Welcome to the Neighborhood

Taking a break from all our worries about what to get Rob for his birthday today (Teej has some Skymall selections for us), I thought I'd add to the anticipation . . .

In less than an hour, Bill Simmons (née Boston Sports Guy, suivi de Sports Guy) unveils his heavily – but perhaps appropriately – hyped new endeavor Grantland. It’s a website independent of, or at least adjacent to ESPN, but one ostensibly still steeped in sportswriting, as evidenced by the moniker; Grantland refers to Grantland Rice, the hallowed sportswriter of three generations ago. The press release indicates a broader scope, however, a “sports and pop culture web site” “with a mix of original columns, long-form features, blog posts, and podcasts.” Huh . . . sounds like a little website I know.

Okay, so it sounds like what 10,000 homegrown blogs and sites aspire to be, a forum for high-minded thought veiled in tongue-in-cheek humor that transcends sportswriting into limitless topics of interest. Somehow, though, the internet has become littered with pseudo-literati waxing indignant at the trifles within their reality (or in a reality show), tilting at windbags, and splashing together liberal arts alliteration and juvenile toilet humor like they were vinegar and water in mad railings against pop culture giants that reek of day-old hypocrisy doughnuts. Case in frickin’ point.

In truth, the only time you’ll find something truly original amid the html-ting pot these days is when some lunatic transcribes the insane, idle ideas that ricochet through his grey matter like Benoit balls in your mother’s attic, and we get Tourette’s-style renditions of chronicles of taco eating, updates on quests for salamanders, Cliffs Notes on acid, hilarious inside jokes from a NJ English department, cute tales of two precocious little boys, and recorded songs fixated on the anal sex scene from Deliverance. “Unique” is misapplied nearly often enough these days to warrant some blowhard dedicating a blog post to expressions like it, but there are still one-of-a-kind places out there in the ‘sphere. Grantland, however, is probably not one.

What it may possibly be, however, is the apex of its ilk. Some of you know by now that my obnoxious bloggings have tended to take the piss out of Bill Simmons and his online works (unbeknownst to him, of course); most of you can figure out that’s predominantly because I am thoroughly jealous of him and the job he has earned the right to do every day. I will probably continue to put too fine a point on it, calling him SportGuy for his limited breadth of interest and understanding in certain pockets of the sporting universe. I will probably continue to hear Wyatt from Weird Science every time he speaks. And I will probably continue to casually dismiss most of his new projects, even as I tout the 30 for 30 series as one of the most enthralling recurring segments on TV, the Know Your Minor League Mascot of cable television, if you will.

Not this time, Biff. Not this time. ESPN’s fondness for doling out enormous amounts of melodramatic pre-event build-up on a regular basis usually evokes my ambivalence; truly, they sound like the radio spots for my local furniture outlet before the Memorial Day sale, and they garner the same amount of enthusiasm from me. This time, however, it’s been a little bit different.

For one, there’s the name. No, it’s not an amalgam of where the Keaton kids went to college. When I first read about Grantland, I thought, “Grantland Rice?” Really, it’s true. As much as I’d like to claim a vast knowledge of the late Mr. Rice’s journalistic or literary accomplishments, I don’t think I’ve ever read a piece of his in its entirety. I don’t know very much about him. I only know one quote:

"For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks - not that you won or lost -
But how you played the Game."

I know this because I spent every summer from 1980-1989 deep in the Shenandoah Valley at a place called Camp Virginia. It’s an awesome boys’ camp steeped in tradition, and it’s where I learned everything from how to throw a curveball to how to get shot down by girls at the dance. In my time there I ate rattlesnake, I won the Malcolm U. Pitt Baseball Award (my proud mention of this flies directly in the face of the quote), and I learned that navigating the winding roads through the Goshen Pass after visiting a handful of Lexington bars is a terrible, terrible idea. More than just about anything else, I learned that Grantland Rice passage. It was (still is) painted on an old piece of wood hanging on the wall in the mess hall; our three squares were always accompanied by its message. A quick visit to the Camp VA website today reminded me that it’s still a big part of the lessons of gratitude, humility, and sportsmanship that permeate the summer. This graphic is from the main page (see the top right corner).


Grantland.com has chosen not only to borrow its name from the man who gave us the quote, but – at least thus far, in “Coming Soon” status – to embed the quote in its main page logo. It will be interesting to see whether, and how, its message remains imbued in the offerings from Grantland. In a venture like this, there’s not a lot of winning and losing inherently incorporated. Seems like a different tagline might have been more appropriate . . . maybe . . . maybe, with the sports media world so aggressively self-important and non-ironic these days, something about taking ourselves less seriously would fit the bill?

The masthead impresses, with names like Klosterman and Gladwell, among many others, and with priors like the WSJ, NYT, GQ, and J’sW all over the staff’s collective curriculum vitae. How they play the game will dictate whether this is an instance of “we didn’t invent it, we just perfected it” or simply yet another road stop on the information superhighway where we can find insights and insults on SEC football, Mayer Hawthorne, news of the weird, Monty Python, feats of eating, LeBron James, vajazzling, Live Aid, political gaffes, baseball card collections, cereal mascots, crystal meth, Andre Agassi, Mike Love, state fairs, the Fighting Wrens, Alfonso Ribeiro shirtless, Gheorghe Muresan, and rapping muppets. Here’s looking forward to their regularly scheduled dipshittery.

Best of luck, Grantland, and don’t steal our stuff.