Tag Archives: sports guy

I’ve got your back, Bill

I see it all the time on the Internet lately, people talking about you, about the Sports Guy, and it’s always some variation of the same argument: “Bill Simmons bit off a little more than he can chew,” like you’ve somehow overextended yourself, like you can’t handle the mounting responsibilities of a twenty-first century multimedia renaissance man. I personally don’t get where this is coming from, but you can’t deny that it’s out there, a rising tide of anti-Bill Simmons propaganda, almost like someone has it out for you.

I just wanted to say that, Bill, I’ve still got your back. I don’t think you bit off more than you can chew. If anything, you should open your mouth even bigger, find some way to unhinge your jaw, like a snake, and see if you can forgo the biting and instead start swallowing whole everything you set your mind to.

Is this because of Magic Johnson? I don’t really know the specifics, and I hate to kind of just throw in my opinion to what so far has been a dated story from October of last year really that hasn’t been anything more than a flame war on the comments sections of Deadspin. But I’m kind of getting the feeling like this is all Magic’s fault. Just think about it, Magic turned his back on ESPN. If he wants to point the finger and blame it on you, go ahead and let him, he’s the one that walked away.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in life, it’s that if you walk away, it doesn’t matter if you’re right or you’re wrong, you just gave up, that’s a forfeit, you lose. It’s like, look at the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. Were they necessarily in the right? Who knows? The Mensheviks left the table, and history didn’t look back. They got like a footnote in one of my history classes in college, and the rest was all Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, whatever, you get the point right? You walk away, you’re automatically the loser.

Also, and this is probably kind of a low blow here, but does anybody else remember The Magic Hour? Talk about biting off more than you can chew, Magic Johnson is the original overextender. A Magic Johnson cooking show probably would have been more successful than his failed attempt at a late-night talk show. Sure, this was way before the era when professional athletes could turn to reality TV as a viable second career, but just look at the history, if Magic hadn’t left ESPN by his own volition, it probably wouldn’t have been too much longer until his poor commentating landed him similarly off the air.

But yeah, Bill, I get it, this isn’t about Magic Johnson, it’s about you. And I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’ve got to say, where some people think you’re doing too much, I personally don’t think that you’re doing enough. Why limit yourself to columnist, podcast host, editor-in-chief, and on-air personality? There are so many more areas of popular culture that could use a side of Simmons.

Like music. Bill, you ever think about starting a band? I’d buy your album. I’d listen to it all the time. Do you sing? I’m sure you’ve got a great singing voice. I can just imagine what karaoke nights at the Grantland office must be like. Everybody hanging around waiting for Chuck Klosterman to finish butchering “Bohemian Rhapsody.” And then you take the mic, and it’s always like a total wildcard, like you pick “Heartbreaker,” by Pat Benetar, and you totally nail it.

Or a cooking show. I know I was just making fun of Magic Johson earlier, saying that even a cooking show would have been more popular than The Magic Hour, but I feel like you’d be able to make it work. It wouldn’t have to be a weekly thing, but right before big sporting events, like the Super Bowl, you could teach fans how to make great game-day snacks, like potato skins that look like little footballs, or white frosted cookies with red piping that resemble baseballs, you know, cool stuff like that.

Anyway, I’ve got your back Bill. Whatever you want to do in the future, I’m totally on board. Hopefully you’ll eventually let me write for Grantland, and my support will amount to more than me just shouting out kudos to you from my blog, but whatever, no rush. Just seriously, think about it, give me a call, I’ll be a total yes-man, like whatever you say sir, I’m behind you, one hundred percent. When everyone else on the Internet turns on you at the same time, you won’t have to defend yourself at all, because I’ll be doing all of your defending for you, getting in people’s faces, issuing nasty threats, all so you can maintain that professional distance, work on swallowing all of that work you’ve bitten off.

I believe in you Bill,

Rob G.

My letter of resignation

Dear Bill Simmons:

Over the past thirteen weeks, I’ve written to you right here on my blog every Friday. Like Reed Richards desperately waving the Ultimate Nullifier in the face of Galactus in an effort to save the planet Earth, I had hoped that by repeating your name and my stated goal over and over again, this lowly Internet gnat might somehow grab the attention of the sports and pop culture Devourer of Worlds.

That’s supposed to be you, the Devourer of Worlds. It’s a Galactus reference, a classic Fantastic Four storyline from the sixties. Did you ever read comics? Just do yourself a favor and don’t watch that movie, The Rise of the Silver Surfer, because I don’t want you to get any weird ideas of what does and doesn’t work when telling a Fantastic Four story.

I’m getting off track. Bill, consider this my letter of resignation. Obviously, I had hoped to be handing you this letter, in person, some thirty years in the future. In my dreams, you’d have hired me two months ago, and it would have been the start of my illustrious career at Grantland. My rise to stardom was supposed to be so rapid that, after a short while, it would have felt like there wasn’t enough room on the web site for the both of us.

So you’d tell me to go on sabbatical for a while, not having the decency to terminate my contract and let me write elsewhere, but totally unwilling to publish any of my work. So I’d start coming up with all of these pseudonyms, submitting killer material behind your back, right to your own web site. Pretty soon you’d have a whole new team of writers, all of them me, but of course you’d be completely unaware.

And then one day we’d all go on strike. You’d reach out to all of the writers you’d have alienated in your naïve Grantland rebuild, but you know how it goes, hurt feelings, bruised egos. Nobody’s going to give you the time of day. So you’ll have to engage your striking writers, meet their one demand: bring back Rob.

You’d relent, the web site would thrive again, and after a few awkward months of us butting heads, unable to see eye to eye, arguing about even the most trivial of office nonsense, (like, for example, you’d insist on a robust dark coffee in the break room, where I’d keep making a case for a subtler, blonde roast,) we’d eventually get past our differences in an effort to make Grantland thrive.

It would be a golden age of writing about wrestling and action movies and sports, year after year of record high page views and increased advertising revenue. We’d both be rich beyond our wildest dreams. But unfortunately, all good things have to end. You’re quite a bit older than me, and so eventually you’ll be thinking about retiring, while I’ll still be in the prime of my career.

“Rob,” you’ll ask me as you start picking out a senior’s village to move to somewhere in Florida, “I want you take full control of the web site. You’ve done a great job, and hiring you turned out to be the best decision I’ve made. I’ve watched you grow as a writer, as a business man, and I’m proud to call you a partner and a friend.”

And that’s when I’d hand you my resignation letter. It would be uncharacteristically bitter, full of hatred and laced with old resentments. It’ll turn out that I never forgave you for trying to push me to the sidelines back you first hired me. This whole time, I’ve been building up the web site all while cooking the books behind your back, rotting the business from the foundation up. And now I want out, leaving you as an old man to try to clean up the festering mess of a once-great media empire.

Of course you won’t have the energy to do it, so you’ll file for bankruptcy, and you’ll have to hire a whole team of lawyers and accountants. Say goodbye to that retirement in Florida, Bill.

Anyway, that’s how I’d always imagined this going down. But you’re not even giving me the chance. It’s like that What If? comic, the one where Ben Grimm winds up chickening out of the space flight that turns Reed Richard and his friends into the Fantastic Four. I think they let Dr. Doom pilot the rocket instead. Of course this winds up destabilizing the timeline, Doom betrays everyone else, and Ben’s not the Thing, so there’s really nothing that he can do about it except for to sit there in misery, thinking about how things could have been different, if only he hadn’t left his friends behind.

OK, that one was kind of a stretch, but I’ve always had a fantasy where I got to write a resignation letter that both began and finished with relevant Fantastic Four analogies. Or metaphors. I can never remember which one is which, a metaphor or an analogy. Whatever.

It would have been an honor to work with you,

Rob G.

Bill, I’m sorry

Dear Bill Simmons:

I’m sorry I wrote you out of my life last week. I want to take it back. I know how cheesy this all must sound, me, making a big, dramatic farewell speech to you and then undoing it a week later. Because I know, everybody keeps telling me I have to make decisions and stick to them. When I was writing out that goodbye, tears streaming down my face, snot running down my nose, when I was in between sobs I recognized that, regardless of how much it hurts, I have to close this chapter of my life. Once I do this, there’s no going back.

And I tried, Bill. I really tried to put you out of my head. But I kept clicking on the Grantland home page. I’d turn around at work and the TV above the bar would be showing a clip of you talking on ESPN. I couldn’t hear what you were talking about, because all of the TVs are muted, and I don’t get why restaurants bother to have TVs on, if they’re just going to show a bunch of guys silently yapping away, without even the benefit of subtitles to give you the option of reading what the conversation might be about.

Anyway, it was a rough week. It felt similar to when my grandfather died a few years back. That sting of emptiness, the palpable sense of loss. Only, with my grandfather, I started to feel better after a few days, coming to terms with the inevitability of death, getting a small taste of my own mortality. With you it was different. Each day that passed since I told you we were through, the level of pain intensified.

I started waking up in the middle of the night crippled with regret. I kept reading and rereading my last letter to you. Why would I do something so stupid? Who gives up on a one-way correspondence with the Sports Guy after only two months? Bill, I realize that I’ve made a huge mistake, and if you’re willing to look past my very momentary lapse in judgment, I’d like to pick up where we left off: me, writing you a letter each week, begging you for a job, and you, blissfully unaware of my existence, hopefully one day stumbling upon this treasure trove of writing, you’ll be so overcome by my persistence, my faith in a dream, you’ll blurt out at your desk, “Hire this man!”

And your secretary will walk in and ask you, “Mr. Simmons, did you just say something? I was down the hall pouring a cup of coffee when we all heard you say something pretty loudly.” And that’ll kind of jolt you back to reality. You’ll explain that you were talking about me, this web site, the letters. Do it Bill, hire me to write for Grantland.

I really am sorry about last week. I hope that you can forgive me. Again, your feelings of confusion, frustration, and eventual forgiveness might be a little disjointed, depending on when you discover all of this, and in what order you decide to read these letters, if you read any of them at all. I guess it’s a little arrogant of me to assume you’ll have time for all of them. Maybe you’ll skip last week’s mistake and you won’t know what I’m talking about. Or maybe you’ll jump right to this week’s apology, and I’ll only have served to point you in the direction of that mistake. If I could just keep my mouth shut and stop talking about it for a second, perhaps we could both move on, pretend like it never happened.

I wish I could just go back and delete it. Well, I guess I could. But then what if you look at the whole list of letters and notice a gap where last week’s should have been? You’ll either think that I’m a slacker, not committed to my craft, or worse, you’ll assume that I have something to hide, which I kind of do. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should just write some generic sounding letter and put it where last week’s letter was.

OK, I think I might be over-thinking this. Bill, I’m sorry I abandoned you. It’ll never happen again. That’s a promise. I don’t care if I ever get a job at Grantland, I’ll still write to you every week, begging. Please, let me write for Grantland. Come on Bill, give me a job. I’ll write about anything you want. Anything.

I’m really, really, really, really sorry,

Rob G.

Bill, I think I was coming off as a little too strong

Dear Bill Simmons:

I’ve been going about this the wrong way, I realize that now. And I’m sorry, for harassing you like this, constantly with the begging, “Please give me a writing job.” That was really annoying of me. At the time I thought it was gutsy. But now I’m starting to see that it was too much. You can’t just go around asking to write for Grantland. There aren’t any shortcuts to all of the sudden having your work pop up online. You’ve got to start from the bottom and work your way up. Right Bill?

Which is why, Bill, please, give me a job at Grantland, but at the bottom. I want whatever is the worst job available. Actually, no, I want you to consider the worst job at Grantland, and then I want you to make a position even lower, and I’ll work my ass off, OK, I’ll work so hard that I’ll earn that promotion to former worst job at Grantland.

And then I’ll keep climbing, turning heads as I ascend that ladder, one rung at a time. I’ll network and stuff. That’s a thing you’ve got to do, right? You’ve got to network. I’ve got to get in there from the bottom and I’ve got to approach men and women above me and say stuff like, “Hey, I really admire your work. Is there any chance you’d be willing to let me buy you a cup of coffee while I pick your brain about careers and opportunities?”

Actually, even that sounds like I’m coming on a little too strong. I should have just kept it to coffee, none of that opportunity talk. That reeks of networking. You’re supposed to network, I get that, but I also get that you’re never supposed to talk about networking or make it seem like you’re networking. Because otherwise you look like you’re too hungry. I’m hungry, but I want to come across as totally full. But secretly ravenous.

You have a pretty decent janitorial staff at Grantland? Make me the janitor’s assistant. Or even better, make me the janitor’s intern. I’ll do it for free. After we finish mopping the bathroom floors and changing out all of the hand soap in the hand soap dispensers, I’ll be like, “Hey man,” to the janitor, I’ll say, “I’m really learning a lot here. Would you mind if I took you out for a cup of coffee after work?”

And I’ll do the whole networking process from the ground up, it’ll be subtle, I won’t say anything about my aspirations as a full-time member of the writing staff. Do you know if the bathrooms at Grantland use liquid soap? Or is it that foam stuff? I only ask because the foam saves so much more space, like there’s a lot less waste. You know what? Forget I asked. I’ll save it for day one.

While I have late night access to the building, buffing floors, emptying out wastebaskets, I’ll start pitching in around the office, fixing the printer jams, straightening out the bulletin boards on the walls, stuff like that. I figure it won’t be long until the higher-ups get wind of my go-getter attitude. We’ll be riding up on an elevator, all of you professionals in your suits and me in my janitor’s outfit, maybe I’ll have like a bucket and mop.

One of you guys might say, “Hey, aren’t you the janitor that occasionally answers line three if the secretary is overwhelmed? The one that takes really detailed notes and passes them on to exactly where they’ve got to go? Do you have any interest in trying out the administrative side of this business?”

And while, no, I really don’t want to be involved in administration, I want to be a writer, I’ll still take the offer. Because up is up, right? The closer I get to you Bill, the more chances there are of you happening to come upon me right as I’m juggling like eight administrative tasks in a row. You’ll raise your left eyebrow as you marvel at my professional office skills, and then the right eyebrow will lift accordingly as you realize that not only am I handling desk work like a pro, but I’m simultaneously changing light bulbs and separating recyclables that have accidentally been tossed in the trashcan.

“Oh it’s nothing,” I’ll try to act casually as you congratulate my willingness to tackle any problem, “I used to be a part of the custodial team, so I like to help out wherever possible.”

Naturally that’ll appeal to you, as a boss, you’ll see some of you in me, maybe you’ll be the one asking me out for a cup of coffee. And that’s when I’ll make my move, I’ll slip in how I’m an aspiring writer, how it’s always been a dream of mine to write for Grantland. You’ll have to give me a chance. I’ll have already proved to you through my other duties and responsibilities that I’m up for the job.

So yeah, sorry for coming off as too strong. I just want it so bad, to write for Grantland. I’ll do anything. I’ll start from even lower if you want. You could have me standing outside getting coffee and running errands for those guys who hold up signs on the streets advertising discount-parking rates at nearby garages. Come on Bill, I’m super serious. Give me a call.

Venti with milk and five sugars,

Rob G.