By Paul M. Banks

Maybe you’ve seen a recent advertisement from Sirius XM radio. A spot where they highlight the men who changed music (Elvis Presley), comedy (Richard Pryor), sports (Michael Jordan) and radio (Howard Stern). If and when the title is bestowed upon a sportswriter, it will no doubt be ESPN.com’s “Sports Guy” Bill Simmons. As the daily newspaper sports section continues to vanish and find a new version of a home on the world wide web, perhaps no one personifies this revolution better than Simmons. To quote a feature story on him in today’s New York Times:

“his column has an estimated 1.4 million page views a month; his weekly podcasts have been downloaded 21 million times this year via iTunes; and his new book, at 700-plus pages, “The Book of Basketball,” reached No. 1 on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list last week…And he has done it without the benefit of the print apparatus — no newspaper column, no contract with Sports Illustrated. Indeed, Mr. Simmons, who voluntarily stopped his column in ESPN The Magazine this summer, seems at times to run away from print. His ascendance also speaks to the changing role of writers — sports and otherwise — in today’s news landscape.”

In other words, Simmons is a rock star in the sports media world. No, he’s the rock star of rock stars in the sports media world,  making him Elvis- and here’s why. The many coincidences are striking and go well beyond a shared love for the city of Las Vegas:

1. Technological developments in Media perfectly coincided with their career.

That newfangled invention called television made Elvis Presley a star. His photogenic traits and sex appeal to straight women and gay men made him perfect for the boob tube. He was exceedingly lucky that the small screen began getting mass consumed at about the same time his career took off. Likewise, Simmons found the internet at a time when almost everyone had “suspicious minds” about it. In 1997, people were more likely to buy a Hootie and the Blowfish album than publish their own website. However, Simmons got in on the ground floor when he began Boston Sports Guy.com, a small site that within a couple years grew to 9,000 hits a day. Then in 2001, ESPN.com came calling. In Elvis’ later years, he would literally shoot his own televisions for amusement. It will be interesting to see what Simmons does to his laptops later in life.

2. Breaking all the conventional rules

As the New York Times article says, Simmons’ book is 700 pages. So it’s approximately 1,768, 876, 890, 543,876, 765, 456 words long, or thereabouts. If you’ve read his internet columns, you know they FREQUENTLY run over 25,000 words an entry. For comparison sake, a piece of fiction writing can be considered a novel at 50,000 words. Sports guy also references his family and friends (J. Bug, House anyone?) and never even attempted to hide any bias for the teams he loves. Pretty much the complete opposite of what is taught in j school. And these dissident practices are nothing compared to Presley’s music which featured riffs, lyrics, subject matter and tempo changes that were very anti-establishment in rock n roll. Itself, a form of expression built on railing against the establishment.

3. From Garden Apartment to the Penthouse

I’ve been to both Graceland in Memphis, TN and seen the small one room Tupelo, MS shack Elvis was born in. All Americans are familiar with his rags-to-riches-to-prescription pills and fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches story. Simmons wasn’t exactly born “in the ghetto,” but he did come from a broken middle-class home, and during his 20s he found himself tending bar to make ends meet. Today, his salary is at a level that less than 1% of sports media professionals could dream of seeing.

His autobiographical Horatio Alger story is detailed in the introduction of his first book, “Now I can Die in Peace”, but there’s one key glaring omission. He started his own site, it took off, and then ESPN came calling to sign him. But where/how he did make the connection to the mothership? Why did the Evil Empire take notice?  You can be good, and you can build a cult following yourself, but no one makes the jump from the grassroots to the big national stage without having someone on the inside lobbying for them…so where/who/what/when/why/how?

4. They both got in touch with their inner African-American

When you take the audio tour of Graceland, you get to hear Lisa Marie Presley say of her father, “I would frequently hear him coming from two rooms away because all his jewelry would jingle.” Elvis was “icy” with his “bling-bling” long before Nelly and P. Diddy were even born. And the black influence on his music is obvious and well-documented. As for Simmons, in his own words on page 8 of his new book

“That spawned my racial identity crisis in the first grade (fully described in my Red Sox book) when I gave myself the Muslim name Jabaal-Abdul Simmons. I didn’t know any better. I wanted to play for the Celtics and most NBA players were black. Besides I had a lot more in common with them- my favorite sport was black,  my favorite player (Charlie Scott) was black, my favorite comedians (Jimmie Walker, Red Foxx, and Flip Wilson) were black, most of my favorite tv shows (Sanford and Son, the Jeffersons, Good Times, the Mod Squad) starred blacks,  and I even made my mother take me to Roxbury in 1975 to see Keith Wilkes’ one and only movie Earl, Cornbread and Me. It pissed me off that I was white.”

And it’s fitting because as Simmons put it in a recent New York Times interview “Race is ingrained in everything that’s happened through N.B.A. history.” 

5. Influence has spawned armies of imitators

I’m sure you’re aware that tons of people make their living in this world as “Elvis impersonators.” Can any other musician claim that? No, not even the Beatles. Unless you count the ’90s Britpop band Oasis. And you don’t need to visit Sons of Bill Simmons.com to learn about the millions of imitators Sports Guy has inspired.

When I attended the Sports Journalism Summitt II at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, FL, I came up with a drinking game. I told the other students/attendees to keep a tally the next day of every time one of our instructors/presenters says “I know you all want to be Bill Simmons, “let’s get our Simmons moment out of the way for this session,” “that was very Sports Guyesque” etc. It was quite easy to get drunk with those parameters in place.

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