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Worthwhile Will Leitch essay on Bill Simmons

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Double Down, Nov 10, 2009.

  1. TheSportsPredictor

    TheSportsPredictor Well-Known Member

    I bought three copies. All for my library. :)

    I did read one of them though. Read it all. Found it very entertaining. I view the footnotes as kind of the directors cut DVD version of the book. Kind of a behind-the-scenes view of the thought process that went into writing the book. If I am not mistaken, didn't the paperback version of his first book contain tons of footnotes? I don't remember if the original did, and don't feel like lookingi t up.
     
  2. GBNF

    GBNF Well-Known Member

    I find this entire topic just utterly fascinating.
    It transcends old-school versus new-school.
    It transcends print versus internet.
    It transcends establishment versus little guy.
    I was once a huge, huge Simmons fan. Eager to read every single word he wrote the second I saw it up on ESPN.com, calling fellow writers at my college paper to read it along with me. He was fresh, witty, young and his columns just hit home. Even as my sports fandom was waning, I went on the ride with him, absorbing every word on Manny, Papi, Pedro, Zimmer, Jeter, Nomar, Brady, Bledsoe, Bird and Len Bias. And I could give two shits about the Red Sox, Yankees, Patriots or Celtics. Maybe Bias; he's pretty interesting.
    I'd venture to say that I read every single thing he wrote from 2003-2007, including all of his older archives. In 2007, I was 23 and his writing resonated.
    Now? It doesn't so much.
    That's the fascinating thing about the Leitch article to me - how much Simmons has worn thin on those who care about writing.
    My sports-fan friends who are not writers still think he's a golden god. They read every word, listen to every podcast, go to his book signings.
    I grew tired of him long ago. Do I still read his football picks column and treasure every one of his Vegas Vacation columns? Hell yes. But I simply can't read some of what he writes now.
    I understand that with increased attention, decreased focus, a hundred different things on his plate and two kids, his writing was bound to suffer. But I never quite realized that other people had noticed it, too.
    That, to me, is the overarching theme here - how impossible it is to stay grounded in writing when so many other things are on your plate.

    Also - He is easily, so easily, the most famous sportswriter in the country, it's not even a comparison.
    Also - I don't even really consider him a sportswriter. He's more of a pop columnist or a society columnist who happens to opine on his favorite teams and his social interactions.
     
  3. tmr

    tmr Member

    The book's pretty good. His premise was that he wanted to write a sort-of history of the NBA, and it is sort-of a history of the game. He skips some stuff, which he tells the reader he's going to do, but in the course of re-ranking the best players of all time, he provides a pretty detailed sketch of the league.

    It's also edited much, much better than his column, as you'd expect.
     
  4. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    What a joke - Bill Simmons writing a book on the history of the NBA.

    If this column he did on Pete Maravich is an example of what is in the book, then he is giving readers a warped history of the NBA.

    http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/070124

    Simmons was born in 1969 yet seems to be able to remember Pete Maravich playing in the mid 70's when Simmons would have been 6 or 7.

    I would be willing to bet that 50 % of any observations that Simmons makes in the book can be refuted.

    Entertaining does not equal accurate when it comes to Simmons.
     
  5. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    I prefer Charles Pierce's book review ... http://deadspin.com/5403430/you-are-not-the-cosmos-a-review-of-bill-simmons-book-of-basketball

     
  6. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Just this passage alone proves that Simmons is unqualified to write a "History of NBA book":

    "The book world has just produced a similar head-scratcher: two competing biographies of Pete Maravich, one by acclaimed author Mark Kriegel, the other by Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrill, who spent five years putting their book together in collaboration with Pete's widow, Jackie. On the surface, dueling Maravich books seems even stranger than dueling Prefontaine movies. After all, Pistol Pete died 19 years ago, didn't win anything other than some scoring titles and never played in the Final Four -- or past the second round of the NBA playoffs. His 10-year pro career spanned the depressing '70s, a decade marred by drug and alcohol abuse, overpaid head cases, tape-delayed playoff games, violent fights and sagging attendance. We always hear that Bird and Magic saved the NBA. Doesn't that mean they saved it from people like Pete Maravich?"

    His statement about the NBA being scared in the decade of the 70's is wildly inaccurate.

    Hopefully his book was better researched than this column.
     
  7. Small Town Guy

    Small Town Guy Well-Known Member

    Boom, you'll be happy to know that graf runs almost verbatim in the book in the Maravich section.

    I did like the book. Perhaps a bit too much Celtics stuff, but when you consider the history of the franchise, especially in the 60s, you have to expect a lot of Green talk. He does put Magic and Kareem ahead of Bird in his top 96 players of all-time discussion. And the dick jokes and porno jokes get old fairly quickly.

    There's such a dearth of NBA books, especially compared to baseball and football, that I eat up any NBA offerings that come out, and his is entertaining, even if I disagree with some of the arguments and found some factual missteps.

    Here's a Slate review.
    http://www.slate.com/id/2235355/
     
  8. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    I am thrilled. Nice - Simmons has recycled inaccurate columns into his book.
     
  9. PaulS

    PaulS Member

    Thank you, Charles P. Pierce.
     
  10. Cousin Jeffrey

    Cousin Jeffrey Active Member

    The Pierce column is pretty spot-on. The stuff he picked apart, I absolutely agreed with, though Pierce basically ignores, for the sake of his argument, the crux of the book: ranking basketball players. Then again, how many of us actually care to rank basketball players?

    In any sense, Leitch's bj on Simmons was authentic and spot-on, and so was Pierce's. It's not black and white.

    Pierce is just a much, much, much better writer than either Leitch or Simmons. And a helluva lot smarter.
     
  11. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    "His 10-year pro career spanned the depressing '70s, a decade marred by drug and alcohol abuse, overpaid head cases, tape-delayed playoff games, violent fights and sagging attendance."


    969-70 - 7,563
    1970-71 - 7,648 (Maravich's rookie year)
    1971-72 - 8,061
    1972-73 - 8,396
    1973-74 - 8,479
    1974-75 - 9,339
    1975-76 - 10,179
    1976-77 - 10,974 (merger with ABA)
    1977-78 - 10,947
    1978-79 - 10,822
    1979-80 - 11,017 (Bird, Magic are rookies)
    1980-81 - 10,021
    1981-82 - 10,567
    1982-83 - 10,220
    1983-84 - 10,620
    1984-85 - 11,141 (Michael Jordan's rookie year)
    1985-86 - 11,893
    1986-87 - 12,795
    1987-88 - 13,419
    1988-89 - 15,088
    1989-90 - 15,690


    So much for Bill's conjecture of "sagging attendance" . Simmons needs to do a better job checking his facts.
     
  12. GB-Hack

    GB-Hack Active Member

    I'd be interested to see how much of a percentage of the arena's capacities those attendence figures are.
     
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