Ryan the hoops writer (never knew Ryan was entrenched in the hoops game, and now I want to read some of Ryan's basketball ramblings).

He and I have many similarities when it comes to looking at basketball as well as personally (minus the dad parts, which I envy; my dad and I have zero relationship. Under different circumstances, though, the relationship I envision with my dad is exactly the one Bill has with his dad).

The only thing that I think hurts Simmons with this book is that people who don't really care about basketball won't be get hooked from the outset. The casual Bill Simmons fan will laugh a lot because of his pop-culture references, but if they don't have that mental basketball catalog that binds them to Bill Simmons the basketball nut, 700 pages of pro basketball history might get boring. That said, not once was I bored, and I was intrigued until the last sentence of the book (and his little acknowledgment to his daughter kind of made my eyes water).

Fantastic book. What a journey.

Next up: Loose Balls by Terry Pluto.



Edit: Thanks, SS! Best present I've received in a long, long time.

 

Congrats. Thanks for keeping us up to date. You should start a running thread for whatever you are reading. Be a nice way for those who don't have a lot of reading time to keep up on a lot of books.

 

Oh, Boom, you're such a cutie pie.

 

Check out Ryan's column on Jordan's 63-point playoff game against the Celtics.

 

Was just coming on here to post the same. It's up there with Gammons' classic story on Game 6 of the '75 Series.

"It's just God disguised as Michael Jordan."

Unfortunately, the Globe took its archives behind a pay wall -- the story appeared on April 21, 1986.

 

what a tease! (thanks, buck, for the link).

what is interesting is that ryan, who i never read during 10 years and 3 stops in new england, both have used "55 studebaker" in a hoops story. in another part of the country, circa 2002, i described a hoop team's offense in studebaker terms. poor '55 studebaker, always getting ragged on.

anywho, that piece of the column wants to make me pay to get the rest.

 

Simmons snafu in today's playoff column, projecting Pats at Colts in next week's Divisional Round. They can only meet in the Championship -- unfortunately for him, a couple of graphs hang on that prediction, so they're probably going to have to pull it down for a while to fix after someone calls it to ESPN's attention.

 

"Simmons could be a great writer if he hadn't sold his soul to the devil's earthly incarnation, ESPN, and chosen the authorial persona of a lifelong frat boy."

Wow - that cuts to the bone.