In Defense of Bill Simmons (a Man so Successful that he Doesn’t Need Defending)
I was not on the show for the intriguing interview with podcaster/writer Dan Levy- who was a good guest with interesting things to say. No, he isn’t a basketball expert or even a huge fan (a fact that seems to have rankled a few of our regular listeners), but Levy is a savvy follower of the sports landscape and we felt that his perspective on where our little sport stands right now would be relevant. It was.
Levy took a pre-existing beef with aspects Bill Simmons’ work and reputation onto our show and pre-existing beefs are one of the many reasons that a guy like Dan Levy is an interesting interview in any context. You want guests with fire in their belly.
I wasn’t there to offer my own opinions or to ask follow-up questions; I instead sat and listened to a finished product [that still has my name on it] and had to remain silent. It is tough to remain on the sidelines when a topic gets discussed on your own show that you have a strong opinion about. . . tougher still when you have a dissenting opinion from what eventually went on record.
Bill Simmons is very relevant to NBA fans right now because of his book and book tour. I believe that such relevance warrants a blog entry to get my opinion of him on record . . . because you all care so much what Ken thinks, right?
Just for giggles, and because lists are fun, here are nine (Roy Hobbs’ number) thoughts related to this topic that I would have offered if I was sitting in on that interview instead of changing poopie-diapers. Ascribe your own context to them and enjoy the rest of your day.
- There is a difference between disagreeing with someone’s opinion and using assumptions about motives to discredit that opinion. That’s a slippery slope.
- Every time the Sports Guy writes a column I am excited to read it. That has to be worth something. I am not a lemming or a zombie. I am, in fact, a college educated and well employed 30 year old father who reads about a book a week (on varying subjects), who once worked in NYC publishing and left because it was interfering with his enjoyment of books, who can tell good writing from bad writing independent of style choices. Popularity does not concern me as much as quality.
- Let’s not underestimate how hard it is to really engage people, and have them experience actual fun, with an internet column. If it was easy to do than more people would do it. How many national sports writers in history have been that much fun to read for a solid decade? Being entertaining is a big deal because there is no gimmick to fake being entertaining.
- Can I name several national NBA writers who flat out know more than Simmons about the NBA in general AND demonstrate that knowledge in a digestible way? In terms of columnists who don’t travel with teams, I would say no. There are a few. We’ve had a couple of them on our show, so I won’t repeat their names and pretend to be objective about them. Surf the blogs and newspaper/magizine sites for a week and you’ll be able to figure that one out pretty easily. One notable name we’ve mentioned in the past in this space is Kelly Dwyer, who hasn’t been on the show; he’s lapped Simmons in NBA street-cred with his Behind the Boxscore column, but that’s hardly an indictment because Dwyer has lapped everybody.
- It is Great with a capital G that someone so popular loves the NBA so much.
- I agree with the Sports Guy, without qualification, that the NBA is rising in a big way and I don’t think that he made that claim up to sell books. He doesn’t need to make anything up to sell books. Trends are trends. More importantly, “coolness” is important because it is often a couple years ahead of the wider trend-and the NBA is the coolest sport right now, by a mile. Advertisers follow youthful coolness, almost to a fault. Further, baseball and even football are getting less cool by the second. MLB censors videos on YouTube and is about to have a SERIOUS PROBLEM with the gap between rich and poor teams that will be amplified by what I am predicting will be another 5 years of dominance for the Yankees; the NFL has nowhere to go but down, especially considering ludicrous PSL’s and the growing awareness about the physical damage the sport inflicts on the players as they age.
- My own beef with the Sports Guy is that he doesn’t write more about the NBA on the website. I hope that some day a million people will enjoy my work so much that they get upset when I don’t write as often as they would like.
- I haven’t read the book yet. I want to enjoy it very badly because the world needs a good 700 page book about the NBA. I’m still waiting for the review copies we requested later than we should have to review it for your people, so we’ll see.
- I wrote this column last summer, for what it is worth.
Tags: Bill Simmons, Dan Levy, kelly dwyer
November 11th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Interesting response piece to your own podcast, though not totally unexpected. I’ve been listening to this podcast for over a year (since FreeDarko got involved) and the Simmons portion of episode #71 was by far the most negative thing I’ve heard here. One of the reasons that this podcast is enjoyable is that you two (when Ken is there) seem to be genuinely happy people, actual friends, who happen to like basketball and are very funny. Bethleham Shoals, especially in his writing, is also a person with optimism about the world and sports culture. The sour grapes so common in other sports media outlets were very conspicuous on your show.
I’ve never been a big fan of the the Sports Guy or ESPN.com, but it’s a worthy statement to stick up for them if you feel that is the right thing to do.
November 11th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Dan Levy can blow. He clearly doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. I’ve never been pissed off by one of your podcasts, ever. This pissed me off. I don’t blame you guys, I just think Levy is full of shit.
FreeDarko was mentioned in The Book of Basketball, by the way. Not sure if you were aware of that.
November 11th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
I am a loyal listener/reader. For those who are new to this podcast/website, I’ve compiled from memory an incomplete list of moral stands taken by ken and dan:
College Basketball sucks.
College basketball should pay its players.
Ball movement is good.
The white media does a poor job covering black athletes.
The Memphis Grizzlies would make a good sitcom.
Bill Simmons is NOT evil.
I am still in high school and as such still need positive male role models. That’s why I’m not going to college to specifically avoid any relation to college basketball. Thank you ken and dan for the guidance.
November 11th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
ken is the rosa parks of podcast hosts who missed an episode and then wanted to get their two-cents in anyway. fight the power, home boy.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
I just finished listening to #71 a couple minutes ago so this is perhaps not deeply thought out, but I thought Levy’s criticisms of Simmons’s anti-baseball stance were asinine and I’m a little pissed that Dan barely pushed back at all.
One was that Simmons is a shameless huckster unconcerned with his credibility, and specifically that if his baseball book was coming out now he wouldn’t be talking about baseball’s sagging (literally) fan base. I didn’t know about Simmons when that book came out, and I haven’t read it because I have zero interest in baseball, but it seems that what we have here is an empirical statement from Simmons, (after all, there are people measuring the demographics of Baseball’s TV audience) and an ad hominem response from Levy (Simmons would lie about that). That said, Simmons has been making this point long before his book came out, and from my admittedly limited knowledge of his first book, it’s not about the wonderfulness and intricacies of Baseball as much as the experience of being a Red Sox fan vis-à-vis “the curse” and its annihilation. The very title “Now I Can Die in Peace” implies that now that the curse has been lifted there’s a little less juice to be had in Red Sox fandom.
Another bit of apparent defensiveness on the part of Levy is that Simmons is wrong because baseball is currently popular. This misses Simmons’s point completely, which is not that baseball isn’t popular now, but that it’s popular with old people and as they die off they won’t be replaced. To add to this, older people tend to have more money and can better afford to go to games, so I would think that TV ratings are a better indicator of popularity.
Also, on the point about specific baseball teams being more popular in specific cities, it seems to me that baseball fans care about their teams whereas the average NBA fan cares not only about their team, but also what’s going on in the league. This doesn’t necessarily make the NBA more popular in the aggregate, but it just seems to me that there’s more enthusiasm about basketball as a sport as opposed to the tribalism of rooting for the home team in baseball. I’ve never heard anybody get excited because Pujols was playing on TBS that night, but with the NBA, casual fans want to see LeBron, Kobe etc. and more established fans want to see how Durant is progressing or how Shaq is fitting in. Maybe I’m just in the fishtank, but this fishtank is New York and I don’t need to explain the disparity in the fortunes of the Yankees and Knicks right now. Despite this, Yankee enthusiasm hasn’t spilled over into interest in the league in general, which, may have to do with the salary cap wrecking competitiveness, but I suspect is more due to the lugubrious pace of the sport itself. It’s like watching an old movie where all of the cuts from one shot to the next feel a beat slow.
Another point that Levy made was that Simmons shouldn’t make NFL picks if he wants to be taken seriously about basketball. I think this is utterly stupid, because I’ve never known Simmons to claim to be a “basketball columnist” to the exclusion of anything else and I don’t see how it really subtracts from his ability to write on basketball anyway given that he’s got no “day job,” can watch sports ad nauseum and Football’s generally just one day a week. Plus, he makes no claim to be an authority on football, just a fan–note that he won’t argue with Mike Lombardi or Aaron Schatz the way he does with Ric Bucher and Mark Stein–and doesn’t really write about football aside from the picks, which seemingly have more to do with his proclivity for gambling than NFL expertise. Personally, I can’t stand all of the time that he devotes to reality TV shows, but I just skip that stuff and if anything it makes me more excited about his basketball columns & podcasts.
On Simmons more generally, I’ve read/heard/watched quite a number of responses and I’m constantly surprised by how nobody mentions that the book is, in my humble opinion, really funny. Everyone slams him for his unseriousness, but I think that this is what makes Simmons good. I wouldn’t call him a great writer, but I think mainstream sports coverage is crushingly anodyne and I think it’s great that he can write a bestseller that reads like a friend of mine and I are talking hoops. I burst out laughing every time I crack The Book of Basketball open, (especially when it seems inappropriate, like riding the subway at rush hour and everybody else is stressed out and looks at you like you’re deranged and you try to hold it in and that just makes it funnier; I love that. On the subject of deranged people on the subway I was reading TBoB merrily on a packed A train yesterday and two women spilled out onto the platform at 42nd street and started clawing at each other. I don’t know what to make of that except to say that I think that it would be nice if there were clear guidelines about what to do when you see people fighting in public. I felt like I should break it up but there were thirty people closer to them than I was, but nobody seemed to be doing anything… all very confusing. The train pulled away before I could tell what the outcome was, seemingly without running anyone over that might have been tossed into the tracks.
Anyhow, this has gone on obscenely long (Holy Shit!!) and I’m afraid I might break your website when I hit “submit” but I had to get it out regardless of whether anyone has the patience or interest to read it. I would just add that you may be surprised to know that it was the Disciples of Clyde that introduced me to Simmons last year. I had just read Michael Lewis’s Battier/Stats piece in the Times Magazine then you guys, (whom I’d just found through iTunes) mentioned it alongside Hollinger’s appearance on the B.S. Report, so I looked into it and that’s how I found Bill Simmons.
Thanks guys, (I’d add a “Go Knicks” but it just feels pathetic)
Greg
November 14th, 2009 at 7:12 am
[...] In Defense of Bill Simmons (a Man so Successful that he Doesn’t… …interview with podcaster/Bwriter/B Dan … Every time the BSports/B Guy writes a … In terms of Bcolumnists/B who don’t … the BNFL/B has nowhere to [...]
November 14th, 2009 at 11:45 am
Bill Simmons is the best periodical sportswriter of his generation, the defining one. This is pretty obvious; those who won’t give him props are just indulging in sour grapes.
November 19th, 2009 at 10:23 am
“We’ve had a couple of them on our show, so I won’t repeat their names and pretend to be objective about them.”
I’ve just now started listening to a few of your podcasts, simply because I’ve been following Kelly Dwyer since he was back with NBAtalk.com — would you mind repeating the names of those other columnists you think are on his level here in the comment section?
December 4th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Thank you for your help!