Bookshelf review: Grantland

I was super-psyched when I heard about this new website — under the aegis of ESPN — that would feature some of my favorite writers opining on all sorts of sports topics and issues (man does not live by baseball alone). Goodness knows there was enough pre-release hype.

Sadly, from what I’ve seen so far, I’m a tad disappointed.

Grantland Rice was considered by many to be one of the greatest sportswriter of all time. Among his legacies was the famous stanza:

“For when the One Great Scorer comes
To write against your name,
He marks – not that you won or lost –
But how you played the Game.”

Now I would guess that some people, especially contemporary readers (those that are left) find this a bit too purpley (as in Purple prose, even those this came from a poem).

But invoking Grantland for your website has to have some meaning. Is it perhaps too elitist? After all, how many under the age of 50 (or older) even know who GR was? So if you’re gonna do it, do it right.

Just picking a couple of items at random:

• Wesley Morris writes about baseball uniforms. It w9uld have been nice to have links to the ones he mentioned so we know what he’s talking about. Or do they think only informed fans who carry the images in their head need apply?
• On the other hand, I enjoyed the couple of pieces by Charley Pierce and Alex French and Howie Kahn on The National, an all-sports daily back in the 1980s.
• The interface a bit unintuitive, whether by design or experimentation, making it somewhat difficult to navigate beyond the top stories and/or find previous entries (a handy work-around is the Google Reader feed which lists each story in perpetuity).
• There’s no component by which to leave comments. Why is that?
• It has the feel of a vanity piece, which some entities don’t much care for, especially the folks over at Hang Up and Listen, Slate’s sports podcast. (In this era, a lot of folks with short attention spans don’t appreciate the long-format essay either).

Maybe this is still a work in progress as they get out the kinks. But they’ve been advertising this thing for months; it should be a finished product. But I’m not giving up. It might take some time to wade through the waters to find the oysters with the pearl in them, but I think it will ultimately be worth it.