The new era of sports journalism has finally found it’s home.  The sub-culture of sports blogging has gone pro and the media juggernaut that is ESPN is eating it up.  Since its launch on Wednesday, “Grantland” has become a front page fixture on ESPN.com.  Grantland.com, named after sportswriter Grantland Rice, is the brainchild of Bill Simmons.  A “free-flowing narrative that sometimes touches on mature subjects,” Grantland provides a forum for a certain niche of writer.  The columnists for Grantland.com include eccentric (some might just say fun) writers like Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Downtown Owl: A Novel), Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), and most prominently Simmons.  Simmons is a New York Times best-selling author and has been ESPN’s diamond in the rough for sometime now.  I mean, if you haven’t heard of Bill Simmons you must be living under a rock (or more accurately, you must not be as big a sports dork as I am.)

Grantland is just another endeavor taken in Simmons’ writing career.  Having published two best-selling books, Now I can Die in Peace (about the 2004 World Series) and 2009′s The Book of Basketball (736 pages of nerdy basketball knowledge), the “Sports guy” is anything but a gimmick.  The rebellious sportswriter (ESPN once suspended Simmons’ Twitter account . . . it was JamesDeanesque) has found a way to make very few enemies while racking up a lot of friends.  Simmons’ persona is that of a sarcastic snob, a weasily nerd who takes sports a little too seriously and is not afraid to get into a war of words, yet he is beloved as a writer.  Is it because he is controversial?  Is it because he’s right?  Or maybe it’s because he is a genuine sports fanatic? Continue reading →