Fans of sportswriting, fans of literature, fans of great writing, fans of McSweeney's, rejoice. Grantland is here.
From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...
When it comes to sportswriting, I tend to subscribe to George Plimpton's small-ball theory: The smaller the ball, the better the writing about the sport. This has a lot to do with my own biases (I'm a baseball fan, not much interest in basketball or football), but it also seems borne out by the literature. And yet, if Bill Simmons is right, the whole notion of a ball theory (small or large) might turn out to be moot.
"We're trying to fill a void, getting good writers to write about what they want," he says during a recent phone conversation about Grantland, the sports and pop culture website that ESPN launched last June with Simmons as editor. Among Grantland's contributors? Chuck Klosterman, Jane Leavy, Malcolm Gladwell, Colson Whitehead and Dave Eggers, who helped launched the site with an essay on Wrigley Field ("ragged and crumbling and lived-in," he calls the ancient ballpark, "beautiful in an almost accidental way") that deftly evokes why, when it comes to the Chicago Cubs, winning has long been a secondary pursuit.
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