The “using golf as a metaphor for father-son relationships” angle for a sportswriting piece is, to me, something that 99,999 out of 100,000 times should never be broached. It might have made for good reading back in the ’60′s when Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer could be appreciated by both Establishment parents and their Baby Boomer kids, but recently the success rate of such an attempt at writing seems so minuscule that every editor should just immediately interrupt with No, no, no! Find something—anything else—to write about when said idea is pitched. It is also decidedly not a coincidence that this type of writing made a resurgence after Nicklaus’ 1986 come-from-behind/last-hurrah victory at the 1986 Masters. It allowed the Rick Reillys and John Feinsteins of the world to write about golf—a sport whose professional center of gravity exists inside of exclusive country clubs and the wallets of Old Money—as a religious experience that Joe and Jane America could attach themselves to. Sprinkle in some safe humor and groan-inducing puns (Who’s Your Caddy? being a real book title that achieved real NY Times success) and you’ve got yourself the kind of Hallmark card way of looking at life.
Being that we are all firmly entrenched in a world in which irony pervades everything we see and listen to and touch, the argument could be made that maybe this perspective and the Rick Reilly- and Mitch Albom-style of writing is breath of fresh air; a reminder to see the pure through the forest of cynicism and the ironical. But to those of us who are quite happy living in our cynical and ironic forests these pieces look and read exactly like what they are: a bullshit desire to try to trade in purity while only delivering overwrought, pungently honey-smelling sap. Or, these pieces read like mailed-in tripe that had been auto-saved and punched up with clichés that were sitting on a hard drive waiting for a rainy day deadline that wanted to be met half-assed. Either one.
Normally, we can rely on Rick Reilly to be the king of this domain. But with his most recent article about Tiger Woods’ performance on Sunday at Augusta it looks like Bill Simmons is willing to wade in Reilly’s waters. The article, which suggest that Tiger’s performance had a transcendent effect on his 3 year old son (or something), is written with the same amount of coloring book aesthetic and soft-lit sepia tones that it could make most people break out the universal I-just-threw-up-a-little-in-my-mouth gesture. I no longer have high expectations for Simmons’ writing, his hack and mailing-it-in tendencies started showing a while ago (for example, this Reilly-esque and puke-worthy piece on Manny Ramirez’s drug suspension in 2009) but I found this piece to be unabashedly retarded, especially considering that Simmons’ recent podcast with Chuck Klosterman saw Klosterman dismantling the idea that kids inherently enjoy sports. (Go here to play the podcast—it’s the one that titled “Basketball Debate”; it is a typically great Klosterman podcast.) Again, I have little faith that Simmons will ever be able to consistently write stuff that had me anxious to read when it when first posted (like he did before he took a writing job on Jimmy Kimmel’s show), but this article is just ridiculous and proof that Simmons may well be on his way to becoming a Rick Reilly-level sports writer.
Which is to say, a grossly overpaid writer who routinely mails his pieces in.
No doubt that the Sports Guy’s latest article is a foreshadowing of a future golf book that he’s going to write, probably called The Gift of Golf and it will no doubt include a chapter about Tiger’s mistresses—complete with rankings—before digging its feet into the Role Model debate. I just threw up a little bit thinking about it.