Fighting Talker

A first here on Fighting Talker, a book review. It’s just like the New York Review of Books except that I’m not from New York and I can hardly spell intellectual. So here it goes.

God Save the Fan: How Preening Sportscasters, Athletes Who Speak in the Third Person, and the Occasional Convicted Quarterback Have Taken the Fun Out of Sports (And How We Can Get It Back) by Will Leitch, founder of deadspin.com.

Let me put this simply. This is one of the best books written about sports and our current sporting culture. Leitch summarizes everything that many of can’t stand and love about sports, athletes and especially the media (see ESPN) that covers it all.

For anyone that views sports with even the slightest sense of irony or humor, Leitch’s Deadspin is required viewing. This book picks up where the site leaves off, serenading Gilbert Arenas, lampooning ESPN (and recounting his terrifying 24-hour ESPN binge), ripping Peter Angelos, reminding folks that Barbaro is, in fact, just a horse and of course talking about his beloved St. Louis Cardinals, Arizona Cardinals and Illinois Fighting Illini.

Rarely has a book I’ve read been right about so much. Topics include how ESPN is a ruinous influence on sports, why most athletes are nothing like us, and most that sportswriters are pompous gasbags whose own egomania is directly related to their hatred of their jobs and themselves.

About the only quibble I have with him is his view that fans who have teams taken away from them (like Browns or Nordiques fans) should just keep on cheering for the teams in their new city and that anything else is sporting treachery. I disagree entirely, except in rare cases of total fan disdain and ignorance (the Expos come to mind). If an owner bails on the city (especially if the team has a long-time connection to the community) the fans have every reason to quit on the team. They’ve already been betrayed, why should the fans served as the battered wife running back to the abuser?

But otherwise, everything he says is dead-on. It also serves as a good primer to some of the most common memes of the sports blogger world. If you’ve ever wondered what all the references to”You’re with me, leather” meant, you’ll find out here.

All in all, this book is a must read for anyone who loves sports but is being driven more and more crazy by them.