An oral history of the National Sports Daily.

Grantland Rice was everything his namesake website should aspire not to be. He was a pandering mythmaker who wrote verse and prose the way Thomas Kinkade paints carriage lanes (“The Hills of Fame still beckon where the Paths of Glory lead …”). Reading him today is not unlike looking at your maiden aunt’s collection of Precious Moments figurines. Moths come flying off every word. He was responsible for a lot of the worst pathologies of sportswriting today, and the fact that a major web site now unironically carries his name tells me we’ve done to Rice what Rice did to so many ballplayers over the years. We’ve godded up the godmaker.

On Simmons’s rise, his gripes, and Grantland.

It was a sultry afternoon, and midway through the game, we went inside to the Dugout Club to cool off and talk. Simmons sounded as if he was having some regrets about Grantland. “It hasn’t been as much as fun as I had thought,” he told me. “I’m not sure I would do it again.” Too much of his time was being spent in the office, dealing with administrative tasks, which was encroaching on his column.

Simmons’s literary persona suggests a slacker, a guy who would like nothing more than to spend his days drinking beer and watching sports. This image, enhanced by his loose, casual prose, is misleading. The real Simmons is hard-working and competitive. His rise to prominence has been punctuated by bouts of restlessness and frustration, even when things looked from the outside to be going his way. He’s still chafing over his publisher’s handling of his 2009 book, “The Book of Basketball,” a No. 1 New York Times best seller.

An ode to Robert Lipsyte.

“The infectious values and myths transmitted by bad sportswriters,” Lipsyte wrote in SportsWorld, now rising to a crescendo, “may be the deadliest words in the paper.” This wasn’t just superb gun-slinging. It was, in the world of the pressbox, a crisis of faith. Lipsyte the sportswriter is like Cherry Jones in a nun’s habit, standing center stage and yelling, “I have doubts!”

A roundtable on sportswriting.