This week would have been a great time to read Deadspin. The Nationals pulled off two straight wins in Houston to take the World Series in seven games; the basketball season is revving up and the Golden State Warriors are a mess; and the NFL is rounding into midseason form. Sure, you can still point your web browser to deadspin.com, and it will still direct to you a site purporting to give you “Sports News Without Access, Favor, Or Discretion.” But Deadspin – a publication I was privileged enough to write for as a freelancer down the years – died this week, as the firing of lead editor Barry Petchesky by parent company G/O Media was followed Wednesday by mass resignations. On Thursday Deadspin’s biggest name, Drew Magary, confirmed he had quit. The site is now nothing but a shell of its former self.
For the unfamiliar, Deadspin – a truly horrific pun on ESPN, its constant nemesis – was a sports-lifestyle blog that helped define the voice of American sportswriting on the internet since such a thing was even a concept. In a sports media landscape built on access journalism, Deadspin said, quite simply, screw all that. Instead of stale game recaps, thinly veiled PR fluff profiles, and the empty platitudes and cliches that lined mainstream sports pages, Deadspin went outside of the traditional bounds of sports media. Think of stories such as How Baylor Happened, on the rampant sexual misconduct within Baylor college football, The Hot Stove And The Triumph Of Shamelessness, on the willingness (or lack thereof) of baseball owners to spend money, or What The Fuck Is Wrong With Stephen A Smith, on – well, that one is pretty self-explanatory.
Deadspin is dead because Jim Spanfeller and the rest of the private equity suits at G/O Media – the organization that purchased what remained after Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media, Deadspin’s parent company, into oblivion – insisted on a “stick to sports” edict under their rule.
“To create as much great sports journalism as we can requires a 100% focus of our resources on sports. And it will be the sole focus,” G/O editorial director Paul Maidment said. “Deadspin will write only about sports and that which is relevant to sports in some way.”
It is an absurd edict. The separation of sports from the real world is a pipe dream. How can you attend a publicly funded stadium filled with primarily white and rich fans watching teams filled with men of color from underprivileged backgrounds in the country with the widest income inequality gap in the world without seeing politics? As the GMG Union representing Deadspin employees succinctly put it in a statement Wednesday, “‘Stick to sports’ is and always has been a thinly veiled euphemism for ‘don’t speak truth to power.’”
The slimy nature of private equity makes it hard to even suss out G/O Media’s motive for tanking Deadspin so efficiently. Deadspin, despite how G/O would make it sound, was a perfectly profitable enterprise doing just what it was doing, running posts about politics and posts about bears alongside hard-hitting reporting and irreverent commentary diving deep into the sports world. Any answer as to why this was all worth tearing down is unsatisfying.
One of the things that made Deadspin special was its understanding that in modern American culture, the idea of “sports” represents so much more than just what occurs on the field. Sports are a huge part of what ties people together, within a community or across regions or groups that might not otherwise intersect. Sports have a tremendous social power, and Deadspin was unique in its ability to understand and communicate that fact.
Sports media, for that reason, wields a power that should be subject to criticism. In Deadspin, we are losing one of the last outlets that reliably held sports media to task for carrying water for the leagues they broadcast and cover. Deadspin’s oeuvre of major media criticism stories include Laura Wagner’s incisive takedowns of the sexist, racist cesspool that is Barstool Sports, Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey’s exposure of the utter fabrication of Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o’s origin story peddled by Sports Illustrated and other mainstream outlets, and practically Diana Moskovitz’s entire author page.
By refusing to stick to sports, Deadspin also provided resistance to the monolithic sports culture. It proved that the sports fan didn’t just have to be one sort of guy – or, in a concept foreign to much of mainstream sports media, it proved the sports fan didn’t need to be a guy at all. For a number of people who are pushed away by sports at a young age, it’s not necessarily the content of the games that pushes them away. It’s the attitude, the aesthetic, the in-your-face embrace-debate bullshit that define corporate sports broadcasting and writing that suggests other types of people don’t have a place in sports. Deadspin provided another way to engage.
Was Deadspin perfect? Of course not. It was responsible for plenty of the frat-bro bigotry that pervades online sports media, and as much as some of the people responsible for that in Deadspin’s early days have apologized and attempted to make right, that influence can’t be ignored. But one of the reasons I’m saddest to see Deadspin go when it’s going is that it has grown and evolved out of some of the uglier aspects of its past, and the voice it had become was absolutely necessary in a landscape overrun with right-wing ghouls and mushy centrists.
The loss of Deadspin is not just a sad day for people like me, a freelancer who has a personal investment in the continued presence of outlets willing to publish work critical of the sports establishment. It’s a sad day for sports as a whole. The sports media landscape is flatter and duller for Deadspin’s loss, and the rich and powerful are probably feeling like their lives just got a little easier. G/O Media, meanwhile? They won’t feel a thing.
Some sports fans will scoff at the idea that Deadspin is a big loss, or the idea that private equity firms like G/O are worth a second thought. They’re just here to watch the games. Honestly, I get it. Life is too hard to stress all the time. But it’s nothing but naiveté to assume your games are safe. The same people snapping up sites like Deadspin are adding sports teams to their portfolio just as quickly. At least a third of Major League Baseball teams are now owned by men with ties to the financial services industry, a growing trend of private equity reaching its tendrils into sports ownership that can be observed in other sports like basketball and soccer as well.
Deadspin died in part because G/O doesn’t need it to be wildly successful to make money off it. Meanwhile, in baseball, tanking teams like the Marlins, Pirates, Mariners and Tigers plod along with no hope and offer none for the foreseeable future, all while raking in sweet profits from media deals and revenue sharing. More and more regular season games are becoming guaranteed wins for the few teams who are trying or irrelevant snoozefests between teams trying to lose in service of some nebulous Process™ peddled by front office suits. Don’t pretend your favorite sport is safe from the same flattening forces that stomped Deadspin this week. They’re already at work, and unfortunately, Deadspin was probably one of the best hopes to stop them.
