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January 23, 2004

Still More Irrational Whining From Boston Sports Fans

Bill Simmons, ESPN Page 2's irrepressible Sports Guy and staff writer for ABC's comedy-free late-night alternative to Leno and Letterman, should stick to his Vegas and NFL material. Every time he embarks on one of his Celtics- or Red Sox-centric rants, readers from outside of New England roll their eyes and see whether there's anything new from Ralph Wiley or Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Like virtually all New England sports fans, Simmons cannot think rationally about any topic even tangentially related to his teams.

The targets of his latest soap box diatribe are five pro athletes that still drive him to distraction. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer, Pete Rose and Roger Clemens are each singled out and taken to task for their offenses, both real and imagined, against the Sports Guy's idealized sports universe.

Let me say right off the bat that I have no issue with his critiques of Isiah and The Hit King. Isiah was a first-rate cheap shot artist who hid behind his choir-boy smile and his giant thug teammates. He was a tempermental ball-hog as a player, a babbling idiot as a sportscaster, the worst and last thing that ever happened to the CBA, a comical failure as a head coach, and now he appears poised to become the ultimate self-destruct mechanism as a team president. Even at 62 years of age, Pete Rose remains the same petulant child that he was throughout his playing and managing career. In spite of all that's happened, he still only regrets the fact that he got caught.

Reading Simmons's scathing assault on Kareem makes me wonder whether he watched the same 20 seasons that I did. (OK, I was only alive for the last 17 seasons of Kareem's career, but I watch a fair bit of ESPN Classic.) The same guy who writes fawning columns about the entertainment value of the JailBlazers calls Kareem "famously petulant." According to Simmons, Magic and Bird "saved the NBA from Kareem." OK, I see how you could see it that way. Let's not ignore the fact that, by the same logic, Kareem and Dr. J saved the NBA from the Red Auerbach Celtics. Boston fans only like variety when somebody else's team is winning.

Bill Laimbeer was certainly one of those guys that you hated unless he was on your team. There was generally only one time when I liked the guy, and that was when he was playing the Celtics. I simply adored the way that Laimbeer would torment the crowd at the Boston Garden. One of the testaments to Michael Jordan's "arrival" as the game's pre-eminent player was when Laimbeer began saving his most flagrant full-body fouls for Jordan instead of Larry Bird. There have been plenty of thugs and enforcers in the history of the NBA, but none is easier than Laimbeer to associate with the descent of the Celtics franchise into the state of mediocrity where they would remain throughout the nineties.

Naturally, Simmons reserves his greatest disdain for Roger Clemens. Granted, it's commonplace throughout pro sports in this day and age for guys to leave the teams where they became great when those teams aren't willing to pay the going rate for their services, but Clemens didn't leave behind just any team. Clemens left the Red Sox. And even though, to the best of my recollection, the Red Sox management believed that Clemens was in the twilight of his career and weren't all that interested in resigning him, that makes him evil. And then Clemens left the Blue Jays to try to win a ring with the Yankees. And even though it was a noble quest driven by the heart of a warrior when Ray Bourque did the same thing, that makes Clemens evil. Most recently, after a brief retirement that nobody with half a brain believed was going to last, Clemens signed with the Houston Astros. And even though many star athletes near the end of their careers like to sign with teams where they can be close to their families and play with old teammates, that makes... well, you get the idea.

I don't know, maybe I'm giving Simmons too much credit to expect him to show any semblance of balance or impartiality. But he is writing for ESPN, not the Boston Herald. Reading this column only cements my strong desire to see the Panthers win the Superbowl. If you think Boston fans are bad when they lose, you should see them when they win...

Posted by Dan at January 23, 2004 11:01 PM

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