Bob Ryan Calls Out Bill Simmons' Celtic Fandom
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Mainstream Media is already back peddling these days but their recent practice of throwing each under the bus is getting ugly. The newest fight amongst the bigwigs isn't a new one but the topic is. I give you Round One of the Bob Ryan-Bill Simmons Fight....Ding!
Beware of False Prophets.Oooooooh! 60s talk. Let the man speak!!!!!!
Beware of clever people who know what they know, but don't know what they don't know, which is far more important.
There is a younger writer of great renown who loves the Boston Celtics, which is fine. He commands an enormous national audience, who have come to regard him as The Authority on all things Celtic. And he has an exhaustive knowledge of the current team. No problem there.
But he has over-stepped his bounds. He is trying to sum up the whole Celtics-Lakers thing in his dot.com forum, and he starts off by saying that it wasn't really a rivalry because the Celtics won the first eight times the two played in the Finals. He completely dismissed the six series of the 60s because the Celtics won all six, as if this somehow means by definition the two teams did not have a viable rivalry.
I'd tend to forgive him on the basis of him not being there, but that would mean that history requires that you had to be there. I wasn't present for the Gettysburg Address or the Bobby Thomson home run, but that doesn't mean I can't have a good idea of what it must have been like to be there. That's what being an historian entails. You do your homework.Ummm okay. Old people are talking history. Everyone sit in a circle Indian-style and listen.....
So in order to become the 1962 NBA champions Boston had to win Game 6 in LA (119-105) and then return home for a Game 7 in the Garden. And that game was one of the greatest NBA seventh games ever, with the Lakers actually having the last shot with the score tied in regulation. But Frank Selvy, a good jump shooter whose 41 points a game senior year at Furman had included a 100-point game, missed a 10 or 12-foot left baseline jumper at the buzzer. Bill Russell took over in the OT, leading the Celtics to a 110-107 victory. By the way, Russ finished with 30 points and 40 rebounds.Crap. The old man is right. You know....there could be a whole thing to MSM and New School working together. But until then....I eagerly await your response Mr. Simmons.
Tinseltown Boys (Boston Globe)
(Thanks to Nick from Boston for the link)
16 Comments:
I have to agree....it was funny that all during last year's Patriots undefeated run, Simmons got more and more obnoxious and then, after the loss I didn't see anything by him for what seemed like months. Now he's back on the a-hole train about the celts.
And bob ryan? Don't get me started. Obnoxious but in a different way. The whole 'it was better in my day, I know it, and you'll never get it' attitude is so condescending it's ridiculous.
It's not enough to get 24/7 sox/yankees, now we're subjected to 2 overexposed windbags from boston, too?
/sigh
Just now, for the very first time, I realized how much Bob Ryan resembles Andy Rooney.
And that's just about the only person on god's green earth that's even as remotely annoying as Bill Simmons.
THANK YOU BOBBY RYAN!!!!EVERYONE THINKS SIMMONS IS SO GREAT WHEN HE IS A JOKE. FINALLY SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY KNOWS THE NBA SETTING IT STRAIGHT. IF SIMMONS KNOWS BETTER (HE DOESNT) HE SHOULDNT EVEN RESPOND BECAUSE HE HAS NO ARGUMENT.
Bob Ryan is a bitter old man. Sad really.
And Anon #2. Simmons wrote several things about the pats loss in the super bowl. They weren't good articles but he did write about it.
Actually, if you read the entire Simmons column, it is pretty obvious that he is joking the entire way through. The joke was that his editors wanted an objective look at the Celtics-Lakers rivalry and Simmons wrote it as "best as he could." The headline to the article was "I can be objective about the Lakers. And, objectively speaking,
I say they suck," so it was pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps not the funniest joke ever, but a joke nonetheless.
Yea,
When you have a Red Sox fan saying that a rivalry doesn't count because one team wins all the time, they're either joking or retarded.
Didn't Bob Ryan want to punch Jason Kidd's wife or something? Maybe Simmons can begin his rebuttal with that.
The Sports Reporters is the worst show on TV and Ryan is one of the main reasons (as well as Lupica).
The whole column was tounge-in-cheek. Really, I'm surprised Ryan didn't catch that...perhaps he is spending too much time with 2.0 and a million different other things to put on reading glasses.
It doesn't matter that Ryan's point is correct (it is). It also doesn't matter that he missed the tongue-in-cheek tone of the whole article (he did). What matters is that there is nothing less entertaining than sports writers writing about...wait for it...other sports writers. Then again, in Bob Ryan's case, his sports analysis is so bad that this may in fact be better.
I go back and forth with Simmons. Some stuff he writes is great, but his blatant homerism is terrible. Enough about Boston, for crying out loud.
Simmons in an interview said he is trying to reverse the jinx after he wrote in November he had the Patriots "19-0" before "The NY team" beat them.
I agree with 1:46. Columnists and Op-ed writers regardless of forum (mostly politics and sports) love to write about others in their industry and promote themselves more than the story itself.
Both of these dudes can go away forever. Oh, and nice to see Joe D (madnice) step up and get a Blogger account.
Anytime someone takes a shot at Bill Simmons and his despicable fanboy nation, I'm all for it!
SIMMONS IS A CUNT.
End of story.
old man ryan,
shut up.
Why would anybody give a rat's ass what either of these clowns write? Just a couple of jackoff megalomaniacs. Move on, you schnooks.....