Wednesday, January 31, 2007

About That Name

In all the excitement of creating the new blog and bashing on Bill Simmons, we forgot to explain the name of our humble effort. Depending on your definition, we may or may not be very young, but we are decidedly not left handed. The young lefthander is a term that was first used by the late Al Ciraldo and later by the irreplacable Wes Durham to describe their broadcast partner, the late Kim King. King was a three year starter at quarterback for Georgia Tech during the mid-sixties and was involved with Georgia Tech football for over fifty years.

Surprise! Another Simmons Bashing!




As new kids on the sports blog block, we felt the best way to earn some street cred was to pile on everyone's favorite target and a guy we actually used to like, Bill Simmons. The supposed "Sports Guy" reminds us of a radio personality that was in the Atlanta area for a brief while, Scott Ferrall. Ferrall was out of Las Vegas before coming to Atlanta, and he probably should have stayed there. Once he arrived in the A, he became the afternoon drive time guy on an AM sports talk station. His act had to be watered down to fit with the, shall we say, conservative station bosses as well as the listeners that didn't give a shit about hockey, his alleged area of expertise. Fairly soon, his show consisted of people calling in and imitating him back to himself (remind you of anyone?). In many cases, the callers were as funny, if not more so, than Ferrall himself. He was cut loose with a quickness. He briefly resurfaced as the radio play by play voice of the Atlanta Thrashers. This was problematic in two ways. First, the Thrashers were new, bad, and on an FM station. Great idea. Let's put hockey on FM radio in a town where the NHL doesn't rate in the top five leagues to follow. Second, this guy's voice sounded like Harvey Firestein smoked three cartons of Marlboro Reds and ate a truckload of gravel. Ferrall didn't last two seasons. What does this have to do with Simmons, you ask? Well, his editors at ESPN tie his hands and won't let him blast idiots that need blasting. As a result, his columns are watered down retreads that give readers a creepy sense of deja vu. His reader e-mails are often funnier than his actual columns, and that's just the ones he can slip past the editors. Then there was that experiment with Billy Boy doing color for college basketball. The brass over at ESPN must have had a ton of confidence in a guy that has somewhere in the neighborhood of zero knowledge of college athletics, considering they put him on a network that approximately 14.36 people actually get. The biggest tragedy of all is that Simmons is still the only columnist on Page 2 that remains remotely readable. Maybe when he moves on, his work will be fresher and more enjoyable. For now, he's just another douche.