“On the day Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was launching in Hollywood, he woke up in San Diego, about 100 miles away. Jimmy was producing a Super Bowl show there for MTV,1 so we drove down on that weekend in January 2003 in a party bus normally reserved for wild bachelor parties. You could practically smell the stale champagne and DNA on the seat cushions. I remember cars honking at us as they passed, assuming something crazy was happening behind the tinted windows. Nope. Unless you count Jimmy’s cousin Sal waiting for people to fall asleep, then farting on their heads.”
Quite the opening salvo. That superscript “1” leads to this footnote: “That Super Bowl would eventually be remembered as either the Bucs-Raiders game or the Barrett Robbins game, depending on how cynical you are.” We should add here a sic, since the name of the Oakland Raiders player who disappeared before the game due to mental illness is Barret Robbins, with one “t.” I know that because I had to Google the name to get the reference. It took one second. One of the big swinging pens editing Simmons (there are such people out there, surely) could have saved Grantland the embarrassment of the editor-in-chief misspelling the name of the first person he mentioned with whom he had not shared a ride in a party bus. It was opening day at Grantland, and gremlins happen; but forgive me for noting that this particular mistake, given its placement and its casual mean-spiritedness, could lead you, the attentive and hopeful reader, to suspect bad portents for Simmons & Co., depending on how cynical you are.
The intro goes on to compare the heady anticipation around the debut of Jimmy Kimmel’s show with how Simmons feels in launching Grantland, and while it does little to illuminate the world outside of Simmons and his friends who make TV shows—Bill Simmons is nothing if not a compulsive memoirist—it serves as a tidy tone poem to hope, and it brings heart to a Borg-backed enterprise. The other marquee writers in the stable turned in perfectly serviceable first-day pieces. Chris Jones, the erstwhile Esquire sports columnist supernovaed with magazine masterpieces on the International Space Station and on a military funeral and on Roger Ebert, gives us a brief history of his suddenly renewed career as a baseball writer, focusing mostly on what it’s like to be Chris Jones and smitten with covering baseball. Chuck Klosterman turned in my favorite piece of the first bunch, about an obscure junior college basketball playoff game he stumbled across as a kid in North Dakota, in which a skeleton-crew team of Native American players actually won with only three men on the floor. It’s not Best American Sports Writing-grade wordsmithing, but it at least explores a heretofore neglected corner of time, and is a fine way to kill twelve minutes at your desk on a weekday.
So there’s hope. Since Wednesday, Dave Eggers rolled out a pleasant little tone poem about Wrigley Field. Jay Caspian Kang was the first writer to serve up sentences (and complex thoughts) to envy in his elegiac Dirk Nowitzki assessment, complementing a companion piece, by Bill Barnwell, that enlisted left-brain stats-porn to digest Dirk. Klosterman followed up with a cracking think piece on the ennui of DVRing sports. And it all looks wonderful: Grantland’s design is a triumph of clean display and minimal advertising; the sponsors (Subway and Klondike, so far) haven’t slathered the page in blinking, blipping signage. It is a pleasure to read, even if it also looks as though the writing, that thing, that only thing here, has yet to turn its gaze away from the Writers themselves and assure us that we haven’t become trapped in yet another locker room.
While I appreciate the scope of your vocabulary, you seem to be missing the central tenant of ESPN's business model - speaking to the audience. Grantland will succeed as much from Simmons' established celebrity as it will the writing talents of its other contributors. The thing you seem to find so annoying - Simmons' eternal focus on self as the prism through which he describes the world - is the very thing that has given him the cache to create Grantland in the first place.
Simmons hasn't succeeded because he writes about sports, or that he does it particularly well. Lots of people write about sports, and quite a few do it better than him. What sets Simmons apart is his persona. While that may cause many to dislike or disparage him, it is also responsible for him being arguably the most popular online sports columnist in the country. It would be foolish of him to launch Grantland and then switch up the style that has proven such a success. He knows how to play to his audience. It just doesn't happen that audience isn't you.
#1 Posted by Joshua Duffy, CJR on Fri 10 Jun 2011 at 03:29 PM
If I use big words,people willl think I'm smart!
#2 Posted by bobsaget, CJR on Fri 10 Jun 2011 at 03:49 PM
That's "slathered" to you, CJR. I will give it a try, but my concern is it may be too self-consciously unresponsive to the immediate, and that there will be more think pieces than advisable or enjoyable. Sanctimonious baseball blather stuff.
#3 Posted by Mark J. McPherson, CJR on Fri 10 Jun 2011 at 06:30 PM
'Tone poem' x 2? Really? Is the cabaret voltaire really THAT applicable here?
That aside, the navelgazing is getting a bit out of hand. Here's hoping they get the message
#4 Posted by stephen, CJR on Sat 11 Jun 2011 at 11:35 AM
Not that I'm a 2011-era Simmons fan, but to write a perspecitve piece on this site after less than one week seems a little silly.
The whole problem with the Intenet is there's no space for nuance, longview or perspective, and I think this piece - while well-written and pretty observant - is part of that problem.
Good points, but would have been better a couple months down the road. In the first days of Huffington Post, it was regarded as an immediate failure - and that didn't quite happen, did it?
Again, though, good article all the same.
#5 Posted by NS Webster, CJR on Sat 11 Jun 2011 at 12:37 PM
Did the pot just call the kettle black?
The following definition took me 1 second to look up on Google.
Tone poem
Musical work for orchestra inspired by an extramusical story, idea, or “program,” to which the title typically refers or alludes. It evolved from the concert overture, an overture not attached to an opera or play yet suggestive of a literary or natural sequence of events. Franz Liszt, who coined the term, wrote 13 such works. ...
#6 Posted by Phred, CJR on Mon 13 Jun 2011 at 11:09 AM
Just read that little "tone poem" about Wrigley Field. Utter hooey in any media era. In the new world, apparently, anything is possible if you don't know what you're talking about.
#7 Posted by steve daley, CJR on Mon 13 Jun 2011 at 11:14 AM
Exactly what part of that first paragraph is misogynistic? Obviously, Simmons does do that occasionally, but there's no reason to point it out in a paragraph where it doesn't exist. Great journalism.
#8 Posted by jay, CJR on Wed 6 Jul 2011 at 04:13 PM