Intro: A Voice in the Wilderness

Hi. I'm glad you've decided to take a moment to read this post.

Bill Simmons is truly one of the most important figures to appear in the sports media in a long time. With a fresh and humorous writing style, he has reminded us all that sports is fun and intended to be enjoyed. Simmons established himself back when four beat writers in suits would go on TV and pontificate about NCAA violations, the merits of instant replay, whether the wild card was good for baseball, and other such topics. They had forgotten that we follow sports to hang with our friends and marvel at the otherworldly abilities of top athletes. Nothing in America beats sports for water-cooler talk, and Simmons became the one guy at work who had season tickets to every game. We wanted to hear from that guy.

Water-cooler Simmons is good for the column. He can tell an entertaining story when he writes not only about the games, but he can make us laugh about people he saw at the arena, about how a game reminded him of a movie we all like, about what he and his buddies did before tip-off. It's fun stuff. But when you want to discuss the substance and history of the sport, at length, you don't necessarily have the water-cooler guy in mind. You need a sober-minded, serious analyst. And despite the heaps of praise The Book of Basketball has received, it's really just a collection of columns by the water-cooler guy. One cannot discern that Simmons has made any particular effort to be scholarly and objective. It's a shame, because baseball fans have Bill James' Historical Abstracts to peruse; we basketball fans have Bill Simmons one-liners.

Bill Simmons' Bogus Book is here, then, as a counterpoint to Simmons' magnum opus. Someone needed to reign in the propaganda; someone needed to point out the fallacies. Someone needed to combat the army of strawmen and the slippery logic. Someone needed to point out the omissions, cut through the rhetoric, and steer the discussions back to the point. Someone needed to ask for explanations and turn assumptions back into questions. Scores of critics failed to do so - and that's why Bill Simmons' Bogus Book is here. That's why I'm here.