Bill Simmons' Grantland.com launched today. In case you aren't all the way tuned in to the sports blogosphere, this is a huge deal. Simmons signed up some of the best writers he could find to start his own site (sort of) that will be about more than just sports. And I want to talk about it, but before I do that, I have to talk about Simmons.
I come down somewhere in the middle of the Simmons scale. I don't think he's the Tawmy-From-Quinzee, worst-thing that's happened to sports coverage egomaniac Deadspin likes to make him out to be. On the flip side, it bugs me when he goes into "NO ONE DENIES THIS" mode (he does it a few times in his first non-introductory column today,) and shoehorns Teen Wolf and Real World references in for no reason (this happens today, too.) He got where he is now, though, due to the foresight to see what the internet was capable of back when sports was still covered by cigar-smoking old white men in fedoras with a "press" sticker sticking out of them. You're not going to find the next Simmons on the internet, you'll find him at the beginning of whenever the next medium for receiving sports news is invented. There are probably a few steps between the internet age and the "beaming stories directly into our heads" age, but someone somewhere will figure out what that is and take advantage of it.
I'm thankful Simmons figured it out first, though, since while I mostly like Simmons the Writer, he paved the way for Simmons the Producer, who I love. 30 for 30 was one of the best ideas anyone in sports has had in awhile. There were certainly a few clunkers mixed in there, but that's a small price to pay to protect the thing that made 30 for 30 work: Creative freedom. The fact that filmmakers were allowed to come up with projects that were personal to them made them that much more interesting, and you could tell the filmmakers were enjoying what they were making.
It seems like the same idea is going to be at work at Grantland, which is awesome. On launch day, I have so far read Chuck Klosterman's interesting story of a 23-year old JuCo basketball game, Chris Jones' story about returning to cover baseball, and Andy Greenwald's completely non-sports-related story* about how HBO recycles actors. I hadn't heard of Chris Jones before this, but loved the article, and am excited that I'll have one place to go to read about sports and good TV (and ignore articles about reality TV). Good job, Sports Guy.
*I want to respond to Greenwald's point about Aiden Gillen and Game of Thrones, so this paragraph might not be interesting if you haven't seen the show or read the books (you should, they're both excellent.) Greenwald ends the article with the point that we should embrace seeing familiar faces repeating in shows, but if I have one gripe with Game of Thrones the show, it's that Littlefinger (Gillen) has stolen two scenes that don't belong to him in the book. One kind of makes sense, as it's a story about him and his duel for Cat (this happens in Cat's memory in the book), inexplicably set in front of a fairly-hardcore and unnecessary lesbian sex scene. The other, more egregious one is having him tell Sandor's backstory with his brother to Sansa at the tournament. They haven't established Sandor as a character at all in the show, which is a shame because I feel like he becomes one of the most interesting characters in the ensuing books. And the biggest scene with Sandor is him telling the story of his scars to Sansa after the tournament. The scene shows Sandor's contempt for feudalism nicely, and foreshadows Sandor and Sansa's future character interactions nicely. I can't think of a good reason to take that scene away from Sandor and give it to Littlefinger besides that Gillen didn't have enough to do.
Still, watch Game of Thrones. Better yet, read the books.
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