Robert McChesney's secret life as an NBA blogger
A look back at a journalism scholar's labor of love.
The journalism research world lost a giant recently.
Robert McChesney, a legendary figure in journalism studies, died last month at the age of 72. Joshua Benton wrote a wonderful obituary tracing McChesney’s wonderfully eclectic career at Nieman Lab.
McChensey’s 1989 book chapter “Media Made Sport” is an essential text for sports journalism scholars. I cite it in nearly every scholarly work I write and have all my graduate students read it. The chapter traces the beginnings of American sports journalism better than any other text I’ve read. The history of sports journalism is something that’s surprisingly not well documented, and McChesney’s chapter traces the profession’s history from the 1830s sports magazines through the growth of newspapers at the turn of the 20th century and into the TV age of the 1950s and 1960s.
As a work more of sociology than straight history, McChesney framed his chapter around a vital point about sports and sports media (emphasis is mine):
Sport and the mass media enjoy a symbiotic relationship in U.S. society. On the one hand, the staggering popularity of sports is due, to no small extent, to the enormous amount of attention provided to it by the mass media. On the other hand, the media are able to generate enormous sales in both circulation and advertising based upon their extensive treatment of sports. Media attention fans the flames of interest in sports and increased interest in sports warrants further media attention.
McChesney traced how early sports media actively worked to make sports a legitimate cultural institution in the United States, and how sports were an economic engine for newspapers.
Sport was very well suited to the editorial needs of the emerging giant newspaper corporations. Sport was ideologically “safe” and did not antagonize any element of the desired readership. It did not even offend those who were put off by the sex and sensationalism of the front page. Sport also lent itself to all sorts of civic boosterism on the part of the newspaper. As sport gave cohesiveness and identity to a community, a newspaper’s coverage and promotion of sport could be considered a significant contribution to its metropolis.
In other words, sports coverage was good for business for newspapers.
For me, this notion of the symbiotic relationship is essential to understand the nature of sports journalism. Unlike political journalism or other news coverage, it did not develop from a place of antagonism or as a check on governmental power. It came from a more positive place, a way to sell newspapers and promote a leisure activity. So when we think about how sports journalists do their jobs, or what fans expect from sports journalism, or the relationship between sources and sports journalists, it’s important to remember that this profession is built on a symbiotic relationship.
But I want to spend some time today writing about a different part of McChesney’s career, one I didn’t know about until I read Benton’s piece in Nieman Lab.
I want to write about the foremost media sociologist of our time’s not-so-secret life as an NBA blogger.
A blogger who used the pen name Elrod Enchilada.
Over the span of eight years, from July 25, 2006 to Dec. 17, 2014, McChesney-as-Enchilada wrote 70,687 words for RealGM.com about the Boston Celtics and the NBA.
Did read every one of those 70,687 words to get an idea of what kind of sports blogger McChesney was? I absolutely read every one of those 70.687 words.
I became a Celtics fan in 1969, as a teenager from Cleveland watching the heroic and ancient Russell-coached team defeat three teams in the playoffs each with dramatically greater athletic ability. It was a marvel of what was called “Celtic Pride,” and it was intoxicating.
Like most Celtics fans, I assumed this was the end of an era, and that the Cs would revert to the status of the other teams in the league. Then Red Auerbach quickly and quietly put together the extraordinary and underrated Havlicek-Cowens-White-Silas teams in the early and mid 1970s. I was hooked. May 13, 2011.
A quick aside: It’s important to remember that, at the time, writing under a pseudonym1 online was not uncommon. This was before social media ate the web, before everything became content, before people were building online brands. It’s a tradition that came from early blogs, which were often personal online diaries. The anonymity was a feature, not a bug, as it gave people an outlet to write while retaining some privacy, or giving them freedom to write without the connection to their IRL lives. McChesney blogged under Elrod Enchilada for the same reason that Michael Schur wrote Fire Joe Morgan as Ken Tremendous.
I am DYING to learn where and why McChesney came up with the name.
When you go to Elrod Enchilada’s author page at RealGM.com, there are 29 posts listed. There are 27 original posts — one post was rerun three times by the site. According to the developer source code on the site, Elrod’s first post came on July 25.2 In this post, he refers to another entry from July 17, but that initial one has been lost to Wayback Machine in the sky.3
The average length of the posts was 2,618 words. A third of the posts were more than 3,000 posts. Even this average is misleading, because two posts were under 800 words but they featured in-depth tables of an NBA player ranking system that he created.
Even if you’re only doing so once a month, writing 2,618 words takes effort. It takes time. It takes intelligence. McChesney-as-Enchilada’s posts demonstrate the same intelligence he brought to his academic scholarship. There probably weren’t many basketball blogs that accurately quoted French revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint Just. There are references to the 1890 Major League Baseball season, the 1972 Washington football team, and Ed Garvey’s time as the head of the NFLPA.
McChesney-as-Enchilada’s posts were well thought out, researched, detailed, and entertaining. They were the clear work of an intelligent sports fan who cared deeply about the NBA and his favorite team.
There were four distinct topics that he wrote about. He wrote two posts that were more general blog posts about the NBA — one about The Decision, one about a potential “pennant race” in the NBA.4
Three posts (9,540 words) were about the NBA’s labor issues in the early 2010s. In one post, he suggested that if the owners canceled the 2010-11 season, players should consider a nuclear option and form their own league.
One of the posts in this topic — a 5,240 essay — was reprinted twice. “The Path To A Permanent Peace Between NBA Players And Owners” outlined a proposed solution to the issues that divided players and owners in this lockout. The centerpiece of this plan was an elimination of individual player contracts and replacing it with centralized salaries for all players. As Benton wrote in Nieman Lab, “In extremely McChesney style, he once advocated a sort of socialist centralization of NBA salaries that would better allocate rewards to labor.”
The third topic was McChensey-as-Enchilada’s SuperDuperStar theory. The basic idea here is that NBA teams need to have a superstar (first-team all-NBA level) in order to even think about being true title contenders.5 He wrote three versions of this theory. His initial post in 2006 was the first iteration of this. The second came in three parts July of 2010, right after The Decision, with the final version coming in a three-post series in August of 2013. In that final post, he ranked what he considered to be the top 117 players in NBA history by a scoring system he created. It’s quite a thing.
But the lion’s share of the blog — 13 posts, a total of 36,713 words — were about his beloved Boston Celtics.
Being a Celtics fan this year feels a bit like the guy who has one foot in the ice bucket and the other foot in the fire and says “on balance, I feel average … Is it time to start combing the draft websites like Celtics fans did endlessly from 2003 to 2007?
For this post, I learned A LOT about the early 2010s Celtics, an interesting time for the team when they were coming off the Big 3 championship of 2008 but before the current Jason Tatum-Jaylen Brown team. One of the central questions of McChesney-as-Enchilada’s writing is whether or not Rajon Rondo will emerge as a true superstar. The focus of the blog is roster construction, how then-GM Danny Ainge should build and rebuild the roster. It makes sense both on a site called RealGM.com, which “offers users all the data and tools required to simulate the experience of a real general manager” and also for the time period. This was prime Moneyball-Analytics era, when the cult of the GM began to really emerge.
Reading these entries with the distance of time and non-fandom, a few things stood out to me. One is that there was almost no critique of what was then called “mainstream media.” Sports journalists were only mentioned twice, one in passing and one in a historical context. Also, this was written in the informal style of blogs at the time. One quote: “the Eastern Conference royally sucks. It is atrociously bogus.” Thgere’s something just so delightful to me to think of this giant of academia typing that sentence.
But what stands out more than anything is how much McChesney cared about his favorite basketball team. They are obsessive in the best possible way. You don’t write nearly 2,000 words about Rajon Rondo’s free-throw shooting if you aren’t in deep with your fandom.
It’s a voice I recognize. What the Celtics were to McChesney, the Bills are to me. When I told my man
I could write 500 words on the Dalton Kincaid drop, I wasn’t exaggerating. It’s that deep love and care that is the best parts of sports fandom, and the best parts of blogging.I love that there’s nothing connecting McChesney’s basketball blogs to his larger work. This was not a professional project, not connected to his research.6 His blog writing as Elrod Enchilada was a true labor of love, the work of someone devoted to his team and who loved to write and think about sports.
This is unrelated to anything, but 10 years later I still marvel at the line from Hamilton “I’ll write under a pseudonym/you’ll see what I can do to him.”
The date under his byline on the page is for 2015, but it’s listed before a post from 2006 so I double checked the source code.
One of the great lies of the internet is that everything is forever. There has been so much content that’s been lost from the first 20 years of online life.
Interestingly, or maybe ironically, both of these posts were the exact same length. 1,004 words.
It’s similar to the quarterback theory that my man
and Jim Monos talk about — if an NFL team doesn’t have a quarterback, they’re not going to be contenders.Not that he needed it. As Benton pointed out, his CV was 195 pages.