Sorry to get all meta so early in this column’s life, but there’s no avoiding it this week. On Wednesday, ESPN trotted out Bill Simmons’s Grantland, a site looking to bring a thoughtful, literate touch back to sports writing, as well as allow its fearless leader to curse as much as possible. Also part of the plan is to cover pop culture, primarily movies and television. In fact, Grantland’s credo is the plain, if definitive, “sports and pop culture.”

(This is not a hit-piece, in case you’re already defensive or rearing for intestines to chew. It’s an examination of a technique that has become central to whatever the “next wave” of sportswriting is.)

What bothers me about this formulation, and where I worry Grantland might go astray, is in thinking that pop culture can somehow be isolated from, well, culture writ large. Or, for that matter, that sports can. Take “sports and pop culture.” Whether the two are connected by the lifestyle of the fan, or the symbol system used to make sense of sports, or the kind of figures we expect athletes to be, the fact remains: “pop culture” is remarkably trivial and self-limiting. Ceding the considerably less peppy, if not downright stodgy, “sports and culture” both gets in all the silliness that Simmons loves—hell, I like reality shows too—while acknowledging that movies, music, and sports themselves exist in a larger context. Maybe this takes all the fun out of life, but it’s a totalizing act, one that allows the whole picture to be addressed. “Sports and pop culture” supposes that these connections are somehow novel, or even avoidable.

Otherwise, there’s an enforced triviality, a willful blindness (one not evident, happily, in a piece like Tom Bissell’s take on L.A. Noire), while at the same time making sports subordinate. That’s the real incentive to tear down that wall and admit the fallacy of “sports and pop culture.” Once a certain threshold of either intellectual curiosity or writer-ly restlessness has been crossed and you’re no longer writing straight sports, a certain level of responsibility emerges. So does a terrible freedom. Because we all love to be confronted by that every once in a while. I don’t think that means the writing has to be ponderous, or subjugate sports. If anything, it’s the only way to put them on an equal footing with the rest of the world around us, whether we’re trying to learn from them, or just enjoy them as more than a bunch of jumping and numbers. I don’t think pop culture ruins sports, but I do think that pigeon-holing it, and the two together, does very little to advance their cause as something that captures more than the fan experience and Hall of Fame numbers.

We all know about the long tradition of athletes with rap dreams (and, to take it back even further, Wilt Chamberlain and Roosevelt Grier in the field of R&B). The throwback, and Jay-Z’s eventual admission that “I walk like a ballplayer,” completed the circuit of either envy or mutual respect. What’s too often lost, though, is that—at least as tropes—sports and rap have long served as the sole legal career considerations in a host of underprivileged, largely African-American neighborhoods. That’s a real downer, but it’s present in this Sports Illustrated feature from 1999—superficially a puff-piece, but rife with reference to former 2 Live Crew frontman Luther Campbell’s University of Miami boosterism, as well as a relationship between Shaq and Biggie that, in retrospect, casts the athlete’s life in a decidedly darker light. “Calypso, Literature and West Indian Cricket: Era of Dominance,” a twelve-zillion word piece written by Gordon Rohlehr for the journal Anthurium, shows you the absolute, undeniable intersection of sport, pop music, and social change. If that’s not culture, I don’t know what is.

It’s worth noting that Fire in Babylon, a documentary that covers some similar ground, would not have been out of place in Simmons’ 30 for 30. The best docs in that series were very much in this vein, and it’s that sense of scope that sportswriting must achieve to really be taken seriously—for instance, The U brought out Uncle Luke, and not just for laughs.

Finally, Bissell’s piece from Grantland, while ostensibly and frequently a video game review, is also well aware of what it means to review a cultural object like L.A. Noire, and what’s working in him when he immerses himself in its world. After reading it, you have trouble feeling like we’re merely talking about “pop” here, or that L.A. Noire exists in some sort of vacuum of awesomeness and irony. I don’t know if video games are a sport, or if anyone even likes that sort of debate, but that conceit could plop down comfortably in Bissell’s piece without making too much of a fuss.