Dear Bill Simmons, Please Stop Feeling My Pain For Me

I know many of you find Simmons bashing a tiresome pursuit, so I will keep this as civil as I possibly can.

If you could get past the initial 5,000-word summary of an episode of Ghost Whisperer, you'd know today's Simmons column over at the Four Letter contained the following passage:

I was thinking about her three Mondays later, after the NFC Championship Game, when I was sifting through e-mails from devastated Vikings fans, and I realized that, for some readers, I apparently have turned into the "Sports Whisperer." They channel me as an outlet for their pain.

They do? Oh, tell me more, Bill! Why? Why, would they do that?

Because, as a Red Sox fan, I suffered through a lifetime of losing lowlighted by two of the worst defeats in sports history.

Fuck you. Fuck you and die. You are only making things worse. There are, shockingly, some of us out there who are NOT Boston fans who do not need to consult with a goddamn Boston fan for help in grieving after a particularly annoying loss. There are some of us out there who can watch our team blow a game and deal with it without turning it into a fucking production of Medea.

I am tired of sports fans who, immediately after losing a game, demand the empathy of fucking every living being around them. Like seeing your team lose is just an excuse to hold some bullshit emo suffering derby. "We're more tortured!" "No, WE are!" Get over yourselves. You too, Vikings fans. Don't turn into a bunch of gashes who want everyone to feel sorry for you just because your team sold its soul to win a Super Bowl and came up short, as they always have and always will. There's no fucking deserve in sports, and there never will be. No one fanbase is more karmically imbued than the other, and believing so instantly makes you a fucking dipshit. And one other thing…

Heading into 2005, the White Sox hadn't won a World Series since 1917 and the Cubs hadn't won since 1908, but only Cubs fans were considered "tortured." And with reason. Maybe White Sox fans hadn't won anything, but they didn't have a ton of scars, either. Cubs fans were scarred like tribal warriors. Big difference.

O RLY? Well, why don't you ask a fucking White Sox fan about that before you go spouting off about how much more existential angst Cubs fans have? THE WHITE SOX FUCKING THREW THE WORLD SERIES. Something tells me that stung for a handful of their old fans. Don't tell me some batch of asshole fans has somehow built up more character than another bunch of asshole fans, because that is shit. A loss is a loss for any fan. It sucks if you're a Royals fan and your team loses. It sucks if you're a Jets fan and your team loses. And it sucks equally, because that's how shit fucking works.

So knock it the fuck off. Maybe the Vikings will win a Super Bowl one day. Maybe they won't. All I know is that their fans won't have "earned" it any more or less than the fans of this year's Super Bowl winner will. Now leave my fucking team out of your self-involved, phony oracle bullshit.

One last thing:

Let's go with this one — a while back, I wrote that Buffalo had lost three straight Super Bowls, and my editor corrected me that it was actually four. I know I'm getting old, and I've been having a ton of brain farts lately ever since my son decided it would be a good idea to start getting up at 5:15 every morning like he was a CEO. But still, the Bills lost so many Super Bowls in a row that someone who writes about sports for a living couldn't remember the exact number. We'll never see anything like that again. I'm convinced.

Are you really so self-absorbed that you actually think one of your typos offers trenchant insight about a team? Fucking dipshit.

Consider these teams officially tortured [ESPN]

Photo via The Boston Globe