I Was Wrong

I'll say it: I was wrong.

When I wrote that Bill Simmons sucked a couple of months ago, I was mistaken. Well, not entirely. Some of his pieces still don't silence people who have labeled him the "Pop Culture Guy," and he has an unfortunate tendency to fall back on Bill Cosby-esque "life's little foibles" humor at times.

But despite anything I could have said about Simmons, it is impossible to dispute that he's at the top of the world right now. There is nobody who does what he does better. I mean that as a compliment, because he's earned the spot he's in today, but it's also a jab - because there is virtually no good sports or humor content on the Internet, and he has no competition.

Remember when the Internet was brand new, and people who were on the cutting edge were predicting a complete overhaul of the way we get entertaining content? These were the same guys who were saying that books and TV would be obsolete by 2010, and that on-demand television and movies through the Web were the wave of the future. The most obvious thing that was going to change, though, was the writing. Young, funny, intelligent people who simply hadn't fit in with traditional media were finally going to have a voice. Nothing was stopping them, and the elder statesmen of the sports media empire were going to come crashing down. You could almost smell the first terrified squirts of urine coming from guys like Dan Shaugnessy and Woody Paige.

Since then, two things have happened because of the Internet:
1) There is now more free porn than you could consume if you masturbated nonstop until the Earth crashes into the Sun.
2) Virtually nothing has changed about the way we read opinions on sports or get entertainment.
To some extent, what the prophets said was true; more and more Americans are getting their news from the Internet. But when it comes to entertainment - particularly having to do with sports and humor - the Web is lagging. For all the vastness of the Web, there is shockingly little really good available stuff, and Simmons has become the one guy who has really capitalized well on that failed revolution.

This column is more about the current state of American sportswriting than it is about Bill Simmons, though. The sort of traditional, literary writing that appears in the annual edition of "The Best American Sports Writing" is, sadly, almost dead. You know what I'm talking about - the pieces you find every four or five months in Sports Illustrated that feel more like short stories than sports columns. But what's there to take their place? ESPN.com has tried to pick up the torch and take it in a new direction, but it's not enough.

There are reasons for this. For one, because of the low barriers to entry on the Net, sportswriters who actually have something intelligent to say tend to put their stuff elsewhere because they don't want it to drown in the sea of messageboard "DETRIOT RULEZ!!!!!11" suckiness. Still, we haven't seen that promised increase in really funny, insightful sports opinions. More competition should mean better quality, but outside of "Pardon the Interruption," sports coverage is still fundamentally the same as it was 10 years ago. The fact that people like Skip Bayless still have jobs is a testament to that.

Because of all this, Simmons occupies a unique place in our culture - he's got a distinctive writing style and he can turn a funny phrase once in a while, so he became king. He is, by any accounts, a good writer, probably one of the best on the Internet. But he also represents something disturbing, because he's the ONLy person who does his job. Think about it. Should it REALLY have taken until last week for someone to write a well-reasoned and widely available argument that the WNBA shouldn't exist?

If anything, the army of regular Joes should congratulate Simmons on his achievements, not because he represents us, but because he is, for lack of a better word, the benchmark. There's a long way to go, though. There is a void out there for at least one guy - a guy who doesn't have to deal with the constant censorship that Simmons faces, a guy who has a broader range of personal experiences, a guy who can set a new bar for writing on the Internet, whether it's about sports or not.

As we hit the 15th birthday (or so) of the online age, we're still waiting for someone else to really break the mold, but I'm still not sold. It's entirely possible that Bill Simmons might ride off into the sunset uncontested as the definitive Internet writer of our generation, and if he does, more power to him. But I know too many people who love sports and can write too well to let this happen. Do I think that someone can pull it off? Probably not, but like I said earlier, I was wrong. I'd like to be wrong again.