Football Season is Over again
No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your (old) age. Relax — This won’t hurt.
All my heroes kill themselves. Hunter Thompson, Hemingway, Cobain, Chopin, et al. Most of them used a gun.
The tradition continued this week, as Deadspin staffers walked out en masse in an act of bravery; a stoic seppuku of the site they loved. Their new ownership group assigned two embarrassing hobgoblins to run a pump and dump scheme on all of the former Gizmodo Media Group brands, creating revenue efficiencies and monetizing every last pixel until the readership was driven off en masse and only the husks remained. The writers didn’t want their family (and no other site treated their readers like family the way Deadspin had) to watch a loved one die a slow, painful, public death, so they pulled the plug.
Like Gawker’s demise before it, very dumb and largely worthless people celebrated, while nearly every reputable major media member and outlet mourned its death. How CEO Jim Spanfeller or Editorial Director Paul Maidment can even leave the house after watching 99% of their peers mock their stupidity is beyond me. Were I in their shoes, I would likely move to Wyoming and get a job on a ranch, or dive into a hay bale so that nobody would recognize me as media’s biggest living goof. They won’t, though, because they’re moneyed and the moneyed do not feel shame in the same way the rest of us do.
They deserve no further words. Their legacy is and should be that they destroyed one of the only good remaining sites. And, fuck, what a site.
I’ve read Deadspin every day for longer than I can remember. I would log on to read Barry’s 9 AM blog at whatever ad agency I was pretending to do billable work at. I’d read Daulerio’s smut peddling with guilty glee, diving into the comments to see what cleverness Clue Heywood or Uwe Bollocks had to add. I cackled at the ongoing feud with Buzz Bissinger, which was as incoherent as it was generally respectful of a legend in the industry. Charlie Pierce’s review of Bill Simmons’ basketball book made me reconsider everything I had thought up to that point about Simmons, and how I viewed the new generation of “gonzo” fan sports writing. I read every Magary column, often refreshing on Thursday afternoons until it showed up.
Deadspin was a community. It blended absurdity with genuine beauty like nothing had before, and brought a degree of levity to sports that other outlets refused to embrace. More than anything, it made everyone envious. Envious of the fact that these guys got to do THAT for a living, and was a constant reminder that you couldn’t because, honestly, it’s harder than it looks and you probably weren’t capable.
I got to rub elbows with them, which will always be the coolest thing I’ve ever done. Barry Petchesky accepted a direct message from me on Twitter and let me pitch him, despite the fact that my display name (Big Papa Piss) probably would’ve scared most other editors off. 4 hours later, he’d bought the pitch, and three weeks later I had my first ever publishing credit on a major outlet. I cried when it went up. I still get emotional thinking about it, too.
But, something even weirder happened later. The rest of the staff, who I’d never interacted with, reached out in some capacity. They followed me on Twitter, or started liking some of my jokes, or DM’d me to tell me what they enjoyed about the pieces I wrote. They kept in touch. They encouraged me to keep going, keep writing, keep doing this thing that I had almost given up on.
Prior to this, I’d spent 10 years trying to get anyone to read anything. It’s much harder than it sounds, particularly when you are in an afterthought city. For all of publishing’s advancements in accessibility over the past few years (many of which contributing to its current state of rot), it is still an industry of gatekeepers. I don’t think I would’ve ever “quit” so to speak, as the urge to write will always happen to someone who enjoys it, but that urge was already becoming significantly less frequent.
Writing is a lonely business, and it can be increasingly territorial as more outlets close in favor of #brand #partners that play the part. So, it is extremely odd that these writers were not only interacting with me, but actively encouraging me to continue to build my reputation with more work. That is the type of kindness that is rare in general, let alone in a field as embittered as writing. It is the type of kindness that drives someone like David Roth to spend his last 24 hours in professional agony surrounded by the empty desks of his friends, just so he can publish some pieces by freelancers he had taken on.
It is the kindness of Laura Wagner, perhaps the best reporter in the industry at the moment, taking phone calls with someone she barely knew to give me advice on my first story that would require a heavy lift on reporting. She helped me piece together the puzzle, gave me advice on how aggressively to play certain things with sources, and I can confidently say it would’ve been a significantly worse piece without her guidance.
I’m still new to this, but I’ve done enough of it to say confidently that it’s rare to hear back from an editor on every pitch. Barry is the only one who would respond to all of mine. And not just respond, but put thought into his rejections. Each time, he was teaching me what mattered in this business and making me smarter about how I thought about my own writing. I am much better today than I was in January of 2019, because Barry gave me a crash course not just on how to improve my prose, but how to improve my perspective.
I got to meet him and some of my other heroes in person. I played it cool because it seemed silly to let them in on the fact that I was a bit star struck, particularly after they’d gone so far out of their way to treat me like a peer instead of a tourist. We hung out in Planet Hollywood in Times Square, surrounded by movie memorabilia and eastern European tourists eating overpriced cheeseburgers. I resisted the urge to pepper them with questions about the Daulerio years, or Drew’s rise to semi-stardom, or anything Leitch-related. I just hung out and continued to pretend that I deserved to be there, the way I had when they let me show up on the same goddamned site as them a few times. I’ll do it again the next time I’m in New York, too, and any time that they’ll allow me.
They’ll do something else. They all will, because they’re too fucking good not to. But they’ll never do Deadspin again. Nobody can. Maybe it’s better that way, to just put a bullet in a great thing instead of letting it bleed out.
Football Season is Over. No more fun for any of us.
