Book Review: The Book of Basketball

Simmonz can has worldwide platformz? [Ed. Note - I have nothing to say other than "I'm bAAAAaaaaack, bitches." Yours truly, Septimus Rex.]

ZOMG he SIGNED IT!!!1110010101

Prologue: When you read this, and please do, you’ll say to yourself “this guy isn’t half as clever as the thinks he is.”  I know.  It’s part of the schtick.  It also happens to be true in one of those self-fulfilling prophesy type of ways.  It’s a paradox.  You know what else is a paradox, right?

In the spirit of Simmons’ hyperinflated egocentricity, let me begin by talking about me.  I used to LOVE me some Simmons.  I sent him a ton of stuff under different names so I looked like less of a psycho (which in truth actually made me more of a psycho).  I went to espn.com several times a day to see if he had anything new.  This was in grad school, so I’d bust out 5 pages of research, check for Sports Guy, go to class, check for Sports Guy, barter with my faculty adviser over an elective, check for Sports Guy, wonder why a graduate program that was 96% female only had 3 hot girls, check for Sports Guy.  It’s really sick, now that I think about it [Ed. Note - It was sick back then for all of us because you wouldn't let us stop thinking about it].  I worked his style, and some of his theories, into several of my research papers, even though they’re supposed to be dry, patrician discourses.  I sent him a heartfelt email after the Texans drafted Mario over Reggie/Vince, and a few days later TortillaZorro called me excitedly saying that Sports Guy had kinda/sorta named a theory after me.  I was at a wedding shower, but busted out of there Mrs. Bourvier to find the nearest computer.  There it was, and still is – The Vice President of Common Sense.  Of course he didn’t name it after me, but I was #1 in his mailbag (the holy grail) and could kinda/sorta lay stake to one of his crazy theories.  I was like a teenage girl smitten by Menudo.

I fawned over Sports Guy like Jeff the Trisexual Triathlete fawned over N’Sync before Justin took his solo act on the road.  But enough about me (overtly, anyway) after one more anecdote.  When El Rat convinced me to start Faffing (that looks even gayer than it sounded in my head, so it stays), there was really no other choice than to find a Single White Female name homage to the Sports Guy.

TANGENT – This post might get a little long, so I’m putting tangents in italics so you can skip over them if you want.  Footnotes are self-aggrandizing: this isn’t the New England Journal of Medicine.  It’s a sports blog where we talk about how gay each other are even though we have GLBT friends and a healthy amount of respect and cultural sensitivity in real life.  We also post pictures of animals doing funny things and sometimes links to porn.  Not porn directly, especially after Goldfish and others accidentally opened “2 Germans, 1 watermelon” at work.  Just links to porn [Please assume that link is NSFW... Please] so people can make informed, autonomous decisions. 99% of our porn is heterosexual.  I don’t know why I felt compelled to tell you that.  So, in sum, we don’t footnotez.  

The recent Deadspin book reviews remind us of something very important – before he started crumbling from within like the Roman empire, Simmons was an internet god.  He may not have invented the sports/pop culture corollary, but he perfected it.  He’s one of Gladwell’s Outliers, which I believe Gladwell himself might have said [Ed. Note - Really? Did you really just say that? Wow... Don't make me more happy that I've been on sabbatical for these past couple weeks].  Today the sports/pop culture corollary is the fundamental paradigm by which most of us think, talk, and write about sports, but that wouldn’t have been true if this were 1998 [Ed. Note - UNtrue we ALL talked/thought about sports in this way. It was just Simmons managed to put it on paper on the web and made a living at it. He did nothing different. He was one of us, only with a national medium.] [Writer's Note - Fuck you, editor, get back to being an emo hipster and leave us salt-of-the-earth types alone to romanticize the 90s in peace.]  

Now sports and pop culture live in the same zeitgeist. Remember the SAT? Sports is to pop culture analogy as your mom is to things I did last night. That’s Simmons’ legacy, and we all genuflect at the altar.  Everyone ate that shit up for years.  But then he got a big head about it.  Or did he?  He’s an unabashed lazy homer, a hero of post-modernity [Ed. Note - The most relevant sentence you've ever written].  Did he change, or was he so overexposed that we had no choice but to look behind the wizard’s curtain?  Or, in Simmons-speake – once he went HD, we saw the frozen booger in his nose in 1080p.

TANGENT - When you read the Sports Guy’s VP of Common Sense post, you’ll realize that my name is Josh.  This won’t be a surprise to you because we only have 4 readers that aren’t our college friends, and of the 4, Big Hitter is now a tailgate buddy and Chad is hiding in the bushes outside of my house right now, taking shallow breaths.  To the other 2, my Christian name isn’t The Random Guy.  Hope that doesn’t spoil your experience like when you found Santa Claus banging your mom in 1989.  It’s funny the lengths we went to protect our true names so we could say whatever we wanted without fear or repercussion.  Like anyone cares.  The day after we were threatened with a lawsuit by a guy named Redacted was probably one of the most fun so far.  Good times. You know what?  I’m coming out of the closet.  My name is Josh.  I’m a mid-level manager.  I drive a Dodge Stratus.  People fear me.

This isn’t about the book.  But it is. I hope that blows your mind the same way that Back to the Future did when you started thinking through the time-space continuum logic.  I used to chart it out on graph paper and go “wait a minute…”.  On an unrelated note, I didn’t lose my virginity until age 25.  That makes me morally superior to you [Ed. Note - And way less good at sex. I feel for The Random Baby Momma.].  [Writer's Note - And I feel sorry for your right hand.] Sorry, I promised I’d overtly stop talking about how awesome I am.  A hard promise to keep.  Back to Simmons.

TANGENT – Sorry.  The Vice President of Common Sense thing was about Vince/Reggie/Mario. In retrospect, the Vince/Reggie/Mario debate was Houston’s version of the OJ trial.  Whites and hispanics wanted Reggie, blacks wanted Vince, and no one wanted Mario. It really did divide down racial lines, although I’ll have to ask a Chinese friend how his community felt about it.  Maybe they used an algorithm and came up with Mario?  Anyway, that’s why it’s a good thing neither you nor I nor Bill Simmons’ VP of Common Sense has any sway over any sports team.  Although you shouldn’t use anecdotes to try to prove any point, and as an aggregate body of work Charlie Casserly sucked balls.  

The Peter Principle states that people in the workforce will rise to their level of incompetence.  The guy who is a great sales rep makes a terrible manager because those are fundamentally different skill sets.  They involve some of the same means – high social IQ, empathetic active listening, understanding real politik – but they aren’t the same, and they’re not even that similar.  Maybe the Peter Principle applies to Simmons. He was great at throwing rocks at the establishment, but then (as Deadspin covered pretty thoroughly) he became the establishment.  One might say that this is the point when Simmons’ ego began to overshadow his work.  I disagree.  I think he is slightly more full of himself than he used to be, but only a little.  The difference is two things, IMO:

1. He’s super-empowered like a tenured professor to the point where he’d have to kill someone to get in real trouble.  He’d vehemently disagree because he still wants to see himself as the little guy, and he’ll give you of anecdotes about his censor-bosses, and he’ll use this as justification when he leaves ESPN.

TANGENT - Does he need ESPN anymore?  He certainly doesn’t think so.  He thinks it is holding him back, rather than helping him reach his true potential.  I don’t know either way – the internet is not an efficiently allocated capital market yet.  It’s still the Wild West.  I think he’ll make a shit-ton of money and smarmily refer to his former employee as “those people”, but in terms of reaching his true potential?  Who knows?  That’s also subjective and says more about us than anything about him.

2.  He hit his peak 6 years ago and is hanging on for dear life, even though he won’t admit it to himself.  Shoot, I just gave away the end of the post.  Be a dear and keep reading.

You are not the cosmos.  That was the title of Deadspin’s “bad cop” review of the Book of Basketball.  Clever.  But Simmons’ original premise never changed. He likes sports and pop culture, and he likes telling you what he thinks about those things.  He went a little too Hollywood when he went to, well, Hollywood.  But it’s really second verse, same as the first.  Whether you like Simmons 2.0 depends on whether you hate LA or Boston more.

So what is it about Simmons that I (and maybe you) don’t like anymore?  I’ve put too much thought into this.  Here’s the list:

1. Overexposure, to be sure.  The ennui of the internet means stars burn brighter and faster than any other medium to date.  As a scientist, there is one thing I know: stars burn out.  That’s what they do.  It’s a scientific fact.
2. Everyone knows Simmons is a one-trick pony and proud of it.  Hows about adding just another half of a trick just to keep the Visigoths at bay?
3. One can be proud of being lazy.  But there is a line between “lazy in a endearing, self-effacing way” and “lazy as a motherfucker – can’t be bothered to do your job”.  That line between the two?  He pooped on it.  We young U.S. Americans living in the America and such as love the idea that we could do what he do for a living, which of course will never happen, which of course is the false premise of the American dream.  Or is it?  Anyway, he is setting a terrible example for the kids.  Show some self-restraint from being lazy as a motherfucker, please.
4. And the linchpin.  The Secret, if you will.

Simmons is a townie.  Remember Good Will Hunting?  He might be bright-ish and funny enough, but he’s a townie.  He ran out of real ideas years ago and wasn’t smart enough (or maybe too arrogant?) to surround himself with anyone who wasn’t a synchophant, so his maturation slowed to a crawl.  His contributions over the last few years have been a product of groupthink, and it’s gone as well as the Bay of Pigs, or at least Katrina.  Too soon?  Here is your counterpoint – he reads and interviews people like Gladwell and Klosterman [Ed. Note - Simmons' man-love for Gladwell and Klosterman is only rivaled by TRG's man-love for Goldfish].  Good point, “you”.  My counter-counter point: even so, do you really see maturation in his columns (when or if they ever come out)?  He’ll work in an interesting theory from someone else every now and again, but these are blips on a radar.  Neither evolutionary nor revolutionary.  The editorial process seems to be “cut the jokes that will get ESPN sued and otherwise leave the cash cow alone so he doesn’t get too butt-hurt.”  I’m not saying it is a bad business strategy, but then again I don’t give a flying crap about ESPN’s profit margin.  Which is surely ginormous.

It is actually in convos with the Klostermans of the world (yes, I said convos [Ed. Note - At least you didn't say "conversate" which is a worse herpe on the English language that irregardless (how many times must one thing NOT be regarded) or the invention of the emoticon... Fuck you, emoticon users!!!]) where one can see the intellectual wheels fall off the Simmons bandwagon. It’s not about intellectual rigor vs half-ass tomfoolery, because we love us some tomfoolery.  It’s the sense that Simmons is trying to play in a sandbox that might not be age-appropriate for him.  Sometimes I feel like Klosterman in particular is playing cyber-bully when he destroys Simmons’ fly-by-night theories [Ed. Note - In general, Klosterman has also jumped the shark a bit. He's a fiction writer parading around as a journalist. He hasn't had anything original since Downtown Owl (which was good, by the way). He can't seem to publish anything other than a collection of essays that he's already published. His star has already burnt out... Not that I won't be buying his next book... I will.] and I get defensive for SG.  I want to yell: Hey you! Get your damn hands off him! It would be ok if Simmons were to say “yes, my theories fall apart when you go all subterranean, but they’re fun and I’m rich, bitch!” Instead he uses anecdote to try to justify them.

TANGENT - A writer who uses anecdote to prove anything is lazy, stupid, or both.  For example, if I say “most white people can’t dance”, and Septimus Rex says “that’s not true – I am a dancing machine” [Ed. Note - And, I have the photos to prove it!], Rex is thinking anecdotally rather than empirically. He is thinking inside out, rather than outside in. One can superficially prove or disprove anything one wants using anecdote.  There are a lot of anecdotes that lead to horse-shit conclusions.  Here is another.  The Random Baby Momma was struck by lightning several years ago.  We discovered two months later that she was preggers, and you all know that The Random Baby is the joy of my life as well as a sports savant who is smarter than ESPN.  This sequence of events leads to one of two conclusions.  First, lightning strikes drastically increase fertility.  Two, the baby is actually the offspring of Zeus, and I’m just playing mid-husband like Joseph of Arimathea.  That’s the problem with anecdotes: everything in life is on a bell curve, and you are not the bell curve, tough guy.  Don’t use prima facie anecdotes to jump to large-scale conclusions. That is to be expected from The Random Drunken In-Laws at Thanksgiving, not from a New York Times Best Seller.

Maybe this is part of growing up.  Maybe it is like finding Santa banging your mom on Christmas Eve.  Maybe Simmons ran his course, or maybe I just got older and he’s still the killer app for 22 year olds everywhere.  Maybe it’s a personal taste thing. It’s just somewhat disappointing that he couldn’t make the leap from exciting borderline All Star (Josh Smith) to MVP (LeBron), IMHO.  I shouldn’t have expected this – his ceiling isn’t that high, being a townie and all.

Of course, IMHO is not all that “H” and is by definition singular to me.  Someone else might make just as good of a case the opposite way.

So here is your book review: if you like Simmons and/or basketball minutae, buy the book.  If not, make your own informed, autonomous decision.

Epilogue: You might think that we’re superior sumbitches. Perhaps. Or perhaps we’re self-aware, self-effacing emo hipsters that just love to write satirical blog entries while listening to Anniversary. Here are some of our most flattering reader comments to date:

• Man is this outhouse-of-the-web a waste of time!
• I am sure you are just kidding and realize how stupid you sound, but I just wanted to make sure.
• I would like to thank Septimus Rex and Crew for spending hours trying to come up with sketchy facts wrapped with ignorant opinions…
• …there is absolutely no content what-so-ever… I think that is an insult?
• You guys are a bunch of haters. u guys need to shut the hell up…
• No one told me it was LongAss Post day…I would have brought a lunch…
• I love the lies and lack of research on your blog
• Random musing about my penis? Chalk it up…it’s another gay post from TRG.
• …and in turn when you write you sound like douche bags…
• FaF looks super gay on the iPhone
• …this site is classless and brings nothing positive to the outside world.
• If by “effort” you mean “journalistic investigation” you’ve come to the wrong place.
• fu
• You guys need some fiber.
• What was your comeback to “Fat Latinas in David Robinson Jerseys”? Nothing, because it is true and gross and you know it…
• …oh, and your mom’s dick was awful tasty last night…

and last but not least…

• Thanks for almost getting me fired with your surprise gay porn on your quote unquote sports blog. Idiots.

Pic from here.

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