Why Australian sports fans should mourn Grantland

Hey you. Yes, you, Australian sports fan. I have some bad news for you. Grantland, an American sports and pop culture thought factory, founded by Bill Simmons and owned by ESPN, was shuttered some time between Friday evening and Saturday morning Australian time.

If you aren’t familiar with Grantland, clear your diary for the next three weeks and head on over.

What you will find, discerning sports fan, is an archive of some of the most interesting and unique perspectives on a diverse range of sports and pop culture subjects: concussions and performance enhancing drugs, The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, why European handball isn’t the world’s most popular sport, and a far-too-coincidental-to-be-a-coincidence assessment that the Saw franchise is actually a sequel to Home Alone, with Jigsaw’s true identity that of Kevin McCallister.

ESPN’s decision to close the site down was the final jab in a fencing joust between the entity and its one-time MVP Bill Simmons, who left the company in May this year. The story about the stories surrounding the Simmons-ESPN relationship is like a chapter from a political thriller.

The loss of the website has been greeted with near-universal condemnation, and as people like me grapple and grope to fill the time formerly spent on the site with articles and podcasts and other media so epically produced, those calls will only grow louder.

It would be remiss of me to omit that Grantland’s acerbic stylings were what made me pick up the figurative pen in early 2014. I’m one step into the journey to Grantland’s Everestian peak, but I’m one step farther than I otherwise would have been. The loss stings.

Sure, many of the writers are still ESPN writers, and will no doubt surface there – if they don’t seek alternate opportunities, as many former Grantlanders have already – and in the social world we live in, their stuff is only a few clicks away. But that isn’t the point.

Grantland bought together a remarkably diverse range of talented writers, multimedia producers and editors, locked them in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town, and let them go to work. The unique voice that the site has curated for itself is no longer.

It was, in many ways, the DARPA Program of sports writing – the writers threw science at the wall, and saw what stuck. It didn’t always come off, but when it did, it felt like Grantland discovered a new way of doing things.

Take its novel approach to NBA game recaps. Rather than an 800-word summary, ended with a table of statistics and throwaway statements on what comes next, Grantland had what they called a ‘Shootaround’. Each writer took a specific event, story arc, play or player, and came up with an interesting take on it – often blending words and media. This is helped by the fact that there are up to a dozen NBA games on any given evening, but even during the play-offs Grantland’s writers can produce an article of remarkable depth.

The website did have a tendency to get a little insider-y; its prose punctuated by subtle winks and nudges to their dedicated audience. This took some effort to overcome as a new consumer, but once you were in, you were in forever.

They were pushing boundaries in a way the Australian sports media very rarely does. When he started Grantland, Simmons wrote, “We won’t be first, we will rarely break news, but we will be the place people come to understand what is happening.”

A focus on the news of the day, breaking the next player movement story, and 17 ways to improve your fantasy football team, dominate the coverage of our native games.

This attitude towards sports coverage has been neatly summarised elsewhere as being at the third level of online writing. Coverage of Australian sports is firmly rooted in the first level: ‘what’. There are occasional spurts of level two ‘so what’, particularly in cricket, but there is precious little ‘now what’, which is the space Grantland made their own.

Under the surface of the Vines, memes, podcasts and videos lived a remarkable depth of understanding that Grantland’s writers and editors could effortlessly impart on their audience. Their remit wasn’t to break the news faster than their competitors, it was to build a place where people would go to understand and learn.

The hope is that Simmons will develop ‘Grantland II’, as part of or in tangent to his new venture at US cable TV company HBO. Indeed, he nabbed four of his former colleagues in October. That could help fill part of the void, but it’s difficult to foresee a scenario where such a website builds to the scale Grantland did.

It’s not likely that a Grantland-style website could ever exist with a pure focus on Australian sports, and without some focus on news-type articles. Cricket Australia’s digital platform is an example of this mixture, although it is still heavily punctuated by score updates and recaps of the on-field action.

I’ve had this conversation over social media more than a handful of times in recent years. Many will cite lack of market size for our native games, noting that American sports have global followings that can support the creation of top-shelf sports content. However, pockets of this style of writing do exist, enabled by the omnipresence of the Internet and the low barriers to entry that sports blogging present.

In this respect, I’m hesitant to definitively call a lack of market demand. A piece that I authored earlier in September, titled ‘Fremantle have become the most interesting team in the AFL‘, which was firmly pitched at the ‘now what’ level, received close to 13,000 views and 600 shares on social media.

That’s me, a guy who started doing this at a level slightly more serious than ‘weekend hobby’ in March this year.

The Roar’s rag-tag team of writers regularly put up numbers like that with articles that are deliberately not news-ey. Yet the presence of this style of writing on the webpages of major national news outlets around the country is, well, non-existent.

Whether this is a conscious choice of the outlets, or that the perception that there isn’t a mass market for this style of writing is more real than I am giving it credit, is somewhat beside the point. Something is getting in the way.

In an Australian sports media landscape where every edition of a daily news show is ‘Monster!’ (despite the repeat of the same, tired montage), every tweet is labelled ‘More!’ (only for there to be not much more beyond the headline), and every take is scorching, we could always point to Grantland and think quietly to ourselves, “This is what is possible.”

And that’s why you, Australian sports media consumer, should care about the demise of Grantland. The global sports writing industry has lost its Polaris, its cutting-edge research laboratory. We will all be poorer for it.