Good day, how do, and I send a smile to you. Don’t want to waste, waste your breath. Don’t want to waste my hate on you.
Metallica, Wasting My Hate
I usually try not to react so knee-jerk to columnists, particularly national writers who have lost zip on their fastball, no longer able to capture any loser’s angst of years past, which propelled him or her to a nationwide loyal following.
Granted, Bill Simmons is a homer. But he’s also intelligent, reasonable, and actually is still one of the few columnists I relish reading each week. Sure, he loves the Patriots, and sure, I love the rival Colts, but I still always liked Bill Simmons.
Until now. He’s morphed totally from sympathetic fan misery into insufferable, bombastic lunacy. He’s now the guy in a Yankee hat rooting for the Lakers. He’s the condescending clapper at a Nebraska home game. He’s the jagoff who worships Las Vegas (more later), talks shit on his wife, lines up for strip clubs, religiously watches MTV, offers a cocky wedding toast recounting the bride’s walks of shame, and the asshat who orders Jager bombs for the entire bar. He’s the guy you see at your high school reunion, but he can’t discuss anything beyond fantasy football or the latest Maxim. He’s the guy who whines for the ball in pickup, but calls offensive fouls when you drive around him. He’s the dad wearing a fucking Wes Welker jersey (No, really, he says this in the column). In short, he’s a total Masshole – we just never knew it fully till his teams started winning. For more on Massholes, check here.
And granted, as a self-professed rational Colts fan, I should know better – enough to let Bill’s rant wash over my back. Enough to treat Massholes with the same casual response as Michael Silver:
You Pats fans slay me. Really. You’re watching an incredible team compete for what likely will be its fourth Super Bowl championship in seven years, and all you want to do is lash out at people who don’t portray that greatness in precisely the way you deem acceptable. Take a deep breath. Smile. Your team is 9-0. .
I shouldn’t legitimize any of this complaining. The Patriots won. Everyone is talking about them. What the hell do these Massholes want? And normally I totally let it go.
But that was before Simmons took it upon himself to pander to every New England douchebag IM’ing him throughout Sunday’s game dying for a column mention to show off at Saturday’s date-rape, er, frat party. For him, the Patriots’ monster win wasn’t satisfying – it was insulting.
For us? It’s now pathetic.
You see, I don’t care if a columnist wants to be a prick. I don’t care if he wants to gloat. I don’t care if he wants to gnash his teeth a little after a monster win. Flush your readership down the toilet, Bill, totally whiff on your audience. I don’t care.
But I can’t fathom crafting a column so irrational, so mean-spirited, so horrendous in nature that it embarrasses your traditional (Read: Non-Masshole) readers. I mean, come on, Simmons - you’re 38. You have two kids. One just arrived last Friday. There is no way a millionaire blogging for a living should get so worked up about sports – especially after every single team of his owns a title! Again, click on the link. Posted below is my immediate response to Mr. Bill, already emailed to him:
As a longtime Colts fan, I just read your tirade against the officiating (among other things) in the Patriots and Colts game, and I’m not apoplectic or miffed.
After all, your team won, fair and square, no questions asked. The Colts could have won, certainly, but they did not.
I’m not even upset at your tirade against the entire NFL and sports landscape or your embrace of the “Us vs. Them” mantra with fellow Patriot fans.
But what’s enough for you as a fan? When is a win satisfying? When is a team satisfying? What, in the world, do you gain from your fan experience?
Suppose your Patriots do finish 19-0? Is that enough?
What if we all send emails admitting all Patriots fans belong in the Pantheon of “Greatest Sports Fans of All Time?” Is that enough?
What if the entire media sublimates every bit of its NFL commentary with an ode to Belichick and/or Brady? Is that enough?
Three titles in four years and an organization primed to reload each season after that? Is that enough?
A comeback win over a major rival, a delicious mirror image over last January’s title game loss? Is that enough?
I understand your columns are designed to spike readership on Page 2, and may be somewhat inflammatory. They may include complaining or gloating, that’s fine, I get it.
But they don’t usually include this one’s whiny hostility. After your “game analysis,” the column takes a shocking turn. You gleefully condone spite, hubris, and irrationality.
Seriously, someday your son may grow up and read this column. Someday he may be an athlete. Almost certainly, your son will be a fan. And to read an incendiary, teeth-gnashing, sour-grapes mantra fresh off the keyboard of someone who just watched his team win a monumental game, well, it’s petty. It’s disgusting. It’s tragic. These are the lessons in sports fandom he is destined to learn?
Bill, you have my sympathy. Yes, believe it or not, I offer it even as my team lost a big game to its rival. Wrap your head around that.
(For what it’s worth, I didn’t include a response to his cheering on Wes Welker, apparently after Welker told some Indy corner he “fucking sucked.” Well, it wouldn’t have been a corner. It would have been Bob M. F. Sanders. So, come January, uh, good luck, Wes. )
Anyway, that’s my open letter. I like to think my blog has a little perspective, that it’s caustic but all with tongue firmly in cheek. If that’s the way Simmons intended his column, then I certainly missed it. But you read it. It’s hostile, it’s whiny, it’s in short, pathetic.
I don’t have a good ending to this post. Kissing Suzy Kolber weighed in again against Bill today, just after my letter, and I heartily endorse their bounty. This was King Masshole‘s worst column ever, and a spike in click-throughs can’t be worth the depths he plunged himself.
No worthy fan, of any team, demeans himself to this level. Under no circumstance is it okay to cry sour grapes, and excoriate all opposing views after a fucking win. Pathetic. He’s a dad. He’s a success. He’s not the prick at the corner O’Malley’s spitting peanut shells, quaffing Sam Adams, and bitching about the Bruins or the Fisk homer or the Whal-as leaving Hartford.
Before today, I assumed Simmons was better than that.
(Wasn’t he?)
