Why Sports Gives Life Meaning Today

Really, it's not sports, per se, it's writing about sports. Writing like this:

"....The 5-6 Rams are trailing the West by one game. They have lost four of their last five games by a total of 82 points. Their fans aren't just booing during games; they're doing everything short of throwing their own feces. Their coach has become such a punchline, a reader e-mailed me this week and asked if I could start using the word "Martzian" in columns, as in, "When I locked my keys in the car, that was pretty Martzian of me." Their collapse in Green Bay was almost a cry for help, like when little kids need attention and start breaking soda bottles on a sidewalk...."

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I have always felt that sportswriters got the liberties that other journalists should be allowed, but they really only get those liberties because of the utter meaninglessness of what they write about. If you were that cavalier about, say, the municipal sewage treatment plant, you'd never get away with it.

This work, by the way, is Bill Simmons, ESPN's Sports Guy columnist and comes to us, like most other things of merit, via President Furst. It is worth reading regardless of the sport, except for hockey. I tried taking an interest in hockey because Trent was playing hockey, but once the lunatic Finnish guy took over coaching and benched him, he's taken his broken hockey heart over to lacrosse and so now I don't have to worry about it.