The relationship Deadspin has had with ESPN has been parasitic, in a way, but also mutually beneficial. To state this, again, as if it required more clarification: We have never applied for a job at ESPN, have never wanted to work there and are not engaged in some sort of bitter lashing out. There are plenty of smart folks in Bristol, and we'd just dumb the place down. It was never a vendetta; ESPN was the center of the sports world, and no one ever seemed to treat them as the wooly mammoth they were. But more to the point: We were amazed, pretty early on, just how sensitive to criticism ESPN was. It was as if they had never even considered the possibility that someone might not like Teammates. The first month we did the site, we started picking on "Cold Pizza," because we were home all day and presumably the only people on earth watching "Cold Pizza." ESPN staffers noticed; within a matter of days, we were receiving anonymous emails about the backstage "intrigue."

This, of course, led to the infamous ESPN Memo, to this day one of the most hilarious and terrifying corporate documents we've ever seen. ("No, employees cannot keep the trees.") Whenever we would run into ESPN employees, they always asked us, "How do you get all that stuff?" As if we were breaking into someone's email accounts. Never underestimate people's desire to bitch about their jobs.

The constant tweaking of ESPN, to us, seemed fairly innocuous and ultimately ineffectual. After all, this was the biggest sports media on earth, and we were just a couple of guys with a blog. Surely, Chris Berman's lifetime of "work" was not going to be damaged by an example of his wooing prowess. What's the big deal? A little accountability never hurt anybody.

Well, we're not sure if it was the Scott Van Pelt audio or the Stuart Scott-Daulerio dustup, but at some point, everyone over there started losing their damned minds about Deadspin, which, in their minds (as well as some others), represented the entire internet.

It started at the Super Bowl in Detroit, when ESPN distributed a memo making it clear no one from Deadspin would be allowed at any ESPN parties. (The site, at this point, was three months old.) The next year, they brought out the muscle. Trey Wingo had Daulerio — who was told, if he tried to take a picture of Sean Salisbury, he would be "put through a wall" — thrown out of another Super Bowl party. Berman went after a 15-year-old kid for quoting YWML to him. We received 4,000 words middle-of-the-night missives from angry ESPN.com writers. (Not Simmons, actually, before you ask.) Stephen A. Smith blamed us for his low ratings. (Or something.) One ESPN personality actually went to a private detective to look up information on us, and who our sources were. (He must have been so disappointed; "buys lots of black T-shirts and watches "Love And Death" a lot.") And, of course, February 1, 2007. They must have felt that they were losing some guerilla war they didn't know they were fighting.

This did, and still does, surprise us. ESPN was just not used to criticism, and once they started handling it so poorly, it was only a matter of time until other media outlets, eager to pick on the bully in the room, started piling on. Suddenly, Sports Business Journal is doing "What's wrong with ESPN?" cover stories. We are not claiming to be the impetus for this; we just caught a wave that was coming, and ESPN responded with a crash course in how corporations should not handle bad publicity.

As Deadspin grew, and ESPN began to look more human and vulnerable — that is to say: It needed a hug — fewer people, we think, saw Deadspin as an anti-ESPN site. We find it interesting, actually, how ESPN.com has improved over the last couple of years in a way that the network has not. We think it has something to do with competition; whereas ESPN has Versus and Fox Sports, ESPN.com has Yahoo, SI.com, AOL, Sportsline, Foxsports.com, Sporting News and all the sports blogs. ESPN.com has had to evolve to survive; so far, the network has not had to.

The paranoia is still there (and not just from ESPN media folk either). We still get the 4,000-word emails in the middle of the night, the wounded phone calls, the occasional "you're disgusting." But it feels more muted, as if everyone understands that it's a different world now, that everyone's fair game, that ESPN personalities are public figures in the same way athletes are. We've come around in a way, and so have they. And we all move along our way.

Oh, and the cellphone story is the least of it. But you knew that.

The site was sporadically well-written, and seemed to focus too much on New York City for our taste, but it seemed to have the right skewed stance on the world of sports, even if most of it was just long cutting-and-pastings of AP stories with a one-sentence "comment" on the end. In the still-young world of sports blogging, CSTB, whose editor we had never met or had any contact with, was one of the better sites out there. And it's not like it's a competition or anything; sheesh, we're just dopey sports blogs. So when we finally launched Deadspin, we sent an announcement email blast — as you all know, it's scary trying to launch a new site; you never know if anyone will be reading — and CSTB was one of the many sites to give us some much-needed links. Though his was decidedly less positive; it included the tag "Will Leitch Sucks."

We emailed him, in our signature plucky Midwestern way, to say hello, and he then posted the email and mocked us. And then we were off. Over the next year, he'd pretty much hammer us every day — including, in our favorite touches, post our phone number and encourage homeless people to masturbate to pictures of our girlfriend. (We're having trouble locating that post right now.) He slowed down in recent years, but you can read the whole "Will Leitch Sucks" tag right here.

Now, at first, as you might suspect, we were a bit taken aback by this. Our site had been live for about 25 minutes, and we had an online enemy, albeit one we'd never met and knew nothing about. (It turns out he's pretty cool.) We were unnerved, and a little freaked out. And then ... well, jeez, we just got over it. In a way, CSTB might have been the best thing that could have happened to us in the early days of the site. It can be difficult for the blog uninitiated — which we most definitely were — when they are being hammered online, but, thanks to CSTB, we grew used to it pretty quick. Heck, no one was gonna say anything worse than what he was saying. And as we grew more comfortable with what we were doing here, we came to appreciate his, and all, criticism, even when we felt it was wrong-headed.

If you are going to put your name out there in the public sphere, as a celebrity, or an athlete, or a media member, or just a stupid blogger, you have to recognize that there will many people who do not appreciate what you do. You have to have a thick skin; if you wanted to live in a world where no one called you out in a public sphere, you probably should have been a banker. This is why we have been consistently surprised how sensitive media members we've tweaked on the site have been; it's like no one has ever criticized them before.

And, in a way, no one really has. When you hear old-school folks like Bob Costas talk about how "meaner" everyone has gotten online, it's clear they're missing the point. It's not that people have suddenly become cruel toward you; it's just that you can hear them now. Twelve percent of this country thinks Barack Obama a Muslim. You think 100 percent of your readers/viewers are going to love you? But so many people have constructed their careers in a plastic bubble, where only their friends and supporters talk about their work. Now that the Web's here — and we use the word "now" awfully liberally — it's amazing how unprepared they are to handle criticism.

In the underrated movie The Paper, Jason Alexander plays a city council member driven to madness by columnist Randy Quaid's blastings of him in a New York City tabloid. Alexander, distraught, pulls a gun on Quaid in a bar.

Alexander: "Why? Why would you do this to me? Why did you go after me?"
Quaid: "Hey, you work for the city. It was your turn."

If you do something in the public sphere, and the world knows your name, you have to accept that people are going to come after you. You do not receive the upside of fame without the downside. If you are going to email every person who says something negative about you, or start some flame war in the comments, you're probably not cut out for this business. May we recommend banking?

So thank you, Mr. Cosloy, for thickening our spine and helping us get over ourselves. Even if we had to change our number.

The premise of the story, as far as we can understand it: After Buzz Bissinger's tirade — if that's what it can be called — against us on "Costas Now" a couple of months ago, the sports blogs collectively decided that they needed to clean up their act, lest they upset the intelligentsia's delicate sensibilities. (Or, to put it another way, "piss the shit out of them." As an example.) We were not aware of this collective, or this decision. Perhaps we missed the memo, or fell asleep during the meeting.

Or perhaps we just aren't flapping to-and-fro in whatever imagined zeitgeist wind we might have guessed existed. Here's a quote from McIntryre:

"Two years ago, I would have run with [the Kobe affair story]," said Jason McIntyre, owner and operator of the Big Lead. "But as the blogs get bigger, you have to be careful about what you say . . . you can't go with the first rumor you hear."

Wait ... Jason .. you used to run with the first rumor you heard? But seriously: If you have a vision for a site, don't you have to just follow through with it? Why would you change your vision for a site just because more people are reading it? Archives don't go away, you know; the stuff you wrote two years ago is still hanging around. (Believe you us, we know.) If something is worthwhile to post if you're getting 10 readers a day, shouldn't you stand behind it if you have a million readers a day? Changing what you do because you've become more popular is exactly why Bill Plaschke and Rick Reilly have declined so dramatically. Isn't that what this is all supposed to be against?

," said the guy whose site requires you to click through to read the whole post now.

But here's the real piece de resistance.

"The initial reaction was 'Buzz is a lunatic,' " McIntyre said. "After that, people calmed down, listened to what he said and thought, 'You know, maybe we should clean up our act a little bit.' "

OK, really now. We agree wholeheartedly with Dan Steinberg, whose brilliant vivisection of Bissinger's "points" was summed up by, "Bissinger's delivery was marvelously entertaining, but that the crux of his argument made less sense than Emmitt Smith on mescaline." We agree: We've never had an issue with the way Bissinger handled himself on the show; the man has a right to his beliefs, and hey, his screaming just played into our hands anyway. That doesn't change the fact that his "argument" was incoherent and, for a writer we've always respected, shockingly wrong-headed. We have literally not met a single sports blogger who said, "Well, jeez, the screaming man on television made me re-evaluate what I do. Perhaps I should apply for that editorial assistant position I'd been hearing about." Jason must know an entirely different set of sports bloggers than we do. Maybe they're all on Yardbarker.

Listen: We understand. It's nice to imagine a need for a "bridge" between blogs and "MSM," the one who can tell Los Angeles Times reporters looking for a "new" angle exactly what they wanted to hear. That, don't worry folks, we're "the nice bloggers," we're the ones who "get it." We're hardly of the belief McIntyre is the worst offender in this; far from it. But is that what the point of all this has been? To "grow up?" The best sports blogs are based in truth and passion, and, yeah, sometimes that truth and passion come out in profane bursts, and sometimes they involve quarterbacks doing beer bongs. So freaking what? Did Buzz Bissinger really convince people there was something wrong with that? Or was everyone just faking in the first place?

(Oh, and Mike Florio and Daulerio, also quoted in the story, don't get a free pass here either; If Daulerio was quoted correctly — and he says he wasn't, so we should extend Florio and McIntyre, who addresses the piece here, the same courtesy — he seems to forget that the best sports blogs — including, we'd like to believe, this one — have always had a "journalistic element." Daulerio is as good a journalist as this site has ever had; we have to assume he was either misquoted or temporarily went into toxic shock right before the interview. And Florio says, "It's almost like the difference between Eddie Murphy and Bill Cosby. Can you still be funny without cursing?" Hey, Mike, to paraphrase: Why don't you have a jello pop and shut the fuck up? If we're really claiming that the future of sports blogs being like Bill Cosby is somehow a good thing, well, shit, we must be getting out at the right time.)

This is not a polemic against McIntyre, who's a fine guy and does good work over there, or anyone in specific. Everybody's got their own viewpoint, and should express it. (And McIntyre, Florio, everybody, they all express it well.) But, jeez: We have one week left with this shit, and we're seeing this fake storyline emerge — independent of that Times story — that sports blogs should strive for credibility, or mainstream recognition, or to make Bob Costas proud or something. Sports blogs are whatever the hell you want them to be. This is why they are so fun. If everyone's supposed to pat themselves on the back for becoming "respectable," well, shit, what's the point? We're proud of the work we've done here. Some of it has been stupid and juvenile; some of it has at least attempted to be intelligent; some of it has been masturbatory. If you liked it, awesome, we were glad to have you. If you didn't, there are tons of other options. But trying to strive for some sort of mythical "acceptance" is not only pointless — it's never gonna happen, no matter how much you might try to position yourself for it — it's not being honest to the only people who count: The people who take time out of their boring work day to come hang out on your site. It becomes about you, and how you're "positioned," rather than just a bunch of people coming together and talking about things they all care about.

This is to say, sports bloggers of the future: Who cares what Bob Costas or Buzz Bissinger or David Wharton think of you? Why should you care? Just take care of your own business, figure out what you do best, pray everyone just stays out of your way and then start ripping shit up. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

Wild Times For Sports Blogs May Be Coming To An End [Los Angeles Times]