Loose Talk: The Editors' Take

People always say “expect the unexpected.” Nothing could have prepared me for Friday. I was scrolling through Bleacher Report, passing by articles on the World Series and the latest LeBron news, when I saw a headline that caught my eye: “ESPN Announces It Has Suspended Publication of Grantland.” I skipped a breath. It couldn’t be.

For those of you don’t know, Grantland was a sports and pop culture website owned by ESPN. It was the brainchild of Bill Simmons, the self-proclaimed “Sports Guy.” Simmons compiled a list of renowned journalists to write for the site. He snatched Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Wesley Morris from the Boston Globe and Jonah Keri from FanGraphs, the baseball analytics website. Other well-known writers included music reviewer Rembert Browne, basketball analyst Zach Lowe, NFL guru Bill Barnwell and college football pundit Holly Anderson. It wasn’t just written journalism on the site either. Bill Simmons’ podcast, The B.S. Report, along with other Grantland podcasts, were highly popular and helped bring the podcast to relevancy as a respected form of media. Grantland also produced its own 30 for 30 Shorts and other smaller film projects.

While having all different types of media about sports and pop culture all on one website was awesome, that wasn’t what made Grantland so special. It was the people who made Grantland what it was. Each writer had a unique style. There was the elegance in which Zach Lowe broke down the Atlanta Hawks’ offense, the humor with which Rembert Browne dissected Aubrey Drake Graham’s (as he calls the artist formerly known as Wheelchair Jimmy) “Hotline Bling” video and, of course, the biased fandom of Bill Simmons. Thank God I cheer for the same teams as Simmons, or else my opinion of him and probably Grantland would be much different than they are. I appreciated the works of Ben Lindbergh, filled with perfectly placed GIFs, and Jonah Keri, whose use of modern-age baseball statistics have furthered my interest in pursuing a career in an MLB front office. I laughed at the humor piece on who should play the next James Bond (who else but Groot?). To me, Grantland is more than just a website. Grantland has been a go-to during meetings periods in Wetherell or nighttime procrastination. Grantland has been an escape. Over the summer, I got into a large fight with both of my parents. After the fight, I lost myself in the world of the Russian Professional Basketball League and CSKA Moscow for the next half hour to calm myself down. Grantland has been a place of revelation. Rembert Browne’s piece on his two-day trip to Ferguson, MO during the week after the shooting took place brought me to not only the war zone but also a “a post-funeral barbecue … that just happened to have tanks and a small army standing before it.” It was his reporting that shaped my view of the events that transpired.

My favorite piece of writing ever was on Grantland. In “Yankees Suck! Yankees Suck!” Amos Barshad, who normally covered movies and TV for Grantland, told “the twisted, true story of the drug-addled, beer-guzzling hardcore punks who made the most popular t-shirts in Boston history.” It started out with an anecdote of a college student being shot in the face before taking me on the journey of how this same person started a t-shirt empire based on Boston’s pure hatred for the Bronx Bombers. It was only on Grantland where this article could fit in so perfectly. A 7,000-plus word article is often too long for a newspaper and the graphics used in the article wouldn't have been able to appear in a printed media form. At the same time, the article would have been done a disservice had it been posted on the recap- and snippet-heavy ESPN homepage or another sports website such as Bleacher Report. Grantland was, in fact, the only true home for this work of journalistic supremacy.

This was the beauty of Grantland. It was original. There was no other place where I could encounter an article as fun as Simmons’ annual NBA Trade Value rankings and also something as serious and important as the previously mentioned Ferguson article. Each writer had a trademarked style and every writer had the freedom to express their own views about whatever they chose. Every writer loved their job. Maybe that’s what made Grantland so special. One could not read a Grantland article without getting a sense of that love and care that an author put into that specific piece.

Grantland inspired me to become a better sportswriter. It has shaped the style in which I write. In fact, the idea for this weekly column is based on what Simmons and other writers did at Grantland.

So thank you, Grantland. Thank you for the laughs we shared in D-Hall. Thank you for your enlightening views on sports, TV and culture. Thank you for your continued influence on me. You will be missed.