Unacceptable Email Drop-In

As the Cowboy game was finishing up on Sunday, I got an email from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while.

The subject line said: Ouch. In the body he wrote, “Reality hurts. Go Vikes.”

I immediately responded with, “This is an unacceptable email drop in. We haven’t been communicating regularly enough for you to send me the equivalent of a one ring rub in.”

I don’t mind my friends busting my chops when my team loses if they’ve been a part of the conversation beforehand. Had we exchanged even one syllable of pre-game banter, then I’d have welcomed his email as a twisted display of friendship. But what he did was not appropriate, especially since I know that he has little interest in pro football and has no favorite team that he publicly supports. Which means there is no way I can send him a similar email in the future when his teams crashes and burns. He’s not playing fair.

He responded with, “Happy events make me think of you.  Anything bad happening to the Cowboys is a happy event indeed. ‘Unacceptable email drop in’ has a Bill Simmons like sound to it.  I like it…”

Which brings me to the point of this post. It was no surprise that my friend told me I sounded like Simmons. For the past two months I’ve been plowing through his latest volume, The Book of Basketball. At over 700 pages, this is by far the longest book I’ve read since I worked through Wright’s book on the Resurrection of Jesus.

Now that I think of it, both books have a lot in common. Like Wright, Simmons provides persuasive argumentation for the unprovable. I mean, how can you prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the 86 Celtics are the greatest team of all time? You can’t, but Simmons does his best to take away whatever objections you might have and in the end you can’t dismiss the probability that he’s right (I agree with him by the way).

Both Wright and Simmons drop footnotes like crazy. Simmons’ footnotes are funnier than Wright’s though. Here’s my favorite:

Pete Maravich holds the white guy record for points (68); Jerry Lucas for rebounds (40); Mark Eaton for blocks (14); Dirk Nowitski/John Stockton for steals (9); and Dan Majerle/Rex Chapman for threes (9). Peja Stojakovic had 10 threes in a game but I don’t count the Euros as true white guys. Just a personal thing with me.

(Don’t buy this book and try to read it on a Kindle. They can be hard to track down on a Kindle and the footnotes alone are worth the price of the book.)

Both Wright and Simmons can dig into the minutia of a topic and pick it apart for pages. I don’t care how much time you’ve spent thinking about basketball, Simmons has spent more. You may think you know a lot about the game, but Simmons knows more. He proves it page after page after page after page. If you’ve read his column, then you know how long-winded he can be as he goes on quirky asides and throws around creative pop-culture references.  This book is like that times two.

Speaking of asides, I told my friend who sent me the email that I’d send him my copy of the book now that I’m done with it. Ever since his major breach of chop-busting etiquette on Sunday, I’m thinking about sending it “first class postage due.” With a book this size that will amount to a double digit fine.

Seems about right.