8 comments Bill Simmons is So Tortured by His Favorite Sports Teams: Part 194

Bill Simmons is the only person to have ever been disappointed by his favorite team. This is a little known fact that isn't exactly fact. Bill Simmons just believes he is the only person to have been disappointed by his favorite team. so that belief makes it so. Now Bill is dragging his daughter into this pit of disappointment. We are all aware that Bill has whined on behalf of other people prior to this, but now he is dragging his family into the constant, "Woe is me. I can't believe we are so cursed to care for this team and all they repay us with is disappointment. Let me write 10000 words about this as if I am the only person in the world to have ever experienced disappointment" sports discussion.

Because I have a strict "no-mocking a writer's family" policy, which Bill is testing the strictness of by constantly talking about his family, I won't mock his poor daughter who gets dragged into this column and the pervasive "woe is me" whining it reflects. I feel bad for her because children lack the appropriate amount of perspective on sporting events. Of course, Bill is a grown man and he lacks this perspective. I will mock Bill for what he writes. Some writers turn a mirror on society to show our true nature, while Bill Simmons prefers to turn a mirror on himself so he can look in his own eyes when talking about how truly bad he has it to be a fan of his favorite sports teams. He calls this column "The Consequences of Caring" which is so pathetic and whiny I'm surprised it isn't the title of a Lifetime Movie or a Coldplay album.

I read on Twitter several people said this was one of Bill Simmons' best column. Not sure I see it that way. There is nothing special about this column. His daughter asks a ton of questions while lacking the ability to have perspective, which is what every child does, and Bill whines a little bit about how tortured he is when the Celtics lost to the Heat in Game 6, while also telling us how special and remarkable this Celtics team was. It's pretty much a typical Bill Simmons column. What's most frustrating, is yet again, this column really has nothing to do with sports. It is a continuation of Bill truly believing people read his columns because they are interested in him personally. Only the Simmonites are interested in him as a person. I'm guessing, the rest of us, are we interested? Not really.

My daughter was crying. We were waiting for a green light on Olympic Boulevard, returning home from a Stanley Cup celebration that never happened.

It is clear Bill has passed on his penchant for blowing a loss out of proportion on to his poor daughter. His daughter probably didn't understand the idea the Kings may not have swept the Devils, but they are still in control of the series. While I can excuse her for this, since she is magical and can singlehandedly cause the Kings to win the Stanley Cup, I would think she would have faith in the Kings ability to eventually close out the series.

Nothing sucks more than a visiting fan crashing your section and cheering obnoxiously for his team. That's what every Clippers game is like. I didn't want to be That Guy. I hate That Guy. We all hate That Guy.

Well, Bill was That Guy. He is That Guy who isn't really a fan of the Clippers or Kings, but buys tickets to the Clippers game because he can afford to do so and purchased the Kings tickets with his Grantland spending account. So in a way, Bill was That Guy who isn't really a fan of the team, but shows up and cheers for that team anyway. I would submit that's almost as bad as cheering for the other team. There is a lot of fakeness in doing this. I sit in seats Panthers games right behind a guy who is a Packers fan. He admits he is a big Packers fan and wore an Aaron Rodgers jersey to the Packers-Panthers game. Every other game he showed up in a Panthers jersey. I hate That Guy. He isn't a real fan of the Panthers, yet he has the balls to show up and cheer for them, and that annoys me as much as it would if he were a fan of the opposing team. That Guy is Bill Simmons when he is at Clippers/Kings games.

And even though I prepared her before that Bruins game — Look, this is Daddy's team, just like the Kings are your team, and if I ever teach you anything in life other than "stay off the pole," "don't date a Lakers fan" and "don't text naked pictures of yourself under any circumstances ever," it's that you only have one team for every sport — she couldn't handle it when it happened. She felt betrayed

She probably felt betrayed because she sees her dad claim to be a Celtics/Bruins fan, but he shows up and cheers at Clippers/Kings games. I'm not saying Bill is attempting to have duel fanship, I'm saying for a five year old this is very confusing and Bill actions wouldn't make much sense.

On the way home, I discreetly snapped an iPhone picture of her post-cry for a keepsake — you know, "Here's the first time sports ever made my daughter cry" —

No, Bill doesn't suffer from malignant narcissism and egocentrism at all. He's a perfectly healthy parent by seeming to take some sense of joy in his daughter's pain.

only she caught me taking it, flipped out like a Real World roommate and scratched my right arm so hard that it bled.

This is shit Bill really needs to write down and either keep to himself or talk to his therapist about.

She didn't talk to me for two hours. And that's when I knew my daughter liked sports.

Again, some traces of Bill's egocentrism where her reaction to the loss ultimately reinforced that she liked sports and this reflected well on Bill and his intentions that she does like sports. There are traces of egocntrism in Bill's behavior. He doesn't seem concerned about her violence towards him, he simply cares what this violence ultimately led him to conclude and how it reflected on his intentions for her to end up being a sports fan. I'm an amateur psychiatrist you know.

Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't there are traces of malignant narcissism in these interactions with his daughter? Not only did he (seemingly) gleefully mention other fans on the road saw his daughter crying, that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to take a picture of her being upset in order to keep this memory as some sort of keepsake. He was joyful about how cruel the loss by the Kings seemed to his daughter. This also helps to explain why Bill seems to take such joy in watching his teams lose and is able to write so well about the pain it causes. In some weird way, he enjoys the pain, and his success based on his late 1990's and early 2000's whining about the Red Sox reinforced the idea enjoying the pain was a good thing. Again, I'm an amateur psychiatrist, but I think I'm right.

Of course, right now Simmonites are about to write a comment to me explaining I am a moron and Bill Simmons is quite possibly the coolest guy in the world and they hope their children love sports and ask a lot of questions. All of this criticism will be anonymous of course.

I never, ever could have predicted this. That's parenthood. You roll with the whims of your kids.

Thanks for telling us this. If this were an article about parenting, I would give a shit. This is about sports. So talk about sports. Because you are raising two children doesn't mean you are suddenly Dr. Spock and your readers want to hear some navel-gazing about raising children.

Starting last October, the Kings became my daughter's first favorite team. Hockey moves at a different, more frenetic pace than other live sports — it's tailor-made for the ADD Generation,

Which is why the Stanley Cup ratings have been so stellar and all. Of course it also helps to realize your enjoyment of hockey when you stop becoming a hockey widow conveniently at the exact same time your favorite hockey team starts competing for a Stanley Cup title.

You always hear that hockey players are the best interviews, but you rarely hear anyone say hockey fans are the best live event fans. They are. Of the four major sports, only hockey is significantly better in person.

They are significantly better? And here I heard they were only slightly marginally better. It's a good thing Bill has the authority to rule on this issue since it is a completely subjective issue and all.

(She won't attend Lakers games because "the Lakers fans are there." Let's just say the brainwashing worked.) Imagine my surprise when she fell for the Kings within minutes of her first game, even asking the lady next to us, "Who's the best player?"

Apparently Bill's brainwashing attempts to teach her how to be a frontrunner worked as well. I'm kidding. I know kids tend to latch on to the best players for a team.

We spent the next six months attending Kings games. She learned about hockey on the fly,

She learned about hockey on the fly. Is there another way to learn about sport while that sport is in-season? I guess this is as opposed to petitioning the NHL to stop the current season until Bill's daughter can understand and follow the rules of the game?

As April approached, I started prepping her for

therapy?

the playoffs.

Oh, I was close. Bill's acting as if a loss in the playoffs was equivalent to the death of a family member would have eventually led her to therapy.

She didn't get it. There were more than a few dumb questions like, "So if they beat the first team four times, THAT'S when they win the Cup?"

These are dumb questions because a five year old should immediately grasp the concept of a seven game series.

My daughter attended all but one of their home playoff games.

And the staff members of Grantland who are lifetime L.A. Kings fans and wanted to attend the games with the company tickets do thank her for that.

Just as a note, a search for "Bill Simmons daughter" reveals 17,900,000 hits. Looking his daughter's name up with the term "Bill Simmons" reveals 1,490,000 hits. For a private guy, Bill sure is talking about his daughter a lot lately. As a private person myself, in order to stay that way, I would probably stop writing about my family. Of course that's just me.

The Kings scored four times, Quick notched another spectacular shutout, my daughter broke her unofficial record for "Most attempts to start a 'Let's Go Kings!' chant,"

I'll get the Guinness Book of World Records on the phone immediately.

So Wednesday's game … man.

I tried to warn her. I tried to prepare her: "Look, this is sports, you never know, you can't just assume they're going to win." She wouldn't hear it. She kept saying, "Dad, stop it, just stop. They're going to win."

Bill's daughter is the first child to ever have unrealistic expectations of an event. I really believe he thinks this.

And I just watched the whole thing happen, unable to stop it, knowing the entire time, "Oh God, tonight's probably the night … her first stomach-punch loss."

Again, Bill seems to enjoy some part of this because it reinforces thoughts and theories he already had. If his daughter experiences a stomach-punch loss then that means Bill's theories about stomach-punch losses are in fact true. Even his daughter's pain when the Kings lose is in some way about Bill Simmons because it reinforces his own literary theories as true. In Bill's mind, events that have nothing to do with him, at some point eventually become about him.

I felt that way about all their fans, actually. The Kings have been kicking around for 44 seasons, with those years ranging mostly from "unhappy" to "forgettable."

The Kings are very much unlike the Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics, yet Bill still finds a way to pretend like he has been tortured in some way by these teams. I can only imagine the articles Bill would write if he were a fan of a sports team that had not won a title in their respective sport over the last decade.

Remember that scene when Forrest Gump finds out about his son, digests the news, then worries that the boy is just as stupid as he is? For two terrible seconds, he's thinking to himself, Oh, no, I hope I didn't ruin this kid. That's how I felt when I watched my daughter sobbing. Why did I do this to her? Why would I pull her into this fan vortex where you're probably going to end up unhappy more than happy?

Though Bill was sort of happy his daughter could not engage in useless "what-if" scenarios with him now and seemed excited she experienced a stomach-punch loss. Bill took a picture of his daughter while she was crying because he was so worried about her state of mind of course...not because he thrives on misery and pain. Of course not. Everyone loves having a picture taken of them when they are at their most upset so they can fondly recall a bad moment in his/her life. Well actually, the only people who enjoy recalling pain through pictures are those who attempt to make a living off creating, talking and whining about sports-related pain like Bill Simmons has done.

Then I remembered something. Sports is a metaphor for life. Everything is black and white on the surface. You win, you lose, you laugh, you cry, you cheer, you boo, and most of all, you care.

Sports are life! Bill is the first person to ever think of this metaphor. Check the time and date so I can tell my great-grandchildren about this moment.

It's about two strangers watching you cry at a stoplight. It's black and white, but it's not.

Now, we will commence with Bill's whining about the Celtics Game 6 loss to the Heat. After all, the Celtics haven't won an NBA Title since 2008, how long can one fan base stayed tortured like this?

Only 12 hours later, I flew cross-country to watch the Celtics play Miami in Boston. My wife couldn't believe it. We were committed to a party in Los Angeles the following night.

Has a more douche-like group of sentences ever been written on the Internet? Bill is a daredevil people! He is committed to a party in Los Angeles on Friday night, yet he is taking the chance of going to Game 6 in Boston to see the Heat and Celtics play. Don't try this at home, these rich white people problems should only be attempted by experts. Commitments to parties are apparently a really, really serious thing in Los Angeles.

If anyone wonders how far from 2001 Bill Simmons the current 2012 version of Bill Simmons is, please refer to these three sentences above. I'd like to think 2001 Bill Simmons would have mocked someone for writing the sentence "We were committed to a party in Los Angeles the following night." 2012 Bill Simmons is nothing at all like 2001 Bill Simmons, outside of him using the same pop culture references and bad analogies in his writing.

It was a party and Bill was committed to going. Jimmy Kimmel was there. You can't just not show up. What's astounding is Bill's wife and her astonishment at this. Can you do this? Can you fly cross-country in 24 hours? What would Charles Lindburgh do? Check yourself! You don't want to end up like Amelia Earhart!

"I don't understand," she said. "Why can't you just watch it from home?"

Because watching the game from home won't produce a very good column and since Bill is out of ideas at this point, he needs a column idea from somewhere, anywhere. Bill was hoping to write a "I went home to my roots in Boston to celebrate the Celtics making the NBA Finals and here is a shitload of navel gazing about my favorite team that people love to read about for some reason."

Because we spent five years watching Rondo, Pierce, Allen, Garnett and Doc fighting to maintain something that mattered to them — and to us — even as teammates kept changing, bad breaks kept happening, trade rumors kept swirling and there were multiple reasons for any one of them to pack it in.

This is the part where Bill makes every non-Celtics fan hate the team more by pretending they are more special than your favorite team. We've seen some version of this story quite a few times in Bill's columns over the past few months. This is a once in a lifetime team, they all know each other, Big Four...and so it goes.

Three months later, Derrick Rose was rehabbing his knee, Miami was imploding and the creaky Celtics needed one more victory for the most improbable Finals trip in franchise history. They were so banged up, even their coach was battling a herniated disk. An injured coach???

Has this every happened before in any other major sport? Without him looking it up, and you don't look it up either, Bill Simmons says, "No, this has never happened before." One more reason the Celtics are special in a good way.

It's about the familiarity of those moments more than anything, and how they intersect with the franchise's history as a whole. This isn't a great team, it's a great Celtics team — one that Red would have loved — and over everything else, that's why we will always remember the 2012 Celtics.

"We" will always remember the 2012 Celtics. Apparently Bill has a squirrel in his pocket or something.

And that's why I flew back.

Despite the fact Bill FULLY KNEW he was committed to a party the very next night. These are rich white people problems for sure. What happens if Bill gets in town late? Would the city of Los Angeles implode and what about Bill's relationship with his wife? Would it survive or would she simply go to the party without him? Some things are too horrendous to imagine.

And that's why I flew back...Was this like a Dwight Howard thing? Like, "I'm here to do my job, and I'm going to try hard, just know that I'm here because I have to be?" Had the pressure finally broken him? Was he feuding with Wade? What was his agenda?

Apparently LeBron's agenda was to play the best game of his career and not give the Celtics a chance to win the game so the series would go back to Miami for a Game 7. It certainly seemed that way. There wasn't much more than that involved. I know Bill is more interested in the story behind why LeBron James played well, mostly because he doesn't enjoy the sporting events he attends as much as he enjoys the soap opera aspects of sports, but I think LeBron just wanted to kick some ass. That's pretty much it.

Maybe Worldwide Wes gave him an awesome pregame speech along the lines of the chef from Vision Quest.

A Vision Quest reference. Timely.

I don't know what happened. I just know the shots wouldn't stop going in. After about the fifth dagger in a row (he made 10 straight), the crowd started groaning on every make — shades of Philly's Andrew Toney ripping our hearts out 30 years ago.

For those of you counting, that was 30 years ago the last time an opposing player came into Boston Garden/TDWhateverthefuckitiscallednow and lit up the Celtics. 30 years since this last happened on the scale LeBron did this in Game 6. I'd say if a team has gone 30 years without this happening on their home court, that is a pretty fortunate team. Of course, Bill Simmons doesn't see it this way and I'm just surprised he didn't create a corollary or theory to mark this occasion of when Boston fans were tortured by their Celtics team that devastatingly failed to make the NBA Finals for the third time in the past five years.

You can't imagine what this was like to witness in person.

No one can imagine. Even though there were thousands of people at the game and millions of people watching the game on television, YOU DON'T FUCKING KNOW WHAT IT WAS LIKE! Only Bill Simmons understands this...well, him and his magic daughter.

As a Celtics fan, I was devastated. As a basketball fan, I appreciated the performance for what it was.

I have to say, this is exactly how I felt. Bill Simmons and I had the same emotions. Bill Simmons is speaking directly to me and how I feel right now! I want to learn more about him as a person! Give me more information about the zany antics of your children, Bill! What do your friends think about the NBA Finals matchup? I need to hear a Jimmy Kimmel or Adam Carolla reference.

Needless to say, the Celtics couldn't match him — especially Pierce, who's worn down from four weeks of battling Andre Iguodala, Shane Battier and LeBron on one leg and appears to be running on fumes of his fumes' fumes at this point.

Otherwise if he wasn't worn down, Pierce could have easily guarded James during this game. Naturally.

The fans were so shell-shocked that many (including me and my father) filed out with three minutes remaining, not because we were lousy fans, not to beat the traffic, but because we didn't want to be there anymore.

And you wanted to beat traffic. Don't lie. Also, Bill had a party he was committed to back in Los Angeles. You can't just ignore these type of things and the clock was ticking "24" style. Could Bill make it back for the party? I'm on the edge of my sea---wait, I just fell on the floor I was so far on the edge of my seat.

If I were 9 years old, I would have been crying just as hard as I did after the '78 Sox-Yankees playoff game. I stopped crying about sports a long time ago.

Which is nice because Bill Simmons is 40 years old and probably shouldn't be crying over sports very often. But I do give him credit for not crying over sports. It's almost like he's a grownup.

We both agreed that LeBron couldn't possibly play that well again, and that Pierce couldn't possibly play that poorly.

I am sure if Paul Pierce had played that poorly, the Celtics won the series and Pierce was named MVP Bill have taken back all the comments he made about Kobe going 6-for-24 in the deciding game of the 2010 NBA Finals. Sure he would have.

After coming apart at that stoplight, my daughter only cried for another minute, finally redirecting her anger toward me. You know, because that's what daughters do.

Most often daughters do this when their asshole father takes a picture of them crying and want to use it as a keepsake.

"You don't even care about the Kings," she hissed. "You only care about your stupid Boston teams."

"That's not true," I said.

"I'll jump on any successful team's bandwagon, honey. There isn't a bandwagon I'm afraid of jumping on in order to talk about how tortured that team is or to experience the good times that team has. I'm a special kind of bandwagon fan in that I am not a fan of a team that is experiencing success, but I will pretend to know exactly what the fan base is thinking at all times and want to absorb some of the success in order to put it in my writing. What if I became a Oklahoma City Thunder fan starting this week? I will and Oklahoma City fans would love it. Who says 'no' to this?"

"But you don't REALLY care, you're not a Kings fan."

"That's true."

"Then you don't understand," she decided. "You don't understand what it's like. You have NO idea."

At least Bill's daughter is taking my complaint that Bill tries to claim he understands each team's fan base better than anyone else right to Bill. Of course, Bill denies this because he is a sports fan. As if being a fan of sports means he understands what every fan base has gone through in their respective team's history. He knows how Cavs fans feel about LeBron James playing in Miami, because LeBron James lit up his Celtics in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference Finals, or claims he understands how Sonics fans feel to have lost their entire franchise. Bill understands because in his mind the Celtics making three Eastern Conference Finals in five years and losing in one of these Eastern Conference Finals due to an epic performance by the NBA's best player is the same thing as losing that player to Miami in free agency. Bill also believes losing the Celtics losing to the Heat is the same thing as having an entire franchise move out of the city. He understands your pain Sonics-fans. Bill's sports-related pain is always equal to or greater than any other sports fan's sports-related pain. Bill wants to have a monopoly on pain caused by his favorite sports teams. It has to be this way or else it seems he will lose his identity as a long-suffering fan, even though the times he's truly suffered with his teams over the last 10 years are few and far between.

But that's the thing about sports … I do.

You can be a fan of sports and still not understand another sports fan's pain. Stop whining and just enjoy your favorite team.