Paul offers his thoughts on Bill Simmons’ Grantland, the soon-to-be-launched sports and pop culture website helmed by ESPN’s Bill Simmons, including what he hopes it can be, and what he fears it may be.
Like you, I’d guess, until recently, I confess that I had never heard of Grantland Rice. In the past, before attempting to bedazzle you with my own brilliant insights about Rice and his legacy, I would spend a paragraph or so introducing him and attempting to convey his significance, a perfunctory convention writers have employed for hundreds of years to help readers wade into unfamiliar waters. But this being the Internet era, instead of wasting your time and mine, I can link to Grantland Rice’s Wikipedia page, or you can simply search Google, and you can learn as much or as little about him as you’d like.
That dichotomy between what readers needed in the past and what they need today typifies what I find fascinating and perplexing about the announcement of Grantland, the soon-to-be-launched sports and pop culture website helmed by ESPN’s Bill Simmons.
(C) ESPN 2011
ESPN and Simmons deserve credit for trying something bold. It is typically hard to get established companies to take chances, so it should be noted that the Worldwide Leader is investing the time, money and resources necessary to foster Simmons’ grand experiment. Here, like with its 30 for 30 documentary series, ESPN, for all its flaws, is proving is committed to finding new vehicles to create compelling content. Not all publishers share this committment.
Similarly, I’m excited that Simmons has found an endeavour that has seemingly reignited his creative fire. For the better part of the last decade, I counted myself among those who looked forward to clicking over to ESPN.com in hope that I would find a new Simmons column waiting for me. I and many thousands of other readers embraced him over the years because his writing conveyed a special passion for sports that few others have been willing to so nakedly reveal. As a fellow Boston sports fan, it has always been easy to share his jubilation and his heartbreak, but it’s not a leap to suggest that the majority of his readership isn’t plugged into the Beantown sports matrix, yet still felt a bond with him because his unabashed love for sports and the culture of sport fans has been truly endearing. That’s why it’s been so disappointing that in recent years Simmons’ frequent columns have largely given way in favor of a pair of Brittanica-sized books and his semi-regular podcasts, the latter falling short of the cherished columns he frequently churned out in the last decade. Not to say these more recent departures haven’t been enjoyable, but even Simmons would likely agree that he hasn’t brought forth the same passion for his craft as he did when his focus was strictly columns. Putting the subjective aside, podcasts and books can’t be consumed in the same way as a written column, and escaping into Simmons’ world for 10 or 20 minutes at a stretch (or longer, if he happened to be writing about the NBA) was always time well-spent.
Yet I’m troubled about what we know about the plan for Grantland because the Internet has already laid waste to Web initiatives seeking to combine elements of pop culture and sports, such as AOL Fanhouse and TMZ Sports. The fundamental conflict, in this author’s opinion, is that while there is a sizable audience of people who do enjoy reading about both pop culture and sports, there are fewer who are interested in the intersection of the two. “You will never know what to expect when you come to the site – in a good way,” Simmons said recently about his brainchild. “That’s our ultimate goal.” Yet on some level, readers visit specific sites regularly for the fundamental reason that on some level they know what genre or kind of content they’re going to get. Taking that premise away, a website faces a more difficult challenge to grow and sustain a loyal audience.
Not to say there isn’t a large following who flock to whatever Simmons cooks up, and rightly so; he’s proven he can deliver the goods. But there’s a sort of pretentious, too-cool-for-school vibe that the Grantland moniker subtly conveys, almost as if to say that what we enjoy today from sports and pop culture media is inferior to the creativity and purity of purpose of what’s to come. There are a handful of truly special contemporary writers who have unique talents for engaging readers like Simmons, Chuck Klosterman, Katie Baker, and others. They embody Rice’s legacy of applying enthralling, Hemmingway-esque prose to the world of sports, and if this site is dedicated to simply allowing special people to thrive on their own terms, then it will undoubtedly succeed.
But as the New York Times, Newsweek and other dead-tree publications are learning the hard way, the public no longer needs to be spoon-fed a daily agenda of what stories matter, what topics matter, and which writers matter. Today’s media-savvy consumers are able to discern all that for themselves. It is when ESPN attempts to serve in loco parentis – seeking to explain why Lebron James is the best ever, why the Patriots had a terrible draft and why Brett Favre will retire for the eighth time – that it becomes unbearable. So for its own sake, Grantland can’t be a vehicle to show us what we already see, tell us what we already know, or hype what we’ve already accepted or rejected. Its writers should strive to see the world of sports with us, not for us.
Finally, as for Simmons, he’s always been at his best when he was more like Rice and less like Dick Schaap: the wide-eyed outsider marveling at the sports world through a distant fan’s eyes versus the insider inebriated with southern California weather, Hollywood celebrities and Baron Davis’s mansion. If Grantland does nothing else other than to inspire Simmons to rediscover his passion for column writing, sports and the glory of fandom, that would be just fine. If it becomes a place where we all can do the same, then Simmons will indeed leave a lasting legacy of which Rice would surely be proud.
Paul Gammons, a columnist for PaulGammons.com, confesses to still occasionally watching The Sports Reporters.
