Bill Simmons and David Foster Wallace

Unless all Outside the Lines essays take liberties inside the margins, Bill Simmons' OTL piece on Manny Ramirez looks like a tribute to what he learned about writing from being a David Foster Wallace fan. You can see DFW's Tracy Austin essay and the Federer essay all over this piece--and that's not a criticism, regardless of what Simmons had to take back this summer re: his claim that Federer and tennis were boring. What stands out in the Manny essay is that, when they're put in the familiar DFW footnote format, many of Simmons' signature moves (digressions, tangents, pop culture references, lists) look like what he must have admired in DFW. The Manny essay trots out many of the same lines Simmons has been using for years--the repetition is a convention at this point--and it's interesting to see them in a format that he isn't quite used to writing in, so that some of the footnotes of old material work, and others don't. There are whole paragraphs in the essay that would have made better footnotes, but that's a quibble. I think I'd like to read an essay about what Simmons learned from Wallace.

Quick tangent: I don't know what the hell this means. If you want to win the old-school media guys, really, you only have to do six things: run out every ground ball, end up with a dirty uniform every once in a while, show up on time, give reporters whatever time they need, light up like a little kid if Willie Mays or Hank Aaron ever walks into the dugout, and smile broadly during games (so the announcers can talk about how you'd play this game for free, even though you just opted out of your contract and held your team hostage for a $100 million raise). Do those things and you earn an "I Respect The Game" card. We should also mention that ...

A. Boston won two titles with a Hall of Famer who didn't respect The Game (Manny) and zero titles with a Hall of Famer who did (Carl Yastrzemski).

B. Players considered "Respects The Game" guys in their primes include Pete Rose (convicted felon, baseball gambler), Roger Clemens (identified as a cheater in the Mitchell Report) and (fill in the names of at least 12-15 other major stars from the Steroids Era).

On Manny: I liked this essay from Slate this summer about the Boston media treatment of him.

On David Foster Wallace: I haven't known what to say about it. My dad and I traded favorite paragraphs for several days afterward, and if we're still using Simmons conventions, one of my favorite moments with my dad was when we watched the Charlie Rose interview together on YouTube this winter. It was obvious that my dad had watched the interview multiple times because he kept anticipating what was going to happen, cracking up, and making his own verbal footnotes to the video.

I taught "Tense Present," about dictionaries and descriptivism, to my University Writing class a few semesters ago, and the students wrote the most extraordinary essays inspired by it. The students didn't try out his stylistic moves so much as they picked up Wallace's generosity and curiosity about wide-ranging subjects. One of the students from that class came up to me on the street a few days after we heard about Wallace's death and asked, "I just wanted to make sure you were OK." Then he said he was a third of the way into Infinite Jest, and we figured that was as good a way as any to keep thinking about him.