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June 26, 2008

ESPN Pulls Simmons Critique

Last week, Gelf examined a lazy and inaccurate piece by Bill Simmons in ESPN the Magazine—and by examined, we mean ripped to shreds. Apparently, we weren't the only ones who felt the Simmons piece was a mishit. On the Tennis.com blog, hosted on ESPN.com, online editor Kamakshi Tandon wrote a similar piece, castigating Simmons for his ignorance much more eloquently than we did. But now that piece has been taken down.

Tandon takes Simmons to task for his callow view of the sport. Mocking Simmons's signature rhetorical style, she asks, "[W]hen was the last time [sports opinion columnists] bothered to sit down and watch a match? When was the last time they followed a tournament? When was the last time they tackled a tennis topic that wasn't about whether Anna Kournikova used tennis 'as a vehicle to dress in skimpy outfits and wrap every red-blooded male around her finger'?" Tandon really nailed the Simmons vernacular on the last quote; consider this actual line he wrote in February 2007 about Kournikova, "Were we headed for a world where somebody who looked like thiswould win major after major, become the Tiger of tennis, appear on television 50-60 times per year and transform every red-blooded male into a diehard tennis fan?" More to Tandon's point—and please correct me if I'm wrong—I believe that column, in which Simmons flashes back to the height of Anna-mania, was the closest thing he had written to a tennis column in years.

But something strange happened days after Tandon's piece was posted. It seems that ESPN, displeased with the criticism of its star proto-blogger, pulled the article. The article still appears in ESPN search results for "Bill Simmons" but the actual article has vanished. It can only be accessed through a cached Google search.

Gelf reached out to Tandon, who confirmed that the article had been pulled, but was hesitant to say more. We're also awaiting reply from ESPN.com's ombudsman and an ESPN spokesman, and we will update if we hear back.

Before, we were slightly irritated with the lazy journalism from someone who might not even classify himself as a journalist and ends some columns with the line, "The lesson as always, I'm an idiot." Now, we're calling out a major media company for squashing dissenting opinion from its pages, even when it couldn't be more on the spot.

By the way, not that the Sports Guy would care, but the first few days of Wimbledon have featured some excellent tennis.







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