Dave Kindred / National Sports Journalism Center

Though Bill Simmons gets an early call here, be not afraid. This is not a Simmonsesque wordstorm hurling 8,000 words against your brain. I mention the ESPN.com star’s name because of an exchange I had with my old colleague, the PTI matinee idol, Tony Kornheiser. This was four years ago. He couldn’t believe I intended to write a book about a newspaper, even the paper that had given us both shelter from real work. “You’ll sell 11 copies,” he said.

“Well . . .” I said.

“The only thing that matters today is immediacy,” he said. “Newspapers are so yesterday.”

“Well . . .”

Then Kornheiser began a proof of his thesis. He said, “Do you know who the hottest sportswriter in America is?”

“Well . . .” (while vowing to work on my sound-bite technique).

“Bill Simmons,” he said.

Once I regained consciousness, I understood some small part of Kornheiser’s logic. Simmons wrote for an outfit that reached tens of millions of sports fans, and his stuff was immediately available at the click of a mouse. Still, I thought, there had to be more to it than that. Few reporters and writers ever were as gifted as Kornheiser. For him to have called Simmons hot, the guy had to be writing something worth reading.

But damned if I could figure out what it was.

Still, there came that day when a Simmons book rose to No. 1 on the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list. He, to name one author, had sold more than 11 copies.

Well.

A man of lesser will than I might have climbed atop that 700-page mountain of a book and thrown himself into the dread darkness. Instead, I accepted the Kornheiser-pronounced truth: Bill Simmons is America’s hottest sportswriter. Fortunately, at the same time I came up with an explanation that enabled me to continue calling myself a sportswriter. Bill Simmons has succeeded because he is not, has never been, and will never be a sportswriter. He’s a fan.

Lord knows, there’s nothing wrong with being a fan. I love sports fans. Without the painted-face people, I’d be writing ad copy for weedeaters. But I have I ever been a sports fan. A fan of reporting, yes. Of journalism. Of newspapers. A fan of reading and writing, you bet. I am a fan of sports, which is different from being a sports fan of the Simmons stripe.
The art and craft of competition fascinates me. Sports gives us, on a daily basis, ordinary people doing extraordinary things and extraordinary people doing unimagined things. I love it.

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