Fantastic!Oh, I'm ALL IN on watching that.
Coincidentally, I just got tix to see the Yacht Lobsters on 12/13.
It's a terribly awful-good show, full of the worst Sorkin-isms, but there was a great quote from Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip.
This was 2006.
I came here to post this very sentence. It felt like a break the 4th wall moment. It was great.
great ep, the craziest Bill take I ever heard in my life is that Ralphie was not a great character
He's not wrong. The NBA athletes who came up in a post-network/cable TV world have way less cachet than the 90s/00s/10s stars who still could use advertising to launch themselves.
The Q rating of pro athletes might be at its lowest number ever right now.
Bill is not wrong. LeBron was famous fast. Tatum has regularly been in East Finals for a while and isn’t close to that. These guys are nowhere near as famous as Jordan was before he won a title. I think no one is as famous as people used to be. Swift is it.
Correct. Time won't make Tatum, Edwards, Luka, or Jokic more famous.
Lebron is his own unique case, this guy was on the cover of sports illustrated (back when that meant something) as a junior in high school. I don't think it's at all impossible for Tatum to end up with a Q rating similar to Steph or Durant, but it will take a lot of winning. Those two were absolutely not relevant from a national (non-NBA) perspective when they were 26, even though they both had won MVP at that point (and Steph had his first title).
Biles is interesting to me in that I didn’t think of her but I bet both of my kids could identify her. Most of the other guys on that chart are pretty old or retired.
Do not underestimate the Taylor Swift factor. My 13 year old Swiftie niece informed me today that her favorite football player is Travis Kelce even though she admits "I don't know anything about football at all." She only knows his name because of Swift, and I very much doubt she's alone.
My 10 year old daughter wanted to watch the Super Bowl last year to see Kelce. She cheers if she sees the Chiefs on tv. She doesn’t watch sports and I doubt she could name another athlete outside of female Olympic gymnasts.
It’s also a function of the survey being in the run up and shortly after the Olympics. I doubt she’d be there if the poll was held last year or next year.
Maybe I live in a total bubble, but Messi being #1 for the USA seems batshit insane to me with Jordan, Brady, and LeBron on the list, love them or hate them. Unless I'm misreading it.
I don’t know if he passes the street clothes test, I would think Ronaldo is easier to pick out but World Cup and biggest soccer star in the world means in context of sports he is a huge star.
Globally, absolutely. I just don't know if soccer is that popular in the USA yet, despite it's ever growing popularity. I could very well be wrong. In any other country I wouldn't blink an eye at him being #1.
My youngest is in eighth grade. When I’d drop her off at elementary school a few years ago half of the kids were wearing Messi Barca shirts.
I think part of the issue here is that anyone who follows soccer would instantly recognize Messi or Ronaldo, whereas even a fairly big football fan might not recognize Josh Allen or Travis Kelce without his uniform.
im sorry, I didn’t listen to this Simmons podcast (and honestly I won’t)…how did he compare Edwards to Curry? I don’t see any ways that they are similar at all other than they both play in the NBA (which I wouldn’t put past Bill at all)
It’s a simple survey question that’s been run for 30 years as part of a much broader survey about sports fandom and media usage. I both used it and helped curate some questions for years. It’s a great tool, really high quality research.
Bill was lamenting that today’s young NBA stars don’t have the mainstream awareness of Curry, LeBron, etc. Which in the case of Curry is silly since he didn’t become a star until GS won titles.
Bill has always loved the chide other media outlets, especially when it comes to creating fake controversies, and quite frankly, as a major consumer of all types of sports media, he does it as much - if not more - than every other outlet save for say shows that legit billed as such (First Take or Get Up)
I love them. Klosterman has his own flaws, but he's kind of a much smarter, self-aware midwestern version of Bill, and he calls Bill out on his bullshit.
This is absolutely hilarious and may be peak Simmons.
This is where I'm at, I can disagree with what Chuck says but like to hear his takes on stuff. No more complicated than that.
I would have already given it a great review, and then the Donald Fagen phone call took it up a few notches...
I watched it last night and loved it. I did not connect the dots about how deeply Toto was involved with "Thriller," and I read album covers!
Its spectacular and anyone who loves music, especially stuff made in the 70s and 80s, is in for a treat.
A couple of thoughts: Once I learned that Yacht Rock encapsulated 1976-1984 I was in with both feet. Michael McDonald was is one of one. I enjoyed hearing why such luminaries as Hall and Oates and Fleetwood Mac are not included, and I did not have Christopher Cross as the bad ass of Yacht Rock on my bingo card.
The anecdote about Cross filing in for Blackmore at a Deep Purple gig was amazing. I am sure it's well known but it was the first I had heard of it.
I had a lot of fun watching Yacht Rock, but I'd actually heard about how much of a badass Cross was a few years ago. I can't remember if the mentioned it in the show or not, but Stevie Ray Vaughan's #1 guitar, the one that Fender copied for his signature model, had previously been owned by Cross. He traded it into an Austin music store, and Vaughan traded for it a week later, slapped some truck stop letter stickers on it and used it for the rest of his life. He was also really good friends with Eric Johnson, of Cliffs of Dover fame. He was right in the center of the blues rock shredder world and could play his ass off, he just was really good at writing cheeseball pop songs.
The amazing aspect of this little genre of music (it probably more accurately "Los Angeles Session Musician Pop" but that lacks the simplicity of "Yacht Rock") is how much cross (Cross?) pollination was going on. Toto was the bed, MM the accompanying vocals and Cross or Loggins were in the credits and everything was informed by the style of Becker and Fagan. It was a magical stew.
Yes, and they all were so unassuming. I lived just a few blocks away from Village Recording Studios for a couple of years in the '90s and had no idea it was there, much less its significance. What a mensch McDonald is.
