This is my graduate thesis for a master’s degree from Boston University’s College of Communication. Massive thanks to everyone who helped me out with it – specifically Bob Ryan, Paul Flannery, Eric Johnson, Eric Bowman, Steve Hirsch, Andrew Vazzano, Matt Cerrone, Nick Hansen and Professor Dick Lehr.

Bob Ryan and Bill Simmons are two of the most recognizable living sports writers in America, and almost certainly the first two names that come to mind when anyone starts a conversation about modern Boston sports writing. It isn’t surprising, then, that their careers are intertwined. Ryan began covering the NBA’s Boston Celtics for the Boston Globe in 1969, the same year Simmons was born, but the generation gap was not enough to keep them separated.

Almost 43 years after taking that job at the Globe, Ryan announced his imminent retirement on Simmons’ mega-podcast, The B.S. Report – an audio (and recently, video) forum where Simmons and famous friends talk news and new projects. For Ryan’s episode, the two spoke over the phone a week before his 66^th birthday.

“I really and truly believe that my time has come and gone,” he told Simmons. “The dynamics of the business, of what it takes to be involved in the business with all the tweeting and blogging and that stuff, with an audience with a different taste… I’m not comfortable – it’s not me anymore.”

Ryan still appears on ESPN television programming like Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption, but he scaled back dramatically on his columns for the Globe.

He and Simmons wrote about the same subjects for two decades, and for many years their contrasting backgrounds, writing styles and principles underscored a rift in the constitution of the American sports column. There is, however, also some influential common ground. Lately it is more apparent than ever that the two are irrevocable, inseparable parts of sports column-writing’s past and its expanding present.

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Ryan was born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, a town connected to Boston by a few hundred miles of coastal interstate.

“My father would take me to high school basketball games on Friday night,” he told Sports Business Daily’s Joe Perez in 2012, “and I didn’t feel the experience was validated until I read about it in the paper the next day. I wanted to see what was said about the game that I just saw.”

When he was 11 years old Ryan remembers typing up a column he called “The Sportster”, which mostly documented the happenings of his middle school basketball league, but also mixed in a few observations about the Celtics. It was around then he discovered his talent and passion for writing a sports column.

Ryan left New Jersey for Chestnut Hill to attend Boston College, where he majored in history and called radio play-by-play for four years of Golden Eagles basketball games. At 20 years old he got the opportunity to interview legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach, who was scouting players at a Boston College game. Ryan graduated in 1968 and seized the position of Celtics beat reporter for the Globe just a year later. He held the position until 1982.

For 13 years he immersed himself in the Celtics organization. While an adolescent Simmons was at the Boston Garden with his father, watching the Celtics play, Ryan was sitting at the press table, not far from the team bench, being chastised by Celtics’ guard Dennis Johnson. Ryan was (and still is) a loud, fast and unapologetic speaker. That combination was not an appealing auditory presence courtside.

Ryan flew with the team. He went to team dinners. His colleagues called him “The Commissioner” out of respect for his knowledge of and passion for basketball. During the Celtics championship seasons in the 1980s, he became fan and confidant of Larry Bird, one of the best players in NBA history and a saint-like figure in Boston basketball lore. The two eventually coauthored Drive, a book about Bird’s path to professional basketball and his playing career with the Celtics.

Ryan’s experience covering Celtics basketball in the 1970s was profoundly different from Simmons’ experience or any other columnist today.

“The NBA was like one giant fraternity and everyone had a frat house,” he said in a behind the scenes interview on Around the Horn, an ESPN talk show that pits sports columnists against one another by eliciting arguments predicated on the news of the day.

Ryan reciprocated the thought to me last month. As a beat reporter he would ask players during postgame interviews which bar they were going to for the evening, then meet them there to finish conversations. At practices there was no one between him and the players; his access was unfettered. He said he could truly get to know the people he covered.

Ryan took a brief hiatus from the Celtics beat in 1982, but returned to it in 1984. By the end of the decade he earned a promotion to the Globe’s general sports columnist. In 2000 the Associated Press named him National Sportswriter of the Year, and two years later he took the aforementioned steady television roles on ESPN as an Around the Horn panelistand a guest host of Pardon the Interruption. Ryan’s vowed retirement on The B.S, Report was actually a semi-retirement. Like many of the athletes he covered, he was too devoted to walk away completely.

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Twenty years ago, Bill Simmons quit his job as a high school sports reporter and errand boy for the Boston Herald, took a bartending job and started smoking weed out of a “four-foot purple bong,” he recently told Rob Tannenbaum of Rolling Stone.

He was disillusioned by the corporate structure of sports writing; it frustrated him to think he would have to work a decade to get a newspaper sports column. Fresh out of graduate school, he already considered himself a better writer than some of his superiors at the Herald.

That sort of introduction to the sports media world makes it hard to believe that, last week, Simmons wrote about sharing a row in first class with disgraced Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling during a flight to an NBA playoff game in San Antonio. Simmons’ column was the feature piece on Grantland that day, his own offshoot website from ESPN.com. Today many of his peers consider him one of ESPN’s most valuable employees. His seven-figure salary backs that up.

In April 2011, ComScore calculated that Simmons’ “Sports Guy” column for Grantland had an audience of 740,000 unique visitors. As of May 2014 he has 2.63 million followers on Twitter; that means his updates reach nearly four times as many Twitter users as those of Boston Red Sox star David Ortiz. Perhaps the most staggering fact is that, according to ESPN, The B.S. Report podcast was downloaded 32 million times last year.

But Simmons, unlike Ryan, did not get where he is through a newspaper, press seats or postgame interviews. His firsthand account of Sterling on an airplane is not the sort of reporting that helped make him the country’s most-read sports columnist. Reporting, in a traditional sense, was nearly nonexistent in Simmons’ columns for years. He built his audience distilling his own experience as a fan, and in the process led a subversive movement that gave rise to a new model of sports columnist.

Simmons grew up an only child in Brookline, Massachusetts in the 1970s. Despite moving to Stamford, Connecticut at age 13, he maintained an unwavering loyalty for Boston’s professional sports teams. At Holy Cross, a Catholic liberal arts college in Worcester, he majored in political science and developed interests in foreign policy and the Middle East.

At Holy Cross Simmons wrote a renowned sports column in the student newspaper, The Crusader, called “Ramblings”. He served as sports editor for two semesters and called football and basketball games for WCHC, the college radio station.

“When I started writing for The Crusader, everything fell into place for me and I realized that this was what I wanted to do,” he said in a 2001 interview with an alumni magazine.

Upon graduation from Holy Cross in 1992, Simmons enrolled at Boston University to earn his master’s degree in print journalism. From there he worked a few years at the Boston Herald as a high school sports reporter and freelanced for the Boston Phoenix. But he was impatient.

“The only way to get a column back then was to go through this whole ridiculous minor-league-newspaper system and then kind of hope that other people died,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2011.

So Simmons quit his newspaper jobs and worked as a bartender while looking for column space. On America Online’s “Digital City Boston”, he spotted a columnist dubbed the “Boston Movie Guy”. From there he wheedled the site’s editor into making him the “Boston Sports Guy” and paying $50 per week for his columns.

“It was an Internet sports column,” Simmons told the Times Magazine. “How far was I going to go with that?”

As it turned out, he became a blogger before many even recognized the term. By 2003 he was averaging 45,000 hits per day on his web page. His opportune timing and (at the time) inimitable writing and perspective took him to ESPN.com, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and eventually Grantland, his own website stabled with proven writers and backed by the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader in Sports”. He parlayed a $50 sports column into an international audience and an unmistakably fresh perspective on column writing.

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Lately, the divergent paths of Simmons and Ryan are more convergent than ever.

This is due in large part to Simmons’ elevated profile. He is no longer an outsider; instead he has steadily built himself into one of ESPN’s most visible personalities. With the visibility comes access that his old “Boston Sports Guy” columns could not provide. Last year he cohosted ESPN NBA Countdown with Magic Johnson, former Los Angeles Laker All-Star. On his Grantland audio and video channels he often partners with 14-year NBA veteran Jalen Rose. The B.S. Report guest list now includes famous writers, athletes, actors, comedians and even President Barack Obama.

All the notoriety and success has afforded Simmons more direct streams of information for his columns, drawing a counterpoint to the years Ryan spent working a beat to cull his sources. But the notoriety of Simmons’ column, coupled with his transition from a fan perspective to a media insider, is conflicting. Once in a while, “Vintage Simmons” (his own words) returns. After all, this is a columnist who once speculated, “Is Roger Clemens the Antichrist?”

Just a week after inviting Ryan on as a guest of The B.S. Report, Simmons took to his column on Grantland to deride the decision-making of the Celtics organization, specifically General Manager Danny Ainge.

Titled “The Five-Year Anniversary Party for Danny Ainge’s Last Good Move,” it was 4,250 words of vintage Simmons. He set the scene: A fake anniversary party for Ainge’s supposedly last good idea managing the Celtics.

“The event took place at the Hilltop Steakhouse on Route 1 in Saugus,” Simmons wrote, “which was chosen for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it peaked years ago… you know, kind of like the 2012 Celtics.”

From there the roast was on. In the column Celtics players, announcers and coaches come to the stage at the front of the restaurant to berate Ainge. By the end of it Simmons rags on nearly everyone affiliated with Celtics basketball.

The column was greeted with reasonable shock from the local media. It was the sort of colloquial fantasy column Simmons would have written in his more obscure days at America Online. But this was largely unexplored territory with his new website and heightened profile.

Speaking on Comcast SportsNet New England’s television network, Ryan made it clear that he did not want to engage Simmons in an argument that he “could not possibly win due to [Simmons] enormous following.” He also admitted that Simmons made legitimate points about Ainge’s missteps. Nevertheless, he had a problem with the way he birthed the column.

“Though he’s bombarding us with a tremendous amount of data, at core, he’s emotional,” Ryan said. “He is a Celtics fan. Self-proclaimed, there’s no ambiguity, he never denies it. He’s writing from the standpoint of a jilted-lover fan. An angry fan who, in my opinion, is unrealistically greedy.”

Simmons’ takedown of the Celtics did not please many of its targets. His well-documented history of hyperbole and button-pushing affects not only professional sports teams but his own employers. Simmons has been famously critical of ESPN and its programming, deriding ESPN2’s morning show, First Take,and a rush hour radio show on an ESPN affiliate in Boston. Some tweets have gotten him suspended from his Twitter account. In this case, Simmons and Ainge eventually mended their relationship. Ainge was a guest on The B.S. Report in 2013, which is now the customary way Simmons publicly reconciles.

Ryan’s columns have not always been without consequence, albeit he believes his criticism comes from a fairer place. Fairness, and not objectivity (according to him there is no such thing), is crucial. He advised that a columnist should only vilify people personally if he or she could deal with the consequences.

In 1975 Ryan chewed out the Boston Red Sox in a column for the Globe right as the team was preparing for a two-week road trip. He proposed that beloved Red Sox outfielder Carl Yastrzemski should bat lower in the order against left-handed pitchers because he couldn’t hit them. He called Doug Griffin a “totally unacceptable Major League second baseman.” Worst of all, he opined that two players should leave Boston on a charter airplane with Amelia Earhart piloting it.

“It wasn’t exactly a bunch of bouquets,” Ryan said on Around the Horn. “It turned out Amelia Earhart’s sister was alive and well in Massachusetts, read this and wasn’t very pleased at all. I just thought that 38 years was enough of a statute of limitations for talking about Amelia Earhart.”

The team was not pleased, either. When they came back from their road trip, Ryan was greeted icily upon his return to Fenway Park. After a Saturday afternoon game against the Yankees, he wandered into the clubhouse to talk to the players. As soon as he stepped in, Doug Griffin was shoving him out, telling him he didn’t belong. Outside the locker room, another player spat at the ground in front of Ryan’s feet and told him to never write anything about him again.

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There is a perceived fundamental difference between the new sports column and the old, and a difference between writers like Ryan and writers like Simmons observed by readers. Simmons filters his column through the fan experience; he began his career as a fan with no access. While that is no longer the case, he still often writes with the edge of a passionate, team-obsessed outsider. For Simmons specifically, the words are also filtered through his own experiences. There are references to Good Will Hunting, Goodfellas and other movies he enjoys discussing. Sometimes they are even frames for an entire argument in a column. Grantland is not just a forum for sports discussion, but also popular culture.

Simmons has a lexicon for his columns. An actual index on ESPN.com documents recurring Simmons-isms. There is his “Ewing Theory” – named after New York Knicks great Patrick Ewing – that explains the phenomenon of a team rallying around an injury to its best player and performing better. There are “Levels of Losing”, classifying the best and worst ways for a team (and its fans) to experience a loss. And the oft-cited “Nobody believes in us!” corollary, according to Simmons, is a way underdog teams motivate themselves.

All of these pop culture references and coined terms create a sense of inclusiveness with his audience. Even in his early days he developed a small but strong following. His columns were saved by loyal readers and emailed to friends.

“I printed out those 6,000-word columns and took them to the bathroom just like everybody else,” A.J. Daulerio, former editor-in-chief of the sports blog Deadspin, told the Times Magazine. “He changed the way I looked at everyone else’s writing.” Somewhat abiding with the spirit of Simmons (though frequently mocking and deconstructing his columns), Deadspin calls itself “Sports News Without Access, Favor, or Discretion”.

A sports column often showcases the opinions of a columnist. The well of experience that informs these opinions used to come from time spent embedded in a sport or a team. A writer would work his or her way up through the ranks: first covering high school sports for years, perhaps in a small town, before a higher profile position came around. From there the writer would work that beat for years, producing game recaps and piecing together interview notes, before even getting an opportunity as a columnist. This was the world that Ryan lived in. His columns were supplemented by time spent at the ballpark, on the field, or in the locker room.

But access to athletes, coaches and administrators isn’t what it used to be. Team public relations departments, player agents and coaches are often more tight-lipped around the press. According to Ryan, the players don’t need the media as much as they used to. They can influence their own public perception through a Facebook page or Twitter account. This, combined with the ready-made platform of the Internet, might account for the proliferation of writers like Simmons, who use what they can get their hands on – statistics, game footage, postgame television interviews, or even music videos and movie clips – to supplement their blog columns.

But before Simmons and Ryan, American sports writing began with the basic and earnest intentions of reporting what happened at the game. The Baseball Writers Association of America, founded in the fall of 1908, originally tasked its members with keeping score of baseball games in a consistent manner. While general news columnists flourished in the Golden Age of Radio, sports columns were popping up, too. Most of what was written about the games, the players and the coaches was reverential. The columnists almost deified them.

The so-called “Golden Age of Sportswriting,” by many accounts, came about in the 1920s and was led by Grantland Rice, the namesake of Simmons’ website. Rice was raised on football in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and became a letterman player for Vanderbilt University at the turn of the 20^th century. He was a sports poet. His lyrical style is exemplified in the final verse of “Alumnus Football”:

“Keep coming back, and though the world may romp across your spine,

Let every game’s end find you still along the battling line;

For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name,

He writes – not that you won or lost – but how you played the Game.”

Rice was the forbearer of a movement of sportswriters and columnists who looked for a parable in every season, in every game or in every player. Sports were much more widely recognized as escapism. They were battles of good and evil, and there were right and wrong ways to play the game. Perhaps most notably absent were cynicism and criticism.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that writers began to challenge the athletes. In 1966 Gay Talese wrote “The Silent Season of a Hero”, a melancholic profile of “Yankee Clipper” Joe DiMaggio’s life after baseball in his hometown of San Francisco. A few months earlier, Tom Wolfe finished “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!”, an extended profile on the “good ol’ boy” stock car driver. Both men brought deeper and more nuanced perspective that came from an intense study of and familiarity with their subjects. These athletes, and their peers, were not beyond reproach.

Talese and Wolfe were rarely columnists. Wolfe called himself and his colleague practitioners of “New Journalism”; they were more interested in extended storytelling. But their spirit of viewing athletics from a critical lens was reflected in Ryan and other columnists of the 1970s. By the 1980s, papers like the Globe had also expanded their staffs. There were columnists for each major national sport, in addition to a national columnist.

Vicious op-ed hecklers like Dick Young of the New York Daily News now held athletes accountable for their behavior in the locker room and outside the field of play. Shortly after Young’s death in 1987, George Vescey of the New York Times wrote, “With all the subtlety of a knee to the groin, Dick Young made people gasp.”

In 1986, former heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes kicked Young out of his gym in Las Vegas.

“I don’t like what you say about me,” Holmes told Young.

“You’ve got a right to say things and I don’t?” Young replied.

The columns of Young and others were perhaps written in backlash to the columns they were raised on. They were duped by the supposed elegance of these games. Boxing, once lovingly called “The Sweet Science,” could not live up to the beautiful prose anymore.

An issue that all sportswriters dealt with in their columns before the Internet was space. There were only so many column inches in a newspaper for a sports column, and therefore the standard length settled somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 words. Today some sports columnists (Simmons included) have a tough time keeping their columns under three times that length. The length of the Internet sports column is flexible, and largely depends on the subject, the writer and the intended audience. Every Wednesday, legendary former Sports Illustrated columnist Frank Deford does a podcast for National Public Radio in a segment called “Sweetness and Light.” A 75-year-old sports columnist has adapted the content of his work so it is available on iTunes; clearly the medium has affected the message.

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Steve Hirsch, 22, is a year away from earning a journalism degree at Washington University in St. Louis. During his time as an undergraduate he has worked as a baseball columnist for The Huffington Post and as a digital media intern for SportsNet New York.

“I like to play a pretty big role in my stories,” Hirsch told me during our time together at SportsNet New York. “I don’t know how you can accurately analyze a piece of writing without any gauge on who the writer is or where he’s coming from.”

He considers himself a member of a loose Twitter community – one compiled of fans, beat reporters, columnists, bloggers, players and coaches who are a part of New York Mets baseball. Growing up in Rye, New York, Hirsch has followed the Mets as long as he can remember. He says engaging with people on Twitter helps him develop perspective that supplements his columns.

“The more I can get my reader to react,” wrote Hirsch, “even if it’s to say that I’m a fucking asshole and I have no idea what I’m talking about, the more I’ll feel I’ll have done my job.”

That’s a concept that remains at the core of sports columns: Eliciting a reaction is still a common goal. Making a reader think, form his or her own opinion and respond is what Simmons and Ryan were able to do with great success. It’s how a columnist builds a readership and achieves name recognition. It exists hand in hand with developing a voice, something much more forthright in a column than a game recap or news brief.

“I remember hating Bernie Lincicome when I lived in Chicago and he wrote for the Tribune,” wrote Eric Johnson, a former columnist for Augusta, Georgia’s Metro Spirit. Lincicome was the Chicago Tribune’s sports columnist during the 1990s. “But I always read him, whereas I couldn’t tell you who had the regular Bulls beat, even during the [Michael] Jordan era.”

Finding that voice is a constant balance, and personal and professional missteps can bring down a successful columnist quickly. When Rick Reilly, 11-time NSSA Sportswriter of the Year, jumped from Sports Illustrated to take a big contract and expanded role with ESPN, many readers and colleagues pointed out a dip in the quality of his column. There were miscues and on-air spats with cohosts, and he even misquoted his own father-in-law. Seemingly overnight Reilly went from lauded columnist to, in the eyes of up-and-coming sports blogs like SB Nation and Deadspin, “a walking Father’s Day card”.

A few sport columns from provocateurs get special treatment on the Internet.

“There are many people out there who write just to rouse people and get attention,” Ryan said after taping another episode of Around the Horn. “They take on causes they don’t really believe in to get a rise out of people. They want to be read. I never once did that and I never will.”

Every so often a column, typically written by someone with a history of toeing the line between respect and repugnance (like Phil Mushnick of the New York Post, who recently wrote that the NBA, ironically, “lynched” Donald Sterling for his racist comments and practices), earns the derogatory label “Hot Sports Take”.

“Writing a hot take is simple,” Tomas Rios wrote this past August in the Pacific Standard. “Start with an easy target – any athlete accused of doing anything ‘bad’ will do – channel the aggrieved, paternalistic tone of your least favorite news anchor drunk on paranoia and privilege, dismiss nuance and insight at every opportunity, and close with some nonsensical pap about tradition, or responsibility, or America.”

The concept is now so familiar online that one writer has taken it upon himself to come up with a hot take each week. Andrew Sharp, formerly of SB Nation and now at Simmons’ Grantland, writes about a far-reaching issue in American sports each week for a section of the website appropriately dubbed “#HotSportsTakes”. The mission statement, according to Sharp, is “to write the worst sports column on earth”.

Sharp has written a Christmas-inspired column as Santa Claus, ruling on which athletes have been naughty and nice. He often refers to NFL coach Chip Kelly as “Chump” Kelly because his style of offense moves too quickly. He worships at the alter of Alabama head football coach Nick Saban, once writing, “Give Nick Saban a chessboard and a month to prepare, and he’ll make Bobby Fischer look like Fisher-Price.”

#HotSportsTakes and columns like it make no distinction of what sorts of column clichés they go after. The wide-eyed proselytizing of the Golden Age of Sportswriting exists alongside the contrarian column staples of the 1970s. It aims for fun with satire, but it also points the direction of the sports column forward by showing all the places it has been.

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“I’m a combination of new and old sports writing, I think,” Paul Flannery said last December from his shared office on the second floor of Boston University’s College of Communication. “I lost my fan allegiances years ago, when I started covering sports. I try to tell a good story and I try to tell the truth.”

Flannery lives near Porter Square in Cambridge and splits time as a lecturer for Boston University and a basketball writer for SB Nation. His class on sports journalism includes instruction on helping students write columns.

He notes a difference between being in the story and being the story itself. Flannery spent this past June covering a contentious NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs. Heat shooting guard Ray Allen nailed a corner 3-point shot in Game Six that eventually propelled the Heat to their second straight championship. Before the game, Allen told Flannery that he had been keying in on that exact shot, so he wrote that into his postgame column.

“Did it benefit me?” Flannery said, “Yes. At the same time I thought it benefitted the story, so that was a judgment I made. The problem I see with a lot of young writers is that they do it as a crutch. Sparingly it can be an effective tool.”

SB Nation allows him this sort of leeway. Online there is always space, and learning from sports columns of the past doesn’t necessarily mean erasing their merits from the future.

Bob Ryan says he has an “enormous amount” of respect for Bill Simmons. After their disagreements over the Celtics, that hasn’t changed.

“I wasn’t angry with him,” he told me. “We coexist. There’s room for us both.”

According to Ryan, there is a set of universal skills that all great columnists possess.

“He or she needs to have an interpretation of an event. He or she needs to shape it and pose questions and put things in historical perspective. And he or she needs to understand how to connect with an audience.”