Let’s Hate Bill Simmons!

The Sporting Life:

The Public Professor’s

Saturday Sports Column

 Bill Simmons is one of those sports writers I want to hate.  For starters, he’s an unmitigated Boston fan, and if it were up to me, that would put him right in front of the firing line.  But beyond that, he’s a bit smarmy.  His whole “Hey, look at me, I’m just a regular sports fan who likes watching the game with his buddies” shtick rings a bit hollow and comes across as condescending wish-fulfillment.  As in, maybe you were that guy once, but long ago you became a famous, well-to-do, professional sports blabber who hangs out with the rich and famous.  So go ahead and believe you’re still a bleacher creature at heart if it helps you sleep at night, but I don’t think you’re really fooling anyone.

But then again, I’ve gotta hand it to the guy.  He’s pretty sharp, he’s got a decent sense of humor, he seems reasonably good-natured, and most importantly, he’s actually a very good writer.  In other words, I wanna hate Bill Simmons, but he makes it hard.

So imagine how happy I am to see that, in conjunction with ESPN.com, he has launched his own website.  It has only been up for a few days, but that’s all it took to provide me with plenty of fodder for really hating the guy.

The thing is called Grantland.com, a hip reference to legendary, turn-of-the-century sports writer, Grantland Rice. You know, the guy who immortalized the 1924 Notre Dame backfield by dubbing them The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, and who wrote a sholcky, sentimental poem in which he coined the phrase (more or less), “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you played the game.”

Naming the site after Grantland Rice could be seen as a nice tribute to and an acknowledgment of those great sports writers who came before, or as a subtle way of putting Simmons on a par with them.  To me it comes across as the latter, more hubris than homage.  It’s also a bit disjointed, because even though Simmons has a journalism degree, he doesn’t really function as a journalist.  He typically doesn’t report anything other than his own feelings and experiences.  When you come down to it, he’s really just a glorified blogger (gasp!)

To his credit, Simmons claims not to like the name either, blaming his bosses at ESPN for it.  But that’s okay, because upon entering the site, I still found all kinds of stuff that made it a lot easier for me to hate him the way I’d always wanted to; it’s a matter of function over form.

First there was his opening article, which largely consisted of him reminiscing about being one of the top writers for The Jimmy Kimmel Show when it first began.  About driving around in a limo with Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman, about going to the Super Bowl, about how the lead singer of Cold Play is misunderstood, and about how he and the other writers on Kimmel’s show would soon have to tone things down.  Why?  Because, you know, man, the American public just wasn’t ready for their edgy, hip new approach to late night television.  “They don’t want to see new ground broken,” he said.  That’s a quote.  About late night talk show television.  Like it’s fucking abstract expressionism in the 1940s.

From there, the misbegotten elitism on his site runs amok.  It’s only been a couple of days, but there’s already an article from Wright Thompson about how the closing of Elaine’s, fabled hotspot for celebrity hobnobbing in the 1960s, is a tragedy because it’s the best bar in NYC (seriously); and literati wunderkind Dave Eggars opines about Wrigley Field being just the most super special place is the whole wide world!

Then came the piece de resistance (Look!  I’m using a French idiom!).  On Friday, Simmons penned an article about how he’s proud to be a front-running Boston Bruins fan now that they’re in the Stanley Cup finals and have managed to win a couple of games.

The article is chock full of all kinds of crap to make you hate a guy from Boston, that unimportant, provincial backwater with an inflated sense of self-importance.  A place, mind you, that Simmons himself abandoned almost ten years ago for sunny L.A.  But among all the hot air, my absolute favorite line had to be: “If this were a movie, the Bruins would be Will Hunting and the [Vancouver] Canucks would be the condescending ponytailed guy from Harvard who won’t go outside.”

Okay, first off, the pony tailed guy/contrived straw man from Harvard whom we’re supposed to hate in the movie Good Will Hunting?  He’s Boston.  Boy is he fucking Boston.  Christ, if it weren’t for Harvard and a string of lesser, rich kid private schools, would anyone other than sports fans and colonial history buffs remember the place even exists?

Secondly, the character of Will Hunting, portrayed by Matt Damon, was an asshole.  That’s right.  Hate to burst your bubble, but he was a whiny, brooding, narcissistic asshole.  The character was the adolescent, guilty bourgeois fantasy of a young Damon (who also co-wrote the script), projecting his desire to be smarter than everyone else and rub their noses in it, while still retaining his faux working class/underdog identity by doing construction, getting into fights, and banging Mimi Driver, and then jumping in a car for distant points unseen, like some dumbass who read Kerouac and didn’t really get it.

Which is a lot like Simmons, interestingly.  He’s a kinda wealthy, minor celebrity, hobnobbing with the rich and famous as if he were at Elaine’s in 1974, but he wears the mask of The Sports Guy, so he can pretend to be an Everyday Joe and delude himself into thinking he has suburban street cred.  Enough’s enough.  Let’s start hating him already.  He’s finally making it easy.

*Note: This is an update of the original version published June 11, 2011.