Culture, Sports, Writing…or whatever
No one knows they’re a self-fulfilling prophecy until they are. It never seems obvious in the moment anyways.
I remember when Bill Simmons announced Grantland. It was on a BS Report episode with Chuck Klosterman, who, in that probing way he always manages to push Simmons with, asked if they could discuss their new site. They did then explained Why They Write, among other things. I must’ve listened to that episode over a dozen times, caught in that period of my life when I wondered Why I Write, or why I cared to commit to it. I understand it more now—I have a personal reason anyways—but I found comfort within their dialogue. I think I needed that. They never said it but they expressed it.
But this is about Grantland. Simmons at some point revealed his major influences of The National and Spy Magazine, how he’d ‘kill’ to write for those publications, and how he wanted to re-create that. A ‘place for Writers.’ Allow a space for smart, creative people to do whatever smart, creative work they most wanted to do. Which, when you think about, isn’t that original a thought. Though it is an insane execution.
Usually Writing like that a) isn’t for everyone so b) it doesn’t make ‘enough’ money, which c) is what most companies care about. It doesn’t help when the editor leaves and his former company engages him in a very public warfare. Nor does it help that so many employees still had his back at the end of it all. So ESPN killed it. Because egos.
Whatever, though. Grantland succeeded. Wildly. I feel the same way about it as Simmons and so many other sportswriters pine about The National. When I started writing for real, Grantland and Esquire were the places I’d ‘kill’ to write for.
It’s a site I visited every day and made me care about so many things I never would have otherwise. I watch tennis because of Brian Phillips. I love DIVAS because of Kang. I read George Pelecanos novels because of Andy and Chris. I stole so many movie opinions from Wesley (and watched many films I’d otherwise wouldn’t thanks to him). Same with music from Pappademas (although I guess, as he would, I should refer to them as ‘records’). I obsess over celebrities and stars and Hollywood and LA and more thanks to Molly. I watch too much reality TV because of Juliet and Jacoby. I recently bought a goddamn bottle of Hypnotiq because of Rembert. And on and on.
They will always be the cool kids to me. I will never not wish I’d been a part of that family.
I’m trying to say this all feels a bit like high school graduation. These were my friends in a way. I liked hanging out with them. And I’m sad because it’s over now. I mean, I’m happy they’re free and it’s time to move on and all that. It still sucks, though. The world feels a little lonelier knowing that place doesn’t exist anymore.
So I’m posting my favorite pieces here because it was always about the writing. These aren’t best or whatever. They just meant the most to me. I wish I had a piece for every writer but that’s not how favorites work. It happens.
“I Suck At Football, Week 11: Boxes” – Alex Pappademas
A simple conceit, really: Take a non-football fan, make him watch football weekly, and write about the experience. Let him assign himself an arbitrarily middling team so it’s interesting. Weekly content at its finest.
Except at some point this transforms into a sprawling existential crisis of yearning and establishing meaning and all this phenomenal under-the-surface stuff. Sports and fandom help root our otherwise chaotically random lives and in some ways offer explanation to that which has no explanation. Basically, Pappademas wrote about living and football. That’s it. I’m trying both not to undersell or oversell this series. It’s my favorite thing the site ever did.
Start from the beginning and don’t stop. The link above just happens to be the one I liked most. (Although the Season One finale and its eerie alone-with-nothing-but-your-thoughts moment is damn close.)
“Nostalgia on Repeat” – Chuck Klosterman
Something to be said of a publication that had Klosterman essentially coming off the bench. That thing: Fucking incredible.
I could’ve chosen Klosterman’s debut about the “greatest sporting [he] ever witnessed”, or this essay that shaped Breaking Bad’s critical perception (and reportedly made The Wire fanatic/masturbator Jason Whitlock cry), or this seditious missive on Mountain Dew.
But I thought about this piece a lot. Though I don’t agree self-made nostalgia will cease, the idea that collective consensus of your social group would eventually outweigh individual manufactured nostalgia still haunts me. I suspect I only enjoy What a Time to Be Alive and most later-day Drake because everyone else does. But not loving “Hotline Bling” is sort of like not loving candy—it might be healthier, yet it’s a miserable, miserable existence. Watching so many friends devouring candy and smiling and dancing and joyous because you decided to ‘take a stand’ against something that isn’t doing any real harm.
Though maybe it is. Who knows. I’ll be thinking about this piece in the mid-2020s and “Hotline Bling” plays at a wedding and everyone’s dancing salsa real terribly and wonder if I ever had a choice in loving this stupid song so much. All because of this piece. Thanks Chuck.
“Together We Make Football” – Louisa Thomas
Football is a dirty sport. It’s probably the ugliest sport inside and out there is. And it might be our most American artifact currently. I perpetually find myself checking why I love it so much.
Anyways, I’ll get out of the way and let Louisa explain it.
“Watching football connects me to friends and to strangers. It helps me lose myself in something bigger, something almost transcendent. It reminds me of my father, and of afternoons spent outside in the backyard learning to throw a spiral. The acrobatics of the best make me catch my breath in awe. It is just so much fun to watch.
I wish I could say that it is a substitute for violence, that it releases and diffuses that domineering, competitive instinct latent in human nature, and leaves us with some measure of self-respect — some awareness of courage and strength. But I think I’m lying to myself. Because when I’m honest, I can see that within the culture of football, as a woman, I’m not respected. The women I see are cheerleaders, sideline reporters, WAGs. I hear men talk, and I know that when they use the word “girl,” it’s shorthand for something weak.”
“Cinemetrics: The Master” – Zach Baron
I’ve re-read this piece more than any other. Probably because it so captures how affecting great art can be but yet how impossible it is to explain how and why it affects you so much. Also because many writers love tackling PTA, but attempt some intelligible analysis that misses the point and usually says nothing. Most PTA writing lacks passion and sensitivity and awe and encapsulating that deep-forever feeling we all possess inside us and failing to fully contextualize that thing PTA does (that deep-forever feeling). But this comes really fucking close, which is all you really want. This column began my PTA obsession and perhaps factors into why The Master remains my favorite film of his.
“The Front Lines of Ferguson” – Rembert Browne
“Let’s Be Real” – Wesley Morris
These two pieces will forever be inextricably linked to me. Experiencing the tragedy of Ferguson as a millennial white male never made sense. Older people in my life, those I love and respect, just wanted it to go away. They acted like it’s a problem that doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, those closer to my age, wept and raged and questioned and hurt so profoundly throughout the Internet. The images and videos and reports received via social media told such a different narrative than the mainstream media presented.
We had a piece on Ferguson in HRDCVR. As part of the research, I read through every one of @deray’s tweets from the protest’s beginning to the announcement. If you’re familiar with #BlackLivesMatter, you know who Deray is. Reliving Ferguson through his eyes made me very angry at the injustice of these institutions meant to serve us and the ineptitude I felt. To this day I remain furious.
These two pieces helped. They helped place these events and emotions in context. I’m not sure how a lot of us would’ve responded without them.
“The Molly Diaries: Wes Welker’s Day at the Races” – Jason Concepcion
“With More Times on His Hands, Rajon Rondo Gives Connect Four Advice to Children” – Jason Concepcion
I suspect there’s something not quite right with Jason Concepcion. I mean that description as it’s applied to a savant genius and his work.
As ambitious and big Grantland was, it’s the small and weird I loved maybe more. So much Internet tries to be funny, but doesn’t succeed. It tries too hard, too ironic or shaming for someone who doesn’t deserve it in the jokes.
Meanwhile, these posts are equal parts mind-blowing and propulsive comedy. Especially because it’s so believable. Truthfully, I haven’t been able to watch Home Alone the same since.
“Rembert Explains the 90s: Legends of the Hidden Temple” – Rembert Browne
Here’s how I’d explain it: Jason did brilliant Bill Hader sketch bits while Rembert had this Aziz Ansari gleeful stand-up. I just re-read the Legends of the Hidden Temple piece and laughed as hard as I did the first time.
I’ve never seen someone integrate and stitch screencaps/photos with writing so seamlessly like Rembert and often with such hilarious results. He uses them as set-ups and punchlines, which is sort of genius.
Grantland was an #important website, but not always. It’s why I loved it so much.
“Eye of the Beholder” – Molly Lambert
Few writers break down symbols quite like Molly, specifically as it relates to celebrities. She was always ahead of everyone, too. That Taylor Swift piece predicts (“Sure, laugh it off, but you know that Kendrick Lamar collaboration is coming any second now”) and pinpoints that transformation of how modern celebrities move to protect themselves now (“The extremely public Swift is, brilliantly, a cover for the extremely private Swift”).
And then this bit about the Redditor kids placing Prostate Cancer Foundation donation links next to the celebrity nude leaks: “They tried to turn the JLaw nudes leak into an ALS Ice Bucket Challenge for scumbags — the Jizz Bucket Challenge.” Come on!
Again, the important stuff will live forever through, like, Longform and other publications linking to the Big Pieces. That, to me, misses the point of Grantland, though. The blogs, really, are what I’ll miss most day to day.
“Out in the Great Alone” – Brian Phillips
Holy shitballs, this piece! Phillips chasing the Iditarod Race and almost dying in Alaska and grappling with his soul … to even attempt something of this magnitude, let alone nail it. And the design of it—tracking his journey, the videos, the sidebars—so incredible. I know a lot of kids love the similarly constructed “Sea of Crises”, but I’m the pretentious critic who prefers the earlier work. So what.
Just read this paragraph. Please.
“We were standing in the open. All of a sudden I felt … but I don’t want to overstate it; it wasn’t despair or anything, just melancholy, just an extreme forlornness. It hit me that what I really felt — I realize how weird this is to write — was loneliness for history. Alaska has its own past: the murdering flaming wreck of the Russian colonies, the gold insanity, the deep-time traditions of the tribes. But it doesn’t saturate the landscape. In the Lower 48, you carry around a sense that the human environment has been molded by people who went before — this battle on this hill and so on. There’s a texture that you, too, are part of, even when it’s bloody or frightening, a texture within which your life can assume some kind of meaning. And that, as Bernard’s theory of tax policy and generations of writers have discovered, can be its own nightmare, but in remote Alaska, the nightmare is: It’s not there. It’s hard to explain, though this felt absence is an obvious part of both the allure and the terror of the frontier. There are no pre-written meanings. A fella can do just about anything he’s big enough to do. And one strong gust of wind could blow the whole edifice of human habitation away.”
Stunning.
“The Malice at the Palace” – Jonathan Abrams
You know why. Or at least you should. An incident that re-shaped the NBA, players, fandom, and the social agreement between them all. The Dress Code, increased foul calls, a cleaner game that emphasizes finesse over physical toughness, event security and alcoholic drink limitations, San Antonio’s 2005 Championship all stem from this. It’s a dark memory the NBA tries to erase any chance it gets. And Abrams blew the top off the thing.
Related: I’ll miss Grantland’s deep-dive oral histories a lot. I hope they find a home somewhere. Here’s a few more I loved—on Boogie Nights, Friday Night Lights, and WFAN Sports Talk Radio.
“The Song of Solomon” – Wesley Morris
“IV Drip: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Postlapsarian Comedy ‘Inherent Vice’ ” – Wesley Morris
“Hump Day: The Utterly OMG ‘Magic Mike XXL’ ” – Wesley Morris
No one opens and closes like Wesley. There’s no point in pretending otherwise: I’ve stolen his ledes more than any other writer on the planet. He sucks you in immediately and doesn’t let go until you’re laughing or crying or sometimes both.
It doesn’t hurt he’s wickedly smart and dedicated to the craft. Like, who the fuck just knows the word “postlapsarian” and uses it perfectly? He’s so good it’s annoying.
“Let it Fly” – Jordan Ritter Conn
A lot of the great narrative longform the site did could be found elsewhere. It deserves your reading. This one just happened to be my favorite.
“The Consequences of Caring” – Bill Simmons
I came to Simmons later than most. Not until college so I don’t possess that navel-gazing obsession some of his fans do. (Have you ever met a Boston Simmons fan? My GOD.)
Anyways I still like him a good bit. I love his podcasts and journalistic vision. His writing fell off as Grantland soared. I wonder if he knew that’s how it’d happen.
But this is his last Great piece of writing. That ending is like a kick in the balls and punch to the heart. The writing is reserved and precise and self-indulgent in all the best ways.
I hope this Simmons returns because it has so much heart. Really that’s what defined Grantland: the throbbing heart underneath everything they did. A bunch of people truly gave a shit. That’s why many people will miss Grantland so much. They cared.
[a] millennial reservations 