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Yo, Philly Down the Shore
We hate to mention the guy’s name at all, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the recent T.J. Simers piece in the LA Times lambasting Philadelphia and it’s fans, but giving only a cursory glance at the actual baseball that is scheduled to be played over the next week. We will not link this failure’s column because that is exactly what he wants, and in all fairness, we were conflicted on even giving this ass more publicity, but he needs to be called out.
Simers is not like some of the other awful sports personalities that exist. He is not in the realm of Skip Bayless, who is annoying, dimwitted, but is ultimately a harmless wuss. He is not Tim McCarver, who it seems at this point simply has a learning disability. No, T.J. Simers belongs in the worst, most dangerous, and most teeth-grinding of categories: Jackass sportswriters who take themselves too seriously.
Simers, along with Gregg Easterbrook and Howard Eskin (to name a few) are so caught up with their own cleverness and celebrity that they forget they write about friggin’ GAMES for a living and have the abject arrogance to think that what they write will somehow affect the games themselves. Simers tries to insult and sensationalize his way into controversy so people will read his rag of a column. He’s also a complete blowhard who tries to sound tough but comes across as a petulant child. People in LA even hate this guy.. like, a lot. Easterbrook thought he was actually a private investigator last year when he wrote column after column for ESPN.com basically calling for the New England Patriots to be run from the league and that he, HE, had the damning evidence to indict them. Gregg, you’re not Bob Woodward, you’re just a verbose and rambling windbag who takes eight paragraphs to say what could be said in one. You were the kind of kid who cried and took his ball home when he lost a game as a child. You are to the sports world what Lance Bass was to the Russian Space Program: a lucky mooch happy to be along for the ride. There are better careers for the Holier-Than-Thou, like Senator from Idaho. As for Howard Eskin, what else is there to be said about a pompous bootlicker who would do anything just to cozy up to a local celebrity and make people believe that he helps Jeffery Lurie and Andy Reid make personnel decisions? His verbal molestations of women on the air are not funny in an Opie & Anthony or Howard Stern kind of way, but rather sad and pathetic like an old man lecherously reaching to cop a feel of high-school tit. We’re half expecting to one day see him walk into a room with Yoo-Hoo and condoms while Chris Hansen tells him to “take a seat right over there.”
The point is, a lot of fans (myself included), listen to and read these writers for the sole purpose of being incensed, and that is exactly what they want. It’s all about readers and ratings. We should all make a concentrated effort to ignore these blowhards, because that’s the only way they’re ever truly going to go away. So T.J. Simers can talk all the shit he wants on Philadelphia, but T.J., we’d rather be “obstinate pugs” than stick-up-our-ass LA phonies who don’t show up until the 4th inning. We’d rather have our hockey team be “a bunch of bullies” than completely and utterly irrelevant. And we’d rather have a tough (albeit borderline impotent) football team than an empty stadium and a history of two NFL failures.
Most importantly, we’d rather kick your ass with homegrown talent who love the game rather than with a leftfielder who quits on his team, a manager you flew in from (gasp) New York, and a bunch of fair-weather (literally, it’s nice there) fans who want Dodger Dogs made with tofu. T.J. Simers, jump in front of a moving truck.
Phils in 6.
Image Credit: Flickr user dameetch.
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To be honest, most sports writers wish they were something they aren't. Sports and other Entertainment writers need to know that it's just a game/album/movie/work of literature and not the end all be all that they make it. Maybe that's the old Roman spirit in us where actually sports like the fights in the Colosseum actually mattered because they were life and death situations. We still have this notion that it really matters that Philadelphia will kick L.A.'s ass this week and that if you write something about it, it's going to change the outcome.
In the long run, it's the people who take sports too seriously that make douche nozzles like Simmers or McCarver or my least favorite... Kornheiser. However, without these figures of suck, there wouldn't be something to talk about at the water cooler or at the game or something to blog about. It's just meaningless entertainment. And one thing is for damn sure, Philly fans can take it. They dish it out and we can take it because we know we aren't going to change.
Do they really have Dodger Dogs that are Tofu?
I don't know. That was just kind of an LA stereotype. They probably do have Tofu Dogs in Dodger Stadium.
Anyway, I realize I'm walking a fine line of hypocrisy here by writing a pseudo-angry article about sportswriters taking themselves too seriously, but I think it's a symptom of something larger across all media (news included). It's a theory I call "Write to Incite" where, basically, if you have nothing intelligent to say, you just blurt out something controversial to get people to pay attention to you. It's what seperates, say, Anderson Cooper and Glen Beck or John Bucciogross from TJ Simers.
At the end of the day, though, we should all just be able to call them douches and not worry about them. It's the suckers that buy into the controversey that worry me. In the interest of not taking MYself too seriously, though, I'm gonna say who cares.
Of course they have tofu dogs. But real Dodger Dogs are actually worth the hype. Just as I tell people here that these imitation places can't touch Jim's steaks, I insist to you the real Dodger Dogs are delightful. Although they did face lawsuits from several groups, including Mormons, according to my wife, for cooking them in beer.
I have to weigh in on this, as you know, as a lifelong Philly fan living in LA. I don't know this Simers guy, but I've found all the respectable sports people and he isn't one of them. Berating Philly is such an easy thing to do if you don't live there. It's unfair, but usually, they're just empty jokes. I'm hearing a lot of cracks this week on the radio, and when I actually met these 2 guys I listen to a few years ago at a campus event, they gave me the requisite chuckle and a few "How do you live with yourself?" and "We feel sorry for you" lines. They weren't being entirely serious. As you pointed out, this guy is, and no one likes him.
As for LA fans, it's not even close to Philly's intensity on a whole, but it's also not as lax as you think. It's a mix, depending on demographics. The Dodgers and Lakers have been out here long enough so that several generations have grown up watching them. It's very cultural - rich white folk who just moved here or have parents in the film biz hop on the bandwagon, but the working class and minorities can be nearly as intense as us. I wore my Phils hat to work this week, and I expected a few jabs from coworkers that grew up here, but I also got cussed out in the street in Spanish. I forgot that there are just so many people here, that even if only 30 % of the city is super-intense about sports, that's still a whole lot of effing people. So don't totally accept the stereotype that all Dodgers fans get there in the third inning; a lot do (and eff up my commute) but that's not what I would consider a real fan anyway.
As for the Angels, well, their only base is the O.C., so they're all morons.
I'm excited but I'm seeing that this week might be very testy for me. One of the underrated aspects of the Manny trade is going from Boston to a market with a huge Latino population. Manny Mania is bigger than I ever expected. I was joking about him being the MVP if they gave MVP awards for August and September only, and I got some hard looks. This will be interesting..
"We should all make a concentrated effort to ignore these blowhards..." starting with an entire post about them, sent to all the -Ist sites.
Yes, why not? Realization of the problem is the first step to remedying that problem.
here/hear