Pearlman Strikes Back

Absolutely... My only issue with what he's doing is that he acts like he's surprised by it.

Pearlman is a lot smarter than that... Or maybe, this is all an act.

 

I don't think it's an act. I think he's genuinely surprised by the blowback. But if the blowback becomes the occasion to get the book out there, you take it.

 

When I read that, I thought he was implying that, because of proximity, said small town writer was being a fanboi. Not until I read this thread did the notion that he was picking on midwesterners ever enter my mind.

Edit to add: Obviously he was picking on the grammar issues and all that, but again, the implication I get is that said reviewer was subpar because he was at a small, insignificant paper, not necessarily because he was at a small, insignificant MIDWESTERN paper.

 

You might be right, but he had to assume SI was going to use the excerpt that it did. If he didn't think there would be blowback from that, he's naive.

To be fair, a lot of us have written something we knew would be controversial, but still weren't prepared for the level of backlash that came. That may be the case here... I'm also guessing the Ditka comments elevated things a bit too...

 

What other sports books have been controversial and created this kind of backlash? I don't think Autobiographies should count...

When Nothing Else Matters by Michael Leahy should have created more backlash, but that would have required that the book be marketed or read. One of my favorite sports books of all-time and I'm constantly stunned at the number of people who have never even heard of it...

The Jordan Rules by Sam Smith
Hell Bent by Skip Bayless
Ball Four by Jim Bouton
Season on the Brink by John Feinstein
Under the Tarnished Dome by Don Yaeger and Doug Looney
Big Red Confidential by Armen Keteyian

 

(1) He made fun of people from 3,000-circulation papers.
(2) He made sure to note that it was a Midwesterner. Pearlman is a New Yorker. You can't be naive enough to not grasp the message being sent there by a Sports Illustrated writer from New York City.
(3) I agree with you, Mizzou. I don't think he was out to get Walter Payton. At all. I've been standing up for him all week here. But a bunch of Midwesterners have their pitchforks out after you because they think you disrespected them, you don't then turn around and give them something like that quip to latch onto.
(4) I do think he is honestly surprised by the backlash. Like I said, Maraniss and others put dirt in their biographies, as well. I just think they're more deft about it. It's an art.

 

Moneyball, for sure.

 

(1) Agreed
(2) I think it's awful defensive to assume he was a New Yorker taking a shot at midwesterners. I thought the context of the whole post was that Bears nation was getting irrational about a book they hadn't read. By establishing this guy's location, he was pointing out that the guy was probably part of Bears Nation. When Pearlman said the guy was midwestern, I was presuming he wasn't meaning he was from Kansas.

As a non-midwestern, non-New Yorker (though I did spend a significant chunk of childhood there) I didn't read it that way at all.

 

Both of those books were pretty far under the radar.

 

First off, I work at a small Midwestern daily.

That said I didn't take the joke the way many of you did. I didn't see it as a poke at all small town dailies in the midwest. I took it as a poke at the fanboi's who work at small town dailies close to Chicago. People who could out right bash him and go over the line in places simply because no one would really notice.

 

Well, I went to a large state university in the Midwest, and I never thought something like this would happen to m....


Oops, wrong thread

 

???? The column from the 3k-circ. paper was criticizing the Payton book.