Sublime or overwritten?

I wanted to hate it. But I didn't.

If that is your conclusion, then I assume you missed some things.

 

Pete Axthelm is spinning in his grave.

For McGregor's next column he heads farther west to The Bitter End in search of the next Bob Dylan only to find the next Justin Bieber.

 

Less Sublime, more Long Beach Dub All Stars or Sublime with Rome. It sounds good but it's missing its heart.

 

sublimely overwritten... i grew up making' that train ride, walking up those steps to the street, to watch the summer hoops hour at a time ('71-'74, my h.s. wonder years). i was turned onto it by my bible, 'the city game,' and george johnson, a brooklyn courts pal i played with occasionally at foster park in brooklyn (he ended up starring at st.john's and playing in the nba for 8 seasons; i ended up never coming close to making the h.s. hoops team (not even the j.v.); i covered the hell out of 'em, though, for the 'midwood argus'!!). slow, white, 5-9 guards who can't create their own shot or handle when pressed are dead meet once the going gets tough. i wasn't a bad intramurals player st stony brook, though!!

(AN ASIDE: no attempt to threadjack, but the other guy covering the basketball team for 'the argus' was my classmate, steve carp, who also made it in this biz in las vegas, where he became well-known for hounding tark's great unlv teams featured this month by hbo; steve is interviewed throughout -- yup, midwood was a sportswriting FACTORY back in the day)

 

To me the gold standard for waxing poetic about playground basketball is the intro to The City Game by Pete Axthelm:

"Basketball is a city game.
Its battlegrounds are strips of asphalt between tattered wired fences or crumbling buildings; its rhythms grow from the uneven thump of a ball against hard surfaces.
It demands no open spaces or lush backyards or elaborate equipment.
It doesn’t even require a specified number of players; a one on one confrontation in a playground can be as memorable as an organized game.
Basketball is a game for young athletes without cars or allowances – the game whose drama and action are intensified by confined spaces and chaotic surroundings.
Every American sport in a general way directs itself toward certain segments of American life. Basketball is basically a leisurely, pastoral experience, offering a tablieu of athletes against a lush green background, providing moments of action amid longer periods allowed for contemplation of the spectacle."

 

Without delving into the specifics of the column, and why it worked or why it failed, let me offer a respectful rebuttal to this line of thinking, because it comes up often here.

Logging on to ESPN.com every day is like drinking from a fire hose. If you tried, you literally could not get through all the offerings it has, even if you focused strictly on its commentary pieces. Jeff MacGregor does not write like Jemele Hill who does not write like Gene Wojciechowski who does not write like L.G. Granderson who does not write like Bill Simmons who does not write like Rick Reilly, etc. I think the suggestion that someone like MacGregor "write as though he's writing for ESPN.com, not The Atlantic" misses the point that ESPN.com does not have a specific target audience. The web site does not have a specific "voice" or "tone" like many magazines. Because of its wealth of resources, it tries to be many different things to many different people. Regardless of what we're often led to believe -- especially by some of the usual suspects here -- people who read The Atlantic and Harpers do occasionally read ESPN.com, and so if someone like MacGregor appeals to that narrow demographic, then ESPN has succeeded. They are getting a return on their investment. The section of the website that MacGregor is writing for (Commentary, formerly called Page 2) has a rich history of designating someone to sit in the "academic" chair in the room, be it David Halberstam, Ralph Wiley, Hunter S. Thompson, or MacGregor. If you look back, many of those pieces by Wiley and HST (and even Halberstam) were not home runs. But they filled a role ESPN wanted them to fill. They offered a very different approach to something we've read a lot about.

If ESPN asked every writer to shape their voice into something similar to Bill Simmons, on the theory that everyone should emulate their most popular columnist, it would be a miserable failure, artistically and, arguably, commercially.

I love Ernest Hemingway and I love David Foster Wallace. I don't quite understand why so many people seen to believe that, because Hemingway did it one way, the opposite end of the writing spectrum is an exercise in literary masturbation, and therefor wrong. Different writers view the world differently, thank god. If something doesn't work for you (and I'm not speaking to you, YGBFKM, but to the whole group), it should not be seen as a dig at your intellectual shortcomings. It's just a piece of writing.

 

ESPN is devoting a lot of time and money and manpower to create 'Content' (or 'big-C,' to use MacGregor's form) that defies the stereotypical ESPN product. Thus a fiction magazine issue and a place for MacGregor's piece and other things no doubt in the works.

The question Alma asked, though, was whether this particular piece of writing worked, as a piece of literary commentary, not whether it belonged on espn at all.

 

I was 14 when 'the city game' was published, at a time i read anything connected to the knicks '69-'70 season. 'miracle on 33rd street' by phil berger and 'city game' were light years better than the rest; 'miracle' features much insights and philophizing from phil jackson, who was out after back surgery for most (all?) of the season but who was clearly berger's eyes, ears and dope-smoking bud for much of it.

'miracle...' seems to have largely been forgotten all these years later, but if you haven't read it or 'city game' yet, i'd urge you to now. you won't be sorry. in fact, i'm going to have littlest man shockey, 16, dig 'em out from the box they're stored in, buried somewhere in the garage, this weekend. we need to get him reading more -- his verbal psat score was waaay below his math -- largely because he HATES to read. amazing how different kids from the ene pool can be; middle man shockey has read like crazy since birth, it seems, and it sure was reflected in all his english classes and verbal sat score (700), which bested mine BY FAAAAR and his big brother's by 100 (and i thought that was crazy good...

anyhoo, turning littlest man onto sports books like these is my best bet to improve some (if it's not already too late). i'm making a list for his summer reading and these two will be high on it...

 

Which is why I said I was responding to YGBFKM's post, not Alma's question.

 

Right, i wasn't disagreeing with you.

 

My parents have a painting in their home which they got in the 80s which includes a written statement "Painterly painting is ugly." I feel the same way about writerly writing, which is what this is.

 

Trying to put a highbrow literary piece on Pg 2 is like putting a Steinway in Scores.