I read Bill Simmons for a long time. He’s written some funny articles, and his nomination of Bo Jackson as the greatest video game athlete of all time is absolutely right. And he was cool, years ago, when the Celtics, Red Sox, and Patriots all sucked. He’d talk about his beloved local teams now and then, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t ignore. But when they started doing well, it became quite clear that he would be better off writing for the Boston Globe and not something national. Well, maybe he wouldn’t be better off, but we would. He couldn’t go a paragraph without mentioning his teams. And I actually used to like the Pats and the Sox – my grandmother spends a lot of time in New England, so she got to root for both teams a bit, and since they were both terrible for a long time, I was happy to root for them when they weren’t playing the Orioles or Redskins. And then they got good. You, Red Sox fans, are some of the most annoying in all of sports. Some of you, the real die hards, are okay. But most of you have been waiting years, not for your team to be as good as the Yankees, but for you to have the excuse to be as annoying as Yankees fans. It only took one World Series victory to turn you from lovable underdogs into Yankees fans who wear red. But back to Simmons. He had an internship contest that my brother entered. He went to great lengths to explain how he was going to choose the winner, and then ignored all his rules and chose someone who simply aped his style. I stopped reading him completely a few years ago. I just got tired of him talking about his favorite teams all the time. I’d stop reading an article as soon as he started to gush about a Boston team, and pretty soon there wasn’t much for me to read. Many of you may have read this article, which I did not, but apparently it’s not flattering to the Celtics. The wife directs me to this response from Celtics Blog.
From here on out: Stop It. Just Stop. We no longer want you talking about our team publicly. You’ve lost all credibility with Celtics fans. All of it. Don’t bother with some lame and dumb reverse jinx excuse to explain your writing. And really, spare us the joyous article after we do win the title. None of us want to hear about it from Showtime Simmons. Enjoy rooting for Kobe, we hope you’ll be happier sitting next to Diane Cannon, just don’t tell us about it.
I hope he takes it to heart. He has to decide if he’s really a fan, in which case he should write for a Boston area publication and love his teams no matter what, or he can be a national columnist and pretend he cares about other teams in the league (Aside from, apparently, the Lakers). And speaking of the Celtics (The one team from Boston I still like, because the wife loves them and I never had a basketball team I cared about), I actually agree with Mike Wilbon for the first time in a while – the offensive foul on Paul Pierce that they called on his late three point attempt was absolutely awful. I’m glad it didn’t end up affecting the outcome, because it was just terrible. Tayshaun Prince jumped in the air and landed on Pierce while he was shooting and somehow it’s an offensive foul? Crazy. Anyway, I’m looking forward to game 1 on Thursday. Unlike Simmons, I actually want the Celtics to win, and think they can do it. It’ll be tough – LA is a great team. But it can be done, and it can be done by the Celtics. Edit to add: An LA fan thinks that Simmons sucks, too.