H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger, the Pulitzer Prize-winner, the author of Friday Night Lights, the Vanity Fair paycheck-recipient, subjected Deadspin blogger Will Leitch to an incontinent tirade about the menace of sports blogging on Bob Costas’s HBO show last night. Okay, maybe too much has been made of the spit that flew from Bissinger’s lips as he accused blogs of “dumbing us down” (us = society, natch) “to a degree that I don’t think we can recover from.” Maybe too much has been made of the profanity that roared from his old-media throat as he accused Leitch of being “full of shit.” The word “incontinent” still applies, simply because no one is fully in control of themselves in the oxygen-starved stratosphere of wrongness that Bissinger’s argument raised him to last night.
Sports blogs are dumbing society down? SPORTS BLOGS? Sir, you confound me. When I open the sports page of my local newspaper, sir, or listen to ESPN Radio, sir, or spend the evening with Bob Costas on HBO, sir, what I find does not appear to me to be a forum for keen critical thinking. What I find does not appear to me to be an elevated thing to which the world of mascot sex sites can only be a lowbrow alternative. The mainstream sports media’s principled respect for reason and the English language has strikingly failed to reach me.
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m as skeptical about the utopian potential of the internet as anyone who still bothers to correct mistakes on Wikipedia. I have doubts about the culture of snideness, and its implied ethics of rejection, that the Gawker “Empire” (Jesus), Deadspin included, has helped to create. But I always thought the dick jokes were funny not just because dick jokes are funny, but because they were the sign that these sites were offering something pointedly different from the sanitized corporate middlebrow poll-tested nothing that has become the default mode of expression for the professional consideration of sports.
With all the fascinating and unruly ways that organized athletics is working in society (society = us, don’t forget), the fact that Rick Reilly once read Hemingway can’t be the working limit for the aspirational in writing about this stuff. Three ex-athletes sitting around a sine-curve laser desk taking turns saying “upside” is not a viable default. It has to come back to some actual human level; it has to sidestep the anodyne. And there’s nothing more human, or more able to sidestep the anodyne, than a really good dick joke.
People aren’t turning away from old-guard sports columnists because they want to be “dumbed down”; they’re turning away because locker-room access doesn’t seem to have given old-guard sports columnists anything particular to say, and there are better ways to keep your mind alive. It’s a false choice: given good writing and good thinking on both sides, there’s no reason for blogs and traditional media to be enemies, because good writing and good thinking are always good, regardless of where they’re published. But stupid is as stupid does, as Coach Eric Taylor once said, and it doesn’t do a lick of good for a sick person to blame a well person for his eczema.
Most sports blogs are terrible. But then, H.G. Bissinger’s Wikipedia page contains the following sentence:
His most recent article for Vanity Fair, “Gone with the Wind” (August 2007) about the saga of 2006 Kentucky Derby Winner Barbaro, has been optioned by Universal Pictures.
So you tell me: where are the unpredictable, the complex, the eloquent, and the strange more likely to be found? Where would you rather look?
Read More: Buzz Bissinger, Your Gnashing of Teeth Makes Me Drowsy
by Brian Phillips · April 30, 2008
The man who wrote Friday Night Lights, one of the best sports books ever, said all this? Sad day.
I’m trying to look at it like: the man who wrote Friday Night Lights twenty years ago said all this. Still, it’s definitely sad; I would have liked to believe that someone as smart as Bissinger a) would be able to recognize something interesting and new when it came along, and b) wouldn’t feel so comfortable with a sloppy, un- or anti-intellectual status quo just because it made him rich and famous. I mean, bash blogs all you want—there’s a lot to bash—but then don’t act like you’re upholding some ideal of civil discourse by hanging out with Bob Costas.
Here’s a more considered version of his position, from a newspaper article a couple of years ago:
Not a topic I expected to see you take on, Brian, but I’m very glad you did.
I find it extremely interesting that in the same period of a few weeks that Bissinger has chosen to so publicly identify Deadspin as the root cause of all that is wrong with American society, Pat Jordan, another of the country’s most distinguished sportswriters (and one with a rather more extensive and consistent oeuvre than Bissinger), has chosen to use a new medium for both a brilliant article on Jose Canseco and a long serialized interview.
That’s right, Deadspin.
And yes, I know that Belth edited Jordan’s new book, and that Belth and Leitch go back to the Black Table (and perhaps even beyond), but that neither explains why a writer of Jordan’s quality chose Belth as an editor nor why he has chosen to engage with the new reality in a diametrically oppposite way to Bissinger.
Ursus, that’s a fantastic point, I wish I’d thought of it. Pat Jordan’s Canseco piece was so good that I had to dig up a link to it. Well worth reading for anyone with a few extra minutes.
You’re also right that I wouldn’t normally wade into a debate like this. Bissinger’s diatribe about bloggers not sweating over language probably felt like a thrown gauntlet, and then the fact that he thinks amateur sportswriting is ruining American discourse while apparently not having a problem with, say, Colin Cowherd or Jim Rome, just struck me as impossible to pass up.
I’ve always found “sports journalism”, at least in the USA media, to be pretty atrocious, so the idea that blogs are “dumbing us down” amuses me greatly. I don’t go to the mainstream sports media for intellectual betterment, and I doubt anyone else does either.
This diatribe does not surprise me in the least, though. Seriously, sports “journalists”, at least in the USA, are some of the most reactionary types in the mainstream media. Most of the rest of the mainstream media caught on to blogging several years ago, and don’t seem to have major issues with it (many of them have become bloggers as well). Sports journalism has more than its fair share of dinosaurs who are a bit out of touch with today’s reality (these tend to be the worst of the soccer-bashers, as well).
Dave, Costas and Bissinger seemed to share the assumption that profanity equals stupidity, and so the websites with the most curse words must be doing the most to dumb down social discourse. That seems like a demagogic and wrongheaded position to me; maybe I’m out of step, but there are lots of popular manifestations of the “clean” mainstream sports media—ESPN: The Magazine, say, or SportsCenter—that I find much more stultifying than a supposedly lowbrow site like Deadspin.
Kissing Suzy Kolber actually seems to me to possess more social value than a lot of Buzz Bissinger’s recent profiles, for exactly the same reason that a good comedian is more valuable than a mediocre columnist. They’re injecting some id into a system that’s choking on superego.
I think the issue is one more that like iTunes did for musicians, blog culture may have a hand in ruining the livelihood of print journalists.
But mainstream sports journalism made its own bed when they shrank column space and dumbed down coverage for the sake of their decreasingly intelligent readers. I was doing research for an article on the history of club football in Toronto a few weeks back and I was amazed at the sea of print in the sports section of the Globe and Mail back in the sixties and seventies. The writing was ribald, the metaphors colourful, the analysis sharp and unpretentious. That’s been replaced with blather.
Some blogs have risen to fill the void but there is a problem with pay equity. Blogs by their nature are free to read, and if any money changes hands its from annoying advertising links and not on a per-word, per-article basis. Writing should still be a paid craft, like acting, music, and art. How the internet can nurture young and intelligent sports writers remains to be seen…
Don’t I know it.
Okay, guys, I am a print media guy, a long-time sportswriter who realizes that, hey, there’s a great big world of the games people play to write about out there and it’s not the exclusive domain of just us print types.
Things change. Hell, I once wrote on deadline with a freakin’ manual typewriter and still miss the sound of that damn Royal.
But if I was going to compete in this profession, I knew I had better place butt in seat and write to daylight with a computer.
Same now with the Blog World. It just makes me write better, compete more for different angles, thoughts, etc.
Maybe–and this is just my gut feeling–is that vintage print guys like BB and others feel that so many bloggers haven’t paid their “dues”, if you will. That sometimes maybe they aren’t held to the same standards of accountability. Maybe he sees John Doe The Blogger rise out of nowhere, minus any type of journalistic degree or background, and become well-read and followed.
Hey, this is America, right? It’s all about competition and doing better than the next person.
And in the case of sports journalism, the bloggers are here to stay.
I respect them, enjoy what many of them write and use it as another form of incentive for me to grow even more as a sports journalist.