Why Did Peter King Outlast His Haters?

The retiring NFL writer beat my generation

I read this week’s final Football Morning in America by just retired Peter King. It was, as expected, largely devoted to recently deceased heavyweight NFL reporter Chris Mortensen. The writeup was everything old Deadspin despised.

It was pleasant and respectful towards insiders. The key anecdote is Peyton Manning feeding Mort the bombshell of his 2016 retirement news because the veteran reporter is in the hospital with cancer. Mort sits on the news till just the right moment despite ESPN pressure, due to what he promised his source. Rival news breaker Jay Glazer tweeted, “Happy for Peyton Manning riding off on his own terms. Happier that @mortreport kicked my ass on this story!”

It’s a tale both heartwarming and, well, I’m not sure. The cynical part of my brain starts spitting out rude questions like, “Why is there so much sports industry emphasis on breaking news that everyone will inevitably know? Why did such an otherwise richly lived life sometimes revolve around the stress of beating a press release?” But that’s not the point of the passage. The point is, Mortensen was a great guy, which was why a legend would help him, and also why he wouldn’t betray the legend. It’s vibes. You’re supposed to read it and feel good. Old Gawker would dismiss this as “smarm,” but you know what? I doubt it’s fake. It’s just an innocent, sincere morsel plumbed from the depths of an otherwise sordid industry.

King was like a few other prominent boomer writers of his generation, prone to finding actual life lessons in sports. How sappy. How naive. But if Peter King was a fool, and our generation was smart for seeing through a positive depiction of football, then…what were we all doing watching the NFL?

Deadspin was especially brutal towards King, and even if I didn’t necessarily feel their objection on a visceral level, I understood it. Football is this hyper competitive human meat grinder and his perspective on the league was mostly blissful wonder. He covered the darkest game and seemed mostly oblivious to its dark side. Also, he was just so damned reverent. He didn’t hate power, like the Gawker set claimed to. Peter appeared to love the NFL and the NFL loved him right back, along with the readers.

The Institutional Man

Peter King and Bill Simmons are easily the most influential sports writers of the Internet age. Simmons’ impact has been covered more, in part because he was this paradigm shifting gate crasher. He’d mock the media, he’d joke about porn, and he resonated to such a degree that ESPN brought him into their tent to do it. It’s easier to tell the story of Bill. He came from the outside, changed institutions, and eventually built his own.

King was another thing entirely. He was the institutional man who harnessed the Internet, the established print journalist who somehow immediately translated to the online space. I’m not sure how to tell Peter’s story because Sports Illustrated failed to build on his massive success. It’s a doubly odd tale because King’s errors in reporting “deflategate” precipitated his departure from the magazine.

While his his approach certainly changed how other people went about writing for the Internet, it’s difficult to draw a clear line between King and his imitators. To me, the most notable aspect of his career was that it persevered under assault from young upstarts who’ve since become old. Deadspin and other bloggers tried to consign Peter King to history, present themselves as the future in contrast to the past he represented. They faltered, aged out, failed. He kept going and gracefully retired at age 66.

No, his FMIA column did not resonate like that old MMQB column did. People just don’t read as much as they used to. I listened to King’s podcast and radio hits from this latest season, though. They’re excellent. He’s so plugged in, and he was really working these games with an uncommon amount of access. Peter King on the radio is often telling you a story from some team’s vacant locker room when it was just him and the winning coach, processing what just happened. There’s nothing else like this now, at least told through a writer’s perspective.

I’d argue that King outlasted his critics because he was really good, just not in a way they respected. Being really good, in the way he was, helped King establish himself who could walk around an NFL facility with the freedom of a staffer. His career is a reminder that you don’t need to be a scathing “truth to power” cynic to give people what they want. I’ve got my own niche at this website, but its slice of market share doesn’t negate the demand for other forms of storytelling. A certain era of blogs misread their jaded form of success as replacing the smarmy old guard. Turns out, a lot of people want to feel better about what already makes them feel so good.

The Past

As a teenager, I eagerly read King’s Monday Morning Quarterback columns on the SI website. It’s difficult to convey their pull to a teenager today. My vague explanation is that it was like reading something completely familiar but also totally different, i.e., exactly the alchemy you need for a massive hit.

King’s NFL coverage reminded me of what I got from local San Diego Union Tribune columnist Nick Canepa, but it was totally unconstrained by word count, casual while somehow feeling comprehensive. Heeding the advice from an editor to “empty your notebook,” King included aspects of the NFL world that might otherwise be cut in a print column, these bits that aren’t alone essential, but represented a form of world building in totality. Maybe I didn’t need to know about Peter’s coffee habits on the road, but I enjoyed getting behind the scenes of a sports writer’s life.

Such asides were easy to mock, I guess. What seemed like a cutting edge casual blog style in the early 2000s could be ripped later on as the stuffy ramblings of self absorbed toady. A willingness to share arguably non relevant details could be shot back at you as evidence of your own irrelevance. King’s lengthy Monday columns first indicated that the Internet was free of constraints, a new, wonderful playground for print journalists. But, it turns out there were limits out there, placed by others. The more you write, the longer it goes, the bigger the target for critics. It was no longer cool that King shared behind scenes details about himself and your favorite football figures. Instead, from the blog perspective, it was damning. The top NFL writer was asleep at the wheel, indulgent of himself and Roger Goodell. It was time to crush him for a lack of seriousness and honor.

King and Deadspin writer Drew Magary eventually made a joke of the dynamic, in 2018, when the two collaborated for a beer tasting. At the end of the video, after referencing Deadspin’s King-aimed cruelty, Peter pours a beer over Magary’s head and shoves him. King was a remarkably good sport to participate but I’d also say that Deadspin laying down of arms signaled their own demise as a threat. They were no longer in the destruction business, or any business really. Gawker’s moment had passed, they didn’t matter, and Peter was starting out at Pro Football Talk, having persevered through Deflategate and whatever else.

Is there a moral to this story, as would surely happen in a classic Peter King column? If there is, it’s that a lot of people like a soft focus. “Truth to power” is certainly an ideal that I crave, but not everyone does and that’s fine, especially in a sports context. I think it’s easy to conflate the journalism you want with the journalism everyone else needs. This is especially true if, at some level, you personally desire the mantle of another high status journalist. Peter King achieved unprecedented Internet success, and then was ripped for not acting as serious as his standing. But he didn’t get to that success through serious interrogation. He got to it by being a blogger, one who happened to be in thrall to America’s favorite power.