Bill Simmons is one of the best sportswriters I’ve read. His prose pops with ideas, digressions and extrapolations. He churns out words at a high volume (especially in his book on the NBA, but also in his columns for Grantland, which can run to 10,000 words), but still manages to be graceful.
I’m a relative newbie in reading The Sports Guy. I’ve enjoyed reading pieces, by Simmons and the Grantland website’s “usual gang of idiots” (that’s a MAD Magazine reference, for you young’uns), that treat sports as something worth thinking about. (And mocking. And questioning. And loving, all the same.) From the start of this online discussion of sport and pop culture, indeed for his whole career, Simmons has been willing – eager – to rip off the mask of “objectivity” that supposedly marks the true “sports journalist”, and write as an unabashed fan. It’s no shock when a Grantland writer drop a fairly high-cult literary reference into a piece on doomed basketball franchises or tragic-comic ballplayers, but Simmons’s niche is emotion, plumbing the beer-sodden basements of “the agony of defeat”, and the dizzy champagne heights of joy and optimism, when the Good Guys win and whichever Evil Empire threatens them has been justly humiliated.
Simmons thrives on an unapologetic rooting for the laundry of all things New England and an amusing hatred for everything New York teams do and stand for. (See also: Lakers, Los Angeles.)