Jonathan Mahler

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“The Fan Became The Engine”

May 31, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kris Jenner is the new Joe Jackson, and a big ass the new moonwalk.

We don’t have to like what the Kardashian-Jenner clan tells us about our era, but to deny their significance in it–what exactly do those people do?–is to miss the point. From Reality TV to Netflix algorithmic ratings to likes and retweets, the fans, those barbarians, have stormed the gates, overturning the professional class. 

Bill Simmons was part of that revolution, bringing a spectator’s passion (along with writing chops and a funny, if sometimes sexist, sense of humor) to a field that had long been called the “sports pages.” The Internet was his playing field and it graduated him from Boston cheap seats to Los Angeles courtside, a progression that never completely sat right. 

Now that his run at ESPN has finished ingloriously, here are two passages from Jonathan Mahler’s prescient 2011 New York Times Magazine piece, “Can Bill Simmons Win the Big One?” The first focuses on the rise of the fan and the other on the likely bitter ending of a stormy if mutually profitable relationship.

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A brief, reductive history of modern sportswriting in America might look something like this: Practitioners of the craft during the first two-thirds of the 20th century paid for their unfettered access to athletes by glorifying them, “Godding up those ballplayers,” as one sportswriter memorably put it. In the 1970s, sportswriters stopped protecting athletes and started demythologizing them. As they did, their access diminished. The gulf between ballplayers and fans widened.

Enter Simmons and his legion of imitators, whom you won’t find loitering in a locker room, trawling for quotes or sitting at the press tables of an N.B.A. game, where rooting is forbidden. At the center of Simmons’s columns is not the increasingly unknowable athlete but the experience of the fan. His frame of reference is himself. He might not be able to tell you how a ballplayer felt performing a particular feat, but he can tell you how he felt watching it, what childhood memories it evoked, the scene from the movie “Point Break” it brought to mind, which one of his countless theories — newcomers to his column can consult a glossary on his home page — it vindicates. There’s a vaguely metaphysical quality to this approach: the sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls it “the tao of Bill.”

Simmons is more than just a fan; he is the fan, the voice of the citizenry of sports nation. In a larger sense, what he’s doing is nothing new. In much the same way that newspaper columnists call out callous politicians and crooked businessmen, Simmons rails against greedy owners, the commissioners who invariably side with them, overpaid players and dysfunctional franchises. Recently, he lambasted the Maloof brothers, the owners of the Sacramento Kings, for neglecting the team, and David Stern, the N.B.A.’s commissioner, for allowing them to do so. “Once you get approved to purchase an N.B.A. franchise, for whatever reason, David Stern seemingly yields all control over your behavior unless you criticize his officials,” Simmons wrote. “Anything else? Knock yourself out. Buying into the N.B.A. is like buying a house: Once you move in, feel free to disgrace the neighborhood however you want.”

Simmons is a funny, intelligent and original writer. He comes up with surprising angles and conceits — in a column last month, he applied quotes from “The Wire” to moments in the N.B.A. playoffs — that may not always work but certainly prevent him from becoming predictable. He is especially good at describing sports moments, a dying art since the arrival of nonstop sports highlights.

But Simmons’s rise has been fueled by broader forces too. The recent explosion of the sports industry — the emergence of 24-hour sports networks, sports-radio shows, Web sites, fantasy leagues, video games — has been geared foremost toward creating and satisfying the demands of the consumer. The fan became the engine of the sporting world.

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It was a sultry afternoon, and midway through the game, we went inside to the Dugout Club to cool off and talk. Simmons sounded as if he was having some regrets about Grantland. “It hasn’t been as much as fun as I had thought,” he told me. “I’m not sure I would do it again.” Too much of his time was being spent in the office, dealing with administrative tasks, which was encroaching on his column.

Simmons’s literary persona suggests a slacker, a guy who would like nothing more than to spend his days drinking beer and watching sports. This image, enhanced by his loose, casual prose, is misleading. The real Simmons is hard-working and competitive. His rise to prominence has been punctuated by bouts of restlessness and frustration, even when things looked from the outside to be going his way. He’s still chafing over his publisher’s handling of his 2009 book, The Book of Basketball, a No. 1 New York Times best seller.

As far as Simmons has come since he first started searching for an audience, he wants to go much further, to create something more enduring than his column or even his books. But the drudgery of running his own publication is already intruding on the utopian world he has built for himself. And he knows that the only thing preventing him from becoming another overexposed hack, an ex-sportswriter who now gets paid to blather on TV, is his column, which can take days to research and write. “My biggest concern about the site is that I don’t want the column to just be one of the things I’m doing,” Simmons said.

After the game, we drove to Chinatown for a late lunch. “Listen to this,” Simmons said, reading the fortune from his cookie as we were getting up to leave: “An important business venture may soon develop for you.” Everyone laughed. “Or it could be the end of my career,” Simmons joked. “I don’t know, I think I have one more big sellout contract in me.”•

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“The Game, In Other Words, Has Never Been Healthier. So Why Does It Feel So Irrelevant?”

October 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

babepointing

Some things are immensely popular right before a steep decline, like cricket in America in 1900 or newspaper advertising in the 1990s. Just because you’re on top doesn’t mean you’re staying there. Baseball has never been more popular in America than it is now, as measured by ticket sales and television contracts, but something seems amiss. It’s no longer the national pastime; thanks to gambling, a taste for violence and a less-demanding schedule, the NFL reigns supreme. And there isn’t a star in baseball equal to Lebron James of the NBA. 

From the moment of the Nelson Doubleday hokum, the sport was always sold on a lie. Myths were built, and that was unsustainable. It was never a rustic sport nor a clean one, but it was protected as such because it was considered too important to the national psyche. It was the present being sold as nostalgia, and that can’t work in a world of decentralized media. 

But even before the PED scandals of the ’90s and aughts (which are largely silly and filled with hypocrisies) made it all come crashing down, baseball had lost traction with the popular culture, a sport that revered team before individual and humility before braggadocio, unless you were looking for a fastball behind your ear. These society-wide things are (probably) cyclical, and all you can do is better promote your stars.

Commissioner Bud Selig’s retirement is a positive, as his leadership has flagged on almost every important issue, from technology to padded caps for pitchers to stadium disputes. The rise of regional sports cable and its need for live content has provided the MLB with money to paper over Selig’s failings. Owners and players have never been richer, and there’s some danger in that. I have doubts that the next commissioner will be more progressive, but we can hope. So many kids and young adults having no interest in the sport is scary.

The other best thing that could happen to baseball would be to have its antitrust exemption stripped. There is no way for competition to arise under the current system. (To be fair, even without the exemption, it would be difficult to start a new league.) But perhaps a speed league that enforced rules to shorten games to two hours would force the MLB to change and grow. Good competition for the league is as important as good competition between the teams–maybe even more important in the big picture.

The opening of “Is It Game Over?” Jonathan Mahler’s recent New York Times essay:

“MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is doing just fine. Unlike the N.F.L. and the N.B.A., it has been free of labor strife for nearly 20 years. It has more exciting young stars than I can ever remember. It has even achieved that elusive ‘competitive balance,’ with seven different champions over the last decade. Teams across the country are playing in brand-new ballparks that they somehow persuaded local governments to help pay for. Over the last 20 years, baseball revenues have grown from roughly $1 billion to nearly $8 billion.

The game, in other words, has never been healthier. So why does it feel so irrelevant?

Maybe the best evidence of this admittedly unscientific observation is the national TV ratings. There’s no sense comparing baseball’s numbers to football’s, which exist in a whole other Nielsen’s stratosphere. But baseball is losing ground to pro basketball, too. In 2012, the N.B.A.’s regular season ratings on ABC were nearly double those of Major League Baseball on Fox. The last eight years have produced the seven least-watched World Series on record.

More to the point, baseball seems simply to have fallen out of the national conversation (unless the conversation happens to be about steroids, that is). The last time baseball felt front and center, culturally speaking, was the 1998 home-run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. And we all know how that turned out.”

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“Like All Dreams That Are On The Brink Of Being Extinguished, Its Keepers Cling To It With A Fierceness”

August 2, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler, who wrote the amazing 2005 book Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, explores the radical political hotbed that is Oakland, home for decades to Panthers, Angels and Occupiers, all drawn by the cheap rents and the outlaw spirit. An excerpt:

“Why are radicals so inexorably drawn to Oakland? The cheap rents don’t hurt (free, if you’re willing to squat in an abandoned house or industrial space, and hundreds apparently are). Oakland is urban, dangerous and poor — fertile social conditions for inciting revolution. What’s more, it has a long, easily romanticized history of militancy. America’s last citywide strike, in 1946, took place there; the Black Panthers were born in Oakland; and David Hilliard, a former Black Panthers chief of staff, still gives three-hour tours of the movement’s local landmarks and sells his own line of Black Panthers hot sauce: ‘Burn Baby Burn.’

Running parallel to this history of political militancy is a history of lawlessness. In the early 1970s, when the Hell’s Angels were scandalizing America, their most infamous clubhouse was located in East Oakland. The Oakland native Felix Mitchell was one of the first to scale up corner drug-dealing into a multimillion-dollar, gang-controlled business. On his death — he was stabbed in Leavenworth in 1986 — the city gave him a hero’s send-off: thousands came out to see his coffin borne through his old East Oakland neighborhood by a horse-drawn carriage trailed by more than a dozen Rolls Royces and limousines.

In Oakland, the revolutionary pilot light is always on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Oakland writer and social activist Jack London said this to a group of wealthy New Yorkers: “A million years ago, the cave man, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the cave man a million times — you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you.

It’s a dream that still exists in Oakland — that the world can be taken from the haves and delivered to the have-nots. Like all dreams that are on the brink of being extinguished, its keepers cling to it with a fierceness that is both moving and an extreme exercise in the denial of the reality that is at their door.”

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The Symbionese Liberation Army commits acts of terrorism in Oakland in 1974:

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“The City Was A Sinking Ship, A Zoo Where The Apes Were Employed As Zookeepers”

May 16, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Evidence of the city’s decline was everywhere: subway cars bruised with graffiti." (Image by JJ Special.)

Jonathan Mahler, author of the incredible book about NYC in crisis during the 1970s, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, wrote a New York magazine article in 2005 that recalled how Rupert Murdoch’s rise to media domination was largely driven by the Aussie’s gambit that the beleaguered city would return to prominence. An excerpt:

“The year was 1976, and evidence of the city’s decline was everywhere: subway cars bruised with graffiti, arson fires that swallowed whole ghetto blocks, soaring murder rates, and annual six-figure job losses. The city put on its best face for the Democratic convention, hastily enacting an anti-loitering law that enabled cops to round up most of the prostitutes in the vicinity of Madison Square Garden. For a few days anyway, even Times Square was more or less hooker-free. But the area soon returned to being America’s most infamous erogenous zone.

Around the country, cartoonists poked fun at New York in its apocalypse: The city was a sinking ship, a zoo where the apes were employed as zookeepers, a stage littered with overturned props. Central Park had become a running joke in Johnny Carson’s nightly monologues (‘Some Martians landed in Central Park today . . . and were mugged’). The syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak understated the matter considerably when they wrote, ‘Americans do not much like, admire, respect, trust, or believe in New York.’

It’s easy now to look back at this moment and see it for what it was—a classic market bottom. But at the time, few recognized it as such. One man who did was Murdoch. Where others saw a city in financial distress, he saw a place ripe for entrepreneurship. Where others saw a failed experiment in social democracy, he saw an opening for simple supply-and-demand capitalism.”

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Walter Cronkite on New York City’s financial emergency, 1976:

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