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I thought maybe this time I'd keep all of my promises
Forgot this yesterday - Jim Caple still owns my heart, but there was a cute piece on Page 2's Bill Simmons in Sunday's New York Times. I've put the text of the story behind the cut.
November 20, 2005
That Sports Guy Thrives Online
By WARREN ST. JOHN
IT was a curious sight in Greenwich Village one balmy night this fall: hundreds of men in their 20's and early 30's lined up around a city block for a book signing, many of them decked out in team jerseys and wearing the eager expressions of teenagers on the verge of meeting a real celebrity.
It's safe to say that this particular demographic is not known for its zealous attendance at book events, unless the featured "author" is Jenna Jameson, Howard Stern or perhaps Brett Favre. But inside, hunched over a table and signing books like mad, was an actual writer, one whose acclaim can be traced to nothing more than putting words on a blank page, a man with a misleadingly generic name: the Sports Guy, a k a Bill Simmons.
As the writer of ESPN.com's Sports Guy column, Mr. Simmons is among the most popular sports columnists in the country. Writing from the perspective of an unabashed partisan - his teams are the Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics - he has pioneered an intensely personal style of sports writing that draws on frequent references to movies, television sitcoms, music, video games, even his friends and wife (the Sports Gal of course), always with a side dish of mortar-thick sports history and analysis. A recent column on the woes of the New York Knicks, for example, began by equating the pairing of Larry Brown, the coach, and Isiah Thomas, the team president, with the marriage of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.
"Before Simmons you never got a feel for what the columnist's life was like outside of the games," said Will Leitch, the editor of the sports blog Deadspin.com and a longtime Simmons fan. "There was this large disconnect between reporters and their readers. Simmons threw all that out the window and said these are the conversations we're having. It felt like you were all in on a private joke together, like you had discovered something."
Since joining ESPN.com in 2001 Mr. Simmons, 36, has built an audience of around 500,000 visitors a month, according to the company. And a recent collection of his columns, "Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank and the 2004 Red Sox" spent five weeks on the New York Times extended best-seller list and motivated hundreds of young men to put down their remotes to show up for book signings this fall in New York, Boston, Washington and Chicago.
Last Sunday night, while blasting through the commercials of a recorded football game at his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Simmons leaned back on his club-style leather sofa and heaved an anxious sigh. It was his 11th straight hour of NFL viewing that day.
"I live in fear," he said. "Fear of being done, of being tapped out."
It follows, perhaps, that Mr. Simmons would be uncomfortable with the idea of success because he began his sportswriting career as the ultimate outsider. Unable to get a newspaper job, he started a Web site, BostonSportsGuy.com, in 1997, while bartending at night. With no formal journalism training, Mr. Simmons simply wrote what he thought friends would enjoy reading.
"The main thing I noticed was none of them were writing about the stuff I talked about with my friends," he said of traditional newspaper columnists. "The stuff we were doing - going to Vegas, watching football for 10 hours, playing video games - and the stuff we noticed, like the ugliest player in the NBA, wasn't represented."
On his site Mr. Simmons took daily shots at management, players and, especially, local beat reporters for the Boston newspapers, whom he derided as lazy and even dumb. As a devoted fan of Boston's teams, Mr. Simmons said, he never understood how people could gravitate toward sportswriting while professing not to care which team won, in the name of journalistic objectivity.
"I met the other reporters," Mr. Simmons said. "They were 300 pounds and miserable. I never understood why they didn't enjoy their jobs. It's weird to leave your passion at the door."
He recalled that once in a press box he asked another reporter who his favorite football team was. "He looked at me like I'd asked, 'Hey, ever had sex with a guy?' "
In addition to sports Mr. Simmons wrote about getting drunk with friends and contemplating stealing an urn from a church because he thought it would make a nice trophy for his rotisserie football league. When he broke up with a girlfriend, he simply passed her title of Sports Gal to the next woman in his life, who became his wife. (In his book he laments that there was not "a slew of Sports Gals with escalating Roman numerals, like Super Bowls or WrestleManias.")
Mr. Simmons's site eventually attracted about 12,000 readers a day, big numbers at the time. One of his fans was Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night television host, who lured Mr. Simmons to Los Angeles to be a writer on his show. Eventually Mr. Simmons left the job to devote himself full-time to his sports column.
"A lot of the things he wrote about felt like they were stolen right out of my high school diary," Mr. Kimmel said of the column. "Sports is a part of Bill's life, and it's woven throughout. So his column, a lot of it is sports, and a lot of it is 'Beverly Hills 90210' reruns and 'Varsity Blues.' "
In 2001 editors at ESPN.com invited Mr. Simmons to write three guest columns for the site; one, a heartfelt and brutal deconstruction of the former Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens titled "Is Roger the Anti-Christ?" became one of the most e-mailed articles on the site that year.
John A. Walsh, the executive editor of ESPN, said he believed Mr. Simmons came to his casual and intimate writing style precisely because he never had training at a newspaper.
"He would not have had his voice in a traditional medium," Mr. Walsh said. "His entry point allowed him to be himself."
Mr. Simmons's work on ESPN.com these days is somewhere between a freewheeling blog and a traditional newspaper column. While the format is still loose, ESPN is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and Mr. Simmons has had to make adjustments to his style to please his corporate bosses. He reins in his impulse to mock television announcers, for example, a staple of his old BostonSportsGuy persona, because many of those announcers are now his colleagues at ESPN.
Mr. Simmons, married with a newborn, is no longer getting drunk with pals and contemplating stealing urns from churches. All of which raises the ante for his writing, which is published in a medium that craves energy and freshness, and can be punishing when expectations are not met.
His strategy for survival and relevance, besides worrying, he said, is simply work. He inhales television and print media: sports, sitcoms, movies, magazines, video games and anything else he can get his hands on.
TiVo is his friend.
"It's the best thing that ever happened to sports fans," he said.
He works from a lair he created behind his home, a small guest house with a bachelor pad feel. There is a chair and sofa, a mini-fridge, a treadmill, a desk, and of course a 40-inch high-definition TV.
On a typical Sunday, Mr. Simmons said, he watches about 12 hours of football. With the remote in one hand, he can power through a recorded game in an hour and a half. All the while Mr. Simmons, an only child who said he grew up having to entertain himself, engages in a prolonged dialogue with his TV.
"He is truly bad at his job," Mr. Simmons blurted out after the Steelers quarterback, Tommy Maddux, threw an ugly incompletion. "When they say 'pocket passer,' that's a nice way of saying, 'He's white and he can't run,' " Mr. Simmons said to the TV a few minutes later.
After a Steelers touchdown, Mr. Simmons paused the game. "Listen to Mike Patrick," he said of the ESPN announcer. "He'll say, 'What a catch!' " Mr. Simmons hit play, and seconds later Mr. Patrick, in exactly the same key and cadence, barked, "What a catch!"
Mr. Simmons watches games with his laptop at the ready and pauses the game to type notes for his column. And while he blows through most commercials, sometimes one will catch his eye. Watching the sped-up image of some musicians on a stage, Mr. Simmons quickly hit stop, rewind, and play: a commercial appeared for a DVD of the recent Live Aid benefit concert.
"It's a good idea to sell the DVD of the concert nobody watched when it was free," he said, before hitting fast forward again. Mr. Simmons hit play at exactly the moment the game resumed. A satisfied look crossed his face. "I'm a TiVo savant," he said.
Mr. Simmons's book chronicles his lifelong frustration as a Red Sox fan and their improbable World Series victory in 2004. While the Red Sox run that year was good for Mr. Simmons's profile, the victory, along with the New England Patriots streak of three Super Bowl victories, robbed Mr. Simmons of a source of angst that had long fueled his writing.
He had hoped his move to Los Angeles, with its long-struggling NBA franchise, the Clippers, might provide a fresh source of tension. Mr. Simmons bought season tickets, and almost magically, the Clippers started playing well. Mr. Simmons said he thinks he might be good luck. That gave him another idea.
"Maybe I'll be the sports equivalent of Michael Landon in 'Highway to Heaven,' " Mr. Simmons said. "I'll go to different cities and turn their teams around in a tidy one-hour episode."
And we have a teaser trailer for M. Night's Lady In The Water. I think we got this trailer before GOF and I completely forgot about it in all the whoo! of seeing the film. [Bad username or site: trailer_spot / @ livejournal.com] has links to HD versions of the trailer as well. Despite myself, I'm really excited about this film, and M. Night's carried over Bryce Dallas Howard (Ivy in The Village) to play the woman in the water. I cannot wait until we get the first production shots of her.
My early afternoon class was cancelled, because Professor Selassie RULES. However, Judge Baker sucks, and I still have class at 3:30. But after, I'm going to see GOF again with a couple friends, so if I have to stick around an extra day, at least there's fun to be had. One of the people I'm going to see it again with is a friend I saw the midnight show with, and I find his enthusiasm for this movie completely darling. He was all "Man, it made me want to read the book!" **laughs** Which was so me after Prisoner of Azkaban, so I totally relate. Yay for movie adaptations that really hook you ^_~ Maybe this time we'll get the Superman teaser that's supposed to be showing before GOF?
November 20, 2005
That Sports Guy Thrives Online
By WARREN ST. JOHN
IT was a curious sight in Greenwich Village one balmy night this fall: hundreds of men in their 20's and early 30's lined up around a city block for a book signing, many of them decked out in team jerseys and wearing the eager expressions of teenagers on the verge of meeting a real celebrity.
It's safe to say that this particular demographic is not known for its zealous attendance at book events, unless the featured "author" is Jenna Jameson, Howard Stern or perhaps Brett Favre. But inside, hunched over a table and signing books like mad, was an actual writer, one whose acclaim can be traced to nothing more than putting words on a blank page, a man with a misleadingly generic name: the Sports Guy, a k a Bill Simmons.
As the writer of ESPN.com's Sports Guy column, Mr. Simmons is among the most popular sports columnists in the country. Writing from the perspective of an unabashed partisan - his teams are the Patriots, Red Sox and Celtics - he has pioneered an intensely personal style of sports writing that draws on frequent references to movies, television sitcoms, music, video games, even his friends and wife (the Sports Gal of course), always with a side dish of mortar-thick sports history and analysis. A recent column on the woes of the New York Knicks, for example, began by equating the pairing of Larry Brown, the coach, and Isiah Thomas, the team president, with the marriage of Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.
"Before Simmons you never got a feel for what the columnist's life was like outside of the games," said Will Leitch, the editor of the sports blog Deadspin.com and a longtime Simmons fan. "There was this large disconnect between reporters and their readers. Simmons threw all that out the window and said these are the conversations we're having. It felt like you were all in on a private joke together, like you had discovered something."
Since joining ESPN.com in 2001 Mr. Simmons, 36, has built an audience of around 500,000 visitors a month, according to the company. And a recent collection of his columns, "Now I Can Die in Peace: How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank and the 2004 Red Sox" spent five weeks on the New York Times extended best-seller list and motivated hundreds of young men to put down their remotes to show up for book signings this fall in New York, Boston, Washington and Chicago.
Last Sunday night, while blasting through the commercials of a recorded football game at his home in Los Angeles, Mr. Simmons leaned back on his club-style leather sofa and heaved an anxious sigh. It was his 11th straight hour of NFL viewing that day.
"I live in fear," he said. "Fear of being done, of being tapped out."
It follows, perhaps, that Mr. Simmons would be uncomfortable with the idea of success because he began his sportswriting career as the ultimate outsider. Unable to get a newspaper job, he started a Web site, BostonSportsGuy.com, in 1997, while bartending at night. With no formal journalism training, Mr. Simmons simply wrote what he thought friends would enjoy reading.
"The main thing I noticed was none of them were writing about the stuff I talked about with my friends," he said of traditional newspaper columnists. "The stuff we were doing - going to Vegas, watching football for 10 hours, playing video games - and the stuff we noticed, like the ugliest player in the NBA, wasn't represented."
On his site Mr. Simmons took daily shots at management, players and, especially, local beat reporters for the Boston newspapers, whom he derided as lazy and even dumb. As a devoted fan of Boston's teams, Mr. Simmons said, he never understood how people could gravitate toward sportswriting while professing not to care which team won, in the name of journalistic objectivity.
"I met the other reporters," Mr. Simmons said. "They were 300 pounds and miserable. I never understood why they didn't enjoy their jobs. It's weird to leave your passion at the door."
He recalled that once in a press box he asked another reporter who his favorite football team was. "He looked at me like I'd asked, 'Hey, ever had sex with a guy?' "
In addition to sports Mr. Simmons wrote about getting drunk with friends and contemplating stealing an urn from a church because he thought it would make a nice trophy for his rotisserie football league. When he broke up with a girlfriend, he simply passed her title of Sports Gal to the next woman in his life, who became his wife. (In his book he laments that there was not "a slew of Sports Gals with escalating Roman numerals, like Super Bowls or WrestleManias.")
Mr. Simmons's site eventually attracted about 12,000 readers a day, big numbers at the time. One of his fans was Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night television host, who lured Mr. Simmons to Los Angeles to be a writer on his show. Eventually Mr. Simmons left the job to devote himself full-time to his sports column.
"A lot of the things he wrote about felt like they were stolen right out of my high school diary," Mr. Kimmel said of the column. "Sports is a part of Bill's life, and it's woven throughout. So his column, a lot of it is sports, and a lot of it is 'Beverly Hills 90210' reruns and 'Varsity Blues.' "
In 2001 editors at ESPN.com invited Mr. Simmons to write three guest columns for the site; one, a heartfelt and brutal deconstruction of the former Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens titled "Is Roger the Anti-Christ?" became one of the most e-mailed articles on the site that year.
John A. Walsh, the executive editor of ESPN, said he believed Mr. Simmons came to his casual and intimate writing style precisely because he never had training at a newspaper.
"He would not have had his voice in a traditional medium," Mr. Walsh said. "His entry point allowed him to be himself."
Mr. Simmons's work on ESPN.com these days is somewhere between a freewheeling blog and a traditional newspaper column. While the format is still loose, ESPN is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and Mr. Simmons has had to make adjustments to his style to please his corporate bosses. He reins in his impulse to mock television announcers, for example, a staple of his old BostonSportsGuy persona, because many of those announcers are now his colleagues at ESPN.
Mr. Simmons, married with a newborn, is no longer getting drunk with pals and contemplating stealing urns from churches. All of which raises the ante for his writing, which is published in a medium that craves energy and freshness, and can be punishing when expectations are not met.
His strategy for survival and relevance, besides worrying, he said, is simply work. He inhales television and print media: sports, sitcoms, movies, magazines, video games and anything else he can get his hands on.
TiVo is his friend.
"It's the best thing that ever happened to sports fans," he said.
He works from a lair he created behind his home, a small guest house with a bachelor pad feel. There is a chair and sofa, a mini-fridge, a treadmill, a desk, and of course a 40-inch high-definition TV.
On a typical Sunday, Mr. Simmons said, he watches about 12 hours of football. With the remote in one hand, he can power through a recorded game in an hour and a half. All the while Mr. Simmons, an only child who said he grew up having to entertain himself, engages in a prolonged dialogue with his TV.
"He is truly bad at his job," Mr. Simmons blurted out after the Steelers quarterback, Tommy Maddux, threw an ugly incompletion. "When they say 'pocket passer,' that's a nice way of saying, 'He's white and he can't run,' " Mr. Simmons said to the TV a few minutes later.
After a Steelers touchdown, Mr. Simmons paused the game. "Listen to Mike Patrick," he said of the ESPN announcer. "He'll say, 'What a catch!' " Mr. Simmons hit play, and seconds later Mr. Patrick, in exactly the same key and cadence, barked, "What a catch!"
Mr. Simmons watches games with his laptop at the ready and pauses the game to type notes for his column. And while he blows through most commercials, sometimes one will catch his eye. Watching the sped-up image of some musicians on a stage, Mr. Simmons quickly hit stop, rewind, and play: a commercial appeared for a DVD of the recent Live Aid benefit concert.
"It's a good idea to sell the DVD of the concert nobody watched when it was free," he said, before hitting fast forward again. Mr. Simmons hit play at exactly the moment the game resumed. A satisfied look crossed his face. "I'm a TiVo savant," he said.
Mr. Simmons's book chronicles his lifelong frustration as a Red Sox fan and their improbable World Series victory in 2004. While the Red Sox run that year was good for Mr. Simmons's profile, the victory, along with the New England Patriots streak of three Super Bowl victories, robbed Mr. Simmons of a source of angst that had long fueled his writing.
He had hoped his move to Los Angeles, with its long-struggling NBA franchise, the Clippers, might provide a fresh source of tension. Mr. Simmons bought season tickets, and almost magically, the Clippers started playing well. Mr. Simmons said he thinks he might be good luck. That gave him another idea.
"Maybe I'll be the sports equivalent of Michael Landon in 'Highway to Heaven,' " Mr. Simmons said. "I'll go to different cities and turn their teams around in a tidy one-hour episode."
And we have a teaser trailer for M. Night's Lady In The Water. I think we got this trailer before GOF and I completely forgot about it in all the whoo! of seeing the film. [Bad username or site: trailer_spot / @ livejournal.com] has links to HD versions of the trailer as well. Despite myself, I'm really excited about this film, and M. Night's carried over Bryce Dallas Howard (Ivy in The Village) to play the woman in the water. I cannot wait until we get the first production shots of her.
My early afternoon class was cancelled, because Professor Selassie RULES. However, Judge Baker sucks, and I still have class at 3:30. But after, I'm going to see GOF again with a couple friends, so if I have to stick around an extra day, at least there's fun to be had. One of the people I'm going to see it again with is a friend I saw the midnight show with, and I find his enthusiasm for this movie completely darling. He was all "Man, it made me want to read the book!" **laughs** Which was so me after Prisoner of Azkaban, so I totally relate. Yay for movie adaptations that really hook you ^_~ Maybe this time we'll get the Superman teaser that's supposed to be showing before GOF?