In the long, long time ago, when Borders bookstores
were part of the urban landscape, I ran across Pacific Rims: Beermen Ballin’ in Flip-Flops and the Philippines’
Unlikely Love Affair with Basketball.
Bought it immediately. Read it
immediately. If you were anywhere close
to me in the fall of 2010, you heard about it.
A lot.
It is a brilliant book. A fantastic read. Truly, as the author intended, a love letter
to the Philippines.
More than anything else, what struck me about the
book was how unlikely it seemed that I would accidentally run across something
so exquisitely written in a chain bookstore.
Although the recipient of plenty of favorable reviews, I had not seen
them. My pinoy family did not know about
it. It was just sitting there, at the Borders,
and I was fortunate to have run across it and to have my love of sports
validated from a totally unexpected place.
I like Bill Simmons.
When Rafe Batholomew showed up on a byline at Grantland, Grantland
became my jam.
In 2012, at a Barnes and Noble – still a thing – This Love Is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juarez was
on one of the shelves. Bought it
immediately. Read it immediately. If you anywhere close to me in the fall of
2012, you heard about it. A lot.
It is a brilliant book. A fantastic read. Truly, as the author intended,
a love letter to Ciudad Juarez.
This time, however, it was not a total surprise. Grantland had published an excerpt of Robert Andrew Powell’s book in March 2012 and I had been keeping an eye out for the book after reading the excerpt.
Independent of Grantland, I, like a whole lot of
other people, devoured Chuck Klosterman’s books. Charles Pierce’s Idiot America is one of the better pisstakes on the contradictions
of America’s political and religious culture.
That they contributed to Grantland seemed unfair.
Over time, I became enamored with virtually all of
the contributors to the online publication.
I hadn’t read something so closely and regularly since The New Republic
in the late 1990s. Over the last couple of
years, the quality – and quantity – of Grantland’s content led to a daily
ritual of printing out whatever articles the site had published that day that
seemed interesting so that I could read them on the Metro ride home. For the last year, there was so much good and
interesting stuff there that I couldn’t get through all the articles by the
time the green line pulled into Greenbelt station.
Lots of people are sad that Grantland was shuttered
by ESPN on Friday. I count myself among
them. But I prefer to focus on how
amazing it is that Grantland existed in the first place.
