On Monday, a group of some of my favorite sportswriters in the country — including Tim Marchman, Bethlehem Shoals, and Tom Scharpling — announced the creation a new website, The Classical. Modeled after The Awl, The Classical aims to establish “a running, wide-ranging conversation between us and our readers about baseball, basketball, soccer, football and fighting, and about things that aren’t sports, too.”
Unlike the two other giants in online longform sports journalism, Deadspin and Grantland (which are funded by Gawker Media and ESPN, respectively), The Classical is launching via a Kickstarter campaign. Depending on the size of your donation, you can receive a number of pretty awesome rewards. $25 will get you greeting cards featuring inspirational quotes from sporting legends (including Metta World Peace’s “I’m a big fan of the Nobel Peace Prize”). For $250 you can commission an essay on a subject of your choosing.
There are so many reasons to fund this project, but I’ll list just a few:
1. I know I just said this, but the writers involved are some of the most insightful, hilarious sportswriters working today. Any project that means we’ll get to read more work from these guys (and they’re all guys, at the moment, though they’ve promised to diversify soon) makes the internet a much better place.
2. It feels incredibly weird to say this, but there’s actually room for this project on the internet. There’s not enough insightful sports commentary online, and I’m looking forward to see what The Classical will add to the conversation.
3. The fact that the site is going to be launched by its readers is truly exciting.
4. One of the site’s founders, Pete Beatty, told the Observer that “It is probably fair to describe The Classical as post-punk sports journalism,” and that is the best description of anything ever.
I’ve decided to (temporarily) devote money I would ordinarily spend on alcohol to help get the Classical off the ground and will donate $50 to the project as soon as this check clears. I can’t recommend making a contribution to the site, whether big or small, highly enough. If you’re interested in more information, Beatty (read his essay about ruin porn, the Cleveland Indians, and Jim Thome right now. It will make you even more excited about this project.) was kind enough to answer a few questions about the site over email:
How and when did the idea for The Classical come about? What were the early conversations about the site like?
Hard to say, as I was a relative latecomer, but I think the idea was: we like sports, we write sports intelligently, but there’s not a site that does what we want, so let’s start one, and name it after a Fall song if possible. Early conversations were mostly digressive, cuss-filled Gmail conversations.
Deadspin and now Grantland have carved out particular niches for providing intelligent commentary about sports. On Kickstarter and Facebook you’ve indicated that The Classical will be different from those sites. How? And what will make it similar to them?
Once we get our money right, The Classical joining an already great sports-journo world online. Grantland and Deadspin have great people writing killer stuff. We will be different because we’re different writers with different voices. I think you can take our name inspirations for an example. Deadspin is a pisstake on ESPN; Grantland is named after an iconic sportswriter; we’re named after a Fall song that sounds snooty but is actually a warm, crusty riot of ideas. What will make it similar? That fact that it is HTML-based English language sports journalism, I guess.
The list of founders is very impressive. What drew you to one another?
Spazz blogger pheromenes. Plus I think we all share a spirit animal. The caracal.
You’ve indicated that the model for the site is The Awl? Why?
The Awl is funny, smart, and profitable, and equally comfortable doing quick-hit micro and in-depth, reported macro. It has an engaged, relatively troll-free readership, and it’s a publication that makes our lives better. In short, it’s what we want to be when we grow up.
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