ignatiusjreilly
Footballguy
I've been a Simmons fan for probably going on 20 years. Not sure exactly when I discovered him, but I know I was already a regular reader by the time the Sox blew the '03 ALCS and he ran a particularly hilarious/devastating mailbag.
Anyway, I wouldn't describe myself as a fanboy or anything, but I enjoy his stuff and I also admire his accomplishments with both Grantland and The Ringer. (It's pretty cool to create that many jobs in a struggling industry, and by all accounts he's a great manager, which is something I respect a lot in people). Both the flagship podcast and The Rewatchables are in my regular rotation (although I skip the latter if I haven't seen the movie).
At the same time, I definitely recognize his faults: the Boston homerism, flooding the zone with NBA talk, the pop-culture stuff that can sometimes feel too forced. I also suspect if I ever actually hung out with him I probably wouldn't like him as much as I do now. But whenever I see someone on the Internet trying to take him down, I'm reminded of a great piece that Will Leitch once wrote about Roger Ebert.
It came out after Chris Jones' legendary Esquire profile of Ebert cemented his status as a secular saint. Leitch wrote about how, as the editor of the Illinois student paper, he had reached out to Ebert, a UI alum, and Ebert had been nothing but gracious in mentoring him through his early career. And then came the betrayal:
Anyway, I wouldn't describe myself as a fanboy or anything, but I enjoy his stuff and I also admire his accomplishments with both Grantland and The Ringer. (It's pretty cool to create that many jobs in a struggling industry, and by all accounts he's a great manager, which is something I respect a lot in people). Both the flagship podcast and The Rewatchables are in my regular rotation (although I skip the latter if I haven't seen the movie).
At the same time, I definitely recognize his faults: the Boston homerism, flooding the zone with NBA talk, the pop-culture stuff that can sometimes feel too forced. I also suspect if I ever actually hung out with him I probably wouldn't like him as much as I do now. But whenever I see someone on the Internet trying to take him down, I'm reminded of a great piece that Will Leitch once wrote about Roger Ebert.
It came out after Chris Jones' legendary Esquire profile of Ebert cemented his status as a secular saint. Leitch wrote about how, as the editor of the Illinois student paper, he had reached out to Ebert, a UI alum, and Ebert had been nothing but gracious in mentoring him through his early career. And then came the betrayal:
Whenever someone becomes a big name, it just seems like people make it their business to try to take them down, like Kenard shooting Omar in "The Wire". Simmons, Peter King, Malcolm Gladwell. Sure, they all have their flaws. But invariably, those takedowns end up telling me more about the people writing them than they do about their subjects.Meanwhile, the Web was beginning to emerge, and we young turks, swept in during the dot-com boom, all thought we were punk rock gods, ready to kill our idols. Ebert began to feel like the old guard: In the wake of Siskel's death, he had become a ubiquitous presence on television, at the expense of his writing, I felt. In 2000, when I'd moved to New York and, like everybody else, was being paid far too much just to be told I was part of the next "MTV Generation" of Internet stars, I thought I knew everything. You had to burn down the past. These were the days of We Live in Public, of Pets.com, of bringing your dog in the office, of Webvan, of espnet.sportszone.com. We all thought we were hot ####.
And I was ready to make my own name. My editor at Ironminds, the old Web magazine I moved out to New York for, had heard me drunkenly #####ing about Ebert at a bar the night before and suggested I write about him. "Put him in his place," he said. "Yeah: It's our time now," I said. We were all so, so stupid.
So I did. The next morning, Ironminds ran a piece called "I Am Sick Of Roger Ebert's Fat F—-ing Face." The piece — which, mercifully, is no longer online — wasn't as virulent as that headline would imply, but I did use that exact line in the piece, and I did make a few cheap shots about his weight. The thesis of the piece was that Ebert's work was suffering because he was on television all the time, but that's not really what it was about: It was me lashing out at Daddy, trying to make my own name, trying to feed off his. That's not what I thought I was doing at the time. But that's absolutely what it was.