February 12, 2008

Will you go to the prom with me?


I'll bet he wrote something like this in the school newspaper when the head cheerleader turned him down.

The guy gets criticized for not producing on the field last year and doing too much media and PR stuff, now he's criticized for not doing enough media and PR stuff.

Our buddy TJ is trying to make a big deal out of this, when it really just sounds like Beckham didn't want to talk to him. How much soccer has TJ covered in his time in LA? He's not the soccer writer at the LA Times.

Beckham, the Galaxy, and their media consultants probably were worried about a hatchet job coming down the pike and decided against providing the ammunition. They just didn't count on the A/V Club type of response.

2 comments:

Nathan Henderson-James said...

This guy is an idiot who never covers soccer. He's a "humorous" columnist who happens to be the most read sports guy in the LA Times.

This is what I wrote in response to his "writing".

Wow.

See, here I thought that a guy who has so spectacularly blown the last time he tried to write soccer would just go about his business and ignore it like every other American male over the age of 60.

But I can see that I was stupendously incorrect in my assumptions about the whole "once bitten, twice shy" deal. Clearly I'm still learning about your predilections. My bad. I'll pay closer attention from here on out.

Now, let me not be seen as a defender of the powerful, for both AEG and Tim L. have clout to spare. And its not like Beckham needs me running to his defense.

Nope, I'm just sitting here defending myself. Myself being an American soccer fan who mistakenly exposed himself to your second Beckham-based column. I should have taken my own advice - from a reader's perspective. I mean how many times do I have to read The Family Circus before I have to remember that I'm making the choice to read it in the first place? (Great, now I have to apologize to Bil Keane for dragging him into the vicinity of your ridiculousness.)

Look, I get it. You are a sports columnist who doesn't really cover teams so much as personalities here in the LA area. Awesome. But it's just to patently clear that you don't understand soccer, either as a game or as a sports business.

Cuz what I don't understand is not that you don't understand soccer (and really you don't. Can you even describe what Beckham's on-the-field duties are as a right/central midfielder? Besides some asinine flip remark? Go on, surprise me. Make me eat my words.), but it is that you are so intent on trumpeting your ignorance as if that makes you more "authentic", more of an American sports columnist. Like the way guys in my home state fly the Confederate flag on their pickup trucks to show they are down with being from the South. With you guys it's the obligatory "soccer is so beneath me it makes me a man to ridicule it".

That's just weak. Weak and ignorant.

It just puts you in the same category with the rich and powerful who seek to silence the voices of those they do not understand or find threatening. You know, the same guys you spend many a column belittling and exposing.

And, frankly, I think that kind of thing is beneath you, if, in fact there is any room underneath your belly where it is pressed so firmly into the slime and muck of willful ignorance.

Please. Just stop.

Regards,

Nathan

Ian Rose said...

Simers knows nothing about the game, and nothing about Beckham. He's a second-rate humorist, which far outranks his place as a sports man. The LA Times can do much better than this for coverage of one of the most recognizable sports figures on Earth.