From the Archives: Not Your Dad’s Sports Page
Posted on November 8, 2008 - Filed Under Toronto Star |
This is an older bit I wrote for the Toronto Star that was published on October 17, 2006.
Not Your Dad’s Sports Page
By Jeff Beer
Blame Ron Mexico. Not the real Ron Mexico, mind you. No, the real Mr. Mexico is an auto parts supplier in Brighton, Mich. The Ron Mexico we’re talking about is actually Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick. The tale behind the quarterback’s adopted porn-star-handle alias inspired Deadspin, a fastest-growing and influential sports blog that is helping change how fans read about sports.
“That’s the story that ultimately convinced them to do the site,” Deadspin.com editor Will Leitch says from his Manhattan office, which doubles as his living room.
“Them” is Gawker Media, one of largest Internet-only publishing companies. In the fall of 2005, company officials added Deadspin to its stable of blogs and sites — including Gawker, a site about New York celebrity and media happenings, the gadget and technology site Gizmodo and the sex-related Fleshbot — after being told the story of Ron Mexico.
“Ron Mexico” was listed on an affidavit filed in a March 2005 civil suit filed against Vick, alleging he infected a woman with herpes. Vick apparently used the pseudonym when he got tested for the sexually transmitted disease and when that news came out the jokes flew thick and fast. So much so that NFL.com banned the sale of Falcons jerseys with the name “Mexico” on the back.
Gawker officials were intrigued.
“They thought (a sports site) would either be thejetssuck.com, or a hardcore stats analysis-type of thing,” says Leitch, 30. “I had to explain that there is all kinds of stuff going on in sports that people care about or laugh at, but don’t necessarily hear about it all. And Ron Mexico was a perfect example of that.”
Online for just over a year, Deadspin has become one of the most talked about sports sites, boasting more than 4 million page views a month. Such a number is a drop in the online bucket compared to such mega-sites as espn.com and CBS.Sportsline.com, which pull in monthly viewer numbers in the hundreds of millions. But Deadspin has been named one of Time’s “50 Coolest Websites” and cited by Sports Illustrated for having two of the best Web stories of 2005 (for publishing unflattering party pictures of USC’s Matt Leinart the night of the Heisman presentations and for being the first to say that New York Yankees outfielder had tested positive for steroids).
Perhaps not coincidentally, Deadspin is not like Time, Sports Illustrated or ESPN. Instead, it pokes fun at sports anchors, athletes and everyone in between, taking a pop culture infused fan approach to sports journalism. If ESPN is the equivalent of a major record company, Deadspin is the edgy independent label.
The site is where you’ll find the police video of the arrest of the Cincinnati Bengals’ Odell Thurman. Or a debate on whether an Arizona stadium should sell its naming rights to the Pink Taco restaurant chain. Such an offbeat sensibility has made it a leader in the indie sports blogosphere along with The Mighty MJD, Off Wing Opinion and Toronto’s own, The Basketball Jones.
“The thing is, there is always an underlying intelligence that says, ‘Just so you know, this is all crap,’” says Leitch. “It’s just sports, but we still care about it. Life’s really hard and complicated and it doesn’t make sense a lot of the time. But if the (St. Louis) Cardinals win, I’m happy. If they lose, I’m sad. And tomorrow there will be another game and I’ll have the exact same reaction. That never happens in real life.
“Can you name anything else on the planet, other than sports, that gets you to jump out of your seat to yell spontaneously, on a regular basis?”
Deadspin is a largely one-man show, originating from Leitch’s one-bedroom apartment atop an upper west side Manhattan dry cleaners.
“I’m just a dude on my couch,” says Leitch, a native of smalltown Illinois. “I’m not going to the fancy parties, I don’t have any passes — I just get up and write about sports.”
Before Deadspin, Leitch, worked at a financial trade publication. His column for now-in-abeyance New York-based website called The Black Table grabbed Gawker’s attention. It wasn’t sports, but it certainly was funny enough for Leitch to publish a book of collected columns called Life as a Loser in 2005. Gawker originally wanted him to write a gambling blog, but with the help of Ron Mexico, Leitch persuaded them that sports was the way to go.
As for the name Deadspin, Leitch says: “It’s just a name. It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t know what it means either. Eventually we just got tired of coming up with clever names and put two words together.”
For Leitch, a day of Deadspin begins with making the three-metre commute from bed to couch at about 7:30 a.m. The first post goes up around 8:30 a.m., and continues throughout the day until about 5 p.m. At the outset, Leitch had to hunt down every single story, trolling the web for anything funny, interesting or newsworthy in sports. But within months, the site had established a community of commenters and tipsters who began to feed Leitch more material than he could handle, to the point he’s consistently greeted by 75 to 80 new emails every morning.
“Chuck Klosterman (a rock and pop culture writer) once wrote … that since music critics get all the CDs sent to them, really all their writing about is their mail,” says Leitch. “And that’s kind of what I do: I write about my email.”
Considering some of the gold that Leitch has spun from his inbox, Deadspin owes a huge thanks to its legions of cubicle-bound readers.
When Leitch posted a reader’s account of a run-in with ESPN’s Chris Berman, in which the famed commentator with a penchant for nicknames was allegedly able to pick up a leather-clad bar babe by saying nothing more than: “You’re with me, Leather” the joke quickly slid subtly into broadcasts as high profile as MSNBC, ESPN and MTV, and as low as a University of Guelph football game. (Deadspin headline: “He… Could… Go…All…The…Way!”) The Toronto-affiliated Dunedin Blue Jays even held a “You’re with Me, Leather” Day in August.
Then there’s Deadspin’s collection of partying athlete photos supplied by readers, featuring the QB hat-trick of Pittsburgh Steelers’ Ben Roethlisberger, Chicago Bears’ Kyle Orton and Arizona Cardinals’ Matt Leinart, among others.
Leitch has stopped running a lot of the athlete run-in stories due to his growing lack of faith in their authenticity.
“I’m less concerned with the legal risk (of using anonymous sources) than with maintaining my credibility with readers. What kind of credibility do have if I run any old crap some random email gives me? I’m not going to run something I don’t think is right or true.”
The prominence of sports blogs has risen considerably in the last year – there are two on the Star’s website, waymoresports.com – and with ambitious new developments such as AOL Sports’ new Fanhouse that growth isn’t dissipating any time soon. But the future of blogging doesn’t concern Leitch.
“We can talk about how blogs are changing the media and blah, blah, blah,” he says. “But the fact is, I want to have some fun with the site. I think daily job drudgery sucks. And if I can give people something to distract them from that, that’s the best I can hope for.”
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