Thursday, June 5, 2008

Huh...

You know what? Despite the blatant homerism and the fact that the column's format is basically one long rip on Kobe's 2004 persona...the latest Simmons column is actually pretty decent. I'd generally recommend it. This quote I found especially interesting in light of my criticisms of his last column:

(By the way, I disagreed with Bob's serious rebuttal to my intentionally ridiculous column. Both sides need to win for them to have a rivalry; if only one side is winning, then it's a feud and that's all. I covered this in pages 183-186 of my book in the chapter about the Yankees-Red Sox feud -- complete with analysis of Webster's official definition of the word "rivalry" -- a feud that never achieved "rivalry" status until Oct. 21, 2004. From 1959 through 1984, the Celtics and Lakers were feuding and that's it. And if you disagree with that, take it up with Webster.)

I'm not sure I buy that all of the column was "intentionally ridiculous" - there were a few too many pretty clearly genuine shots at the Lakers for me to agree with that (not to mention the fact that I don't really think Bill's writing style lends itself well to "intentionally ridiculous") - but fair enough if he's willing to say the Yankees and Red Sox weren't a rivalry until 2004. Of course, I'm not really sure whether his general attitude towards the Yanks-Sox rivalry really jibes with that statement, but still...benefit of the doubt and all that.

Of course, it's worth pointing out Bill called it a "butt-whupping", not a "feud", but whatever. I'm a magnanimous dude. I also think it's time to dial down the Boston sports hatred, but that's for another post that I may or may not ever write.

(Incidentally, it's worth pointing out the real reason I wrote this post was to try out the new feature on Firefox 3 where you can drag and drop text from one tab to another. It's the greatest toy I've ever had...and I had the Deluxe Dragonzord.



Bet you weren't expecting to see that today.)

1 comment:

Passive Voice said...

i can actually remember the music that played when he came out of the water in the show. who says bloggers aren't 97th-percentile cool?