3) HE’S A VINDICTIVE BULLY When Shaughnessy sours on a player, he hammers them relentlessly and in damning the most terms. Take his allegation this past August that Sox slugger/space cadet Manny Ramirez, a favorite target, had fabricated a hamstring injury to get out of playing: “[W]hen it comes to tweaked hamstrings, only the patient truly knows how he’s feeling. It’s the athlete’s equivalent of the fourth-grade boy who won’t go to school because he has a headache. There are no grounds for a challenge even if you have suspicions.”
“He’s constantly sniping at Schilling, at people like Manny Ramirez — it’s almost pathological,” gripes Adam Gaffin, who writes the Universal Hub blog. Haters see this vindictiveness directed at readers as well as athletes: there’s a whole body of lore involving testy exchanges between Shaughnessy and his detractors — including one celebrated case in which Shaughnessy called an online critic’s boss to point out how the employee was spending his working hours. (In an online video game at BarstoolSports.com, players are invited to literally kick Shaughnessy’s ass — and send him flying through the air. When he lands with a thud, he looks up and says, “I’m gonna call your boss!!”
4) HE’S NOT A FAN With devotion to New England sports teams reaching unprecedented levels of intensity, this charge verges on blasphemy. There are two variations here: while some haters say Shaughnessy is simply indifferent to the fate of the Red Sox (and, less notably, the Patriots, Celtics, and Bruins), others accuse him of outright antipathy — especially toward the Sox. The latter group points to Shaughnessy’s 1990 book The Curse of the Bambino, which cemented both Shaughnessy’s national reputation and the notion that the Sox are a doomed franchise. “I think he’s enjoying the fact that the Red Sox currently have a lot of payroll to work with, because he’s able to go out and get big names, and there’s a lot more things he can lash out at them about,” says Sons of Sam Horn founder Eric Christensen. Barstool Sports publisher Dave Portnoy goes further: “I think he honestly roots against the Sox. I think he profits when they do bad.”
5) HE EMBODIES OLD-MEDIA ARROGANCE The haters’ explanation for why Shaughnessy mocks bloggers? He’s worried that his status as an intermediary between pro athletes and the public is in jeopardy. “He’s an obnoxious, arrogant SOB,” says Gaffin, “who doesn’t realize that it’s not 1989 anymore and the world doesn’t revolve around the sports pages of the Boston Globe.”
6) HE BLOWS IN THE WIND According to the haters, Shaughnessy is far too easily swayed by both positive and negative developments. Case in point: his June 2005 statement that the Sox were a lock to win the AL East. (“Come late September, this is going to look like Secretariat at the Belmont in 1973,” Shaughnessy wrote.) The Yankees won the division; the Sox got the Wild Card and were swept by the White Sox, who went on to win the World Series.
7) HE’S FUNNY LOOKING This is a tricky one, because Shaughnessy’s physical appearance — specifically, his red Afro and plump cheeks — is both a focus of scorn and a catalyst for hostility in other areas.
Consider this tale from “Cheryl” — a Rhode Island woman who regularly stays in a hotel near Shaughnessy’s during spring training, and asked that her last name not be used. “Every year, I see CHB jogging,” Cheryl wrote in an e-mail. “In 2006, I’m coming off a 6- or 7-mile fitness walk, and here comes CHB jogging toward me. He had just come out of his hotel and he was so bright red and sweating so profusely that I thought, ‘Oh, God, if he needs CPR I’m not sure I’d offer. . . . . He’s got that red curly hair and that white splotchy skin and he’s all gangly.’ ”
Ponder this for a moment: a trained CPR practitioner thinks she might actually let Shaughnessy die if he dropped to the pavement in front of her. That’s as bad as it gets.
CHB VS. JURASSIC CARL: Shaughnessy’s red Afro inspired his current nickname. Former Red Sox head case Carl Everett (a creationist whom Shaughnessy dubbed “Jurassic Carl” was asked by another Globe reporter, Gordon Edes, for a story. Everett refused, saying he didn’t talk to Globe reporters, especially “you and your Curly-Haired Boyfriend,” which was subsequently shortened to “CHB.” The acronym has become a favorite moniker of Shaughnessy haters.
(Source: Sons of Sam Horn) |
Playing the game
But wait. For the sake of the argument, suppose that every single Shaughnessy criticism mentioned above, even in its most extreme form, has some validity. He’s totally predictable; he wants to be the story; he’s a jerk; he hates the Sox; he’s an old-media dinosaur; he abhors context; he’s Carrot Top’s uglier twin. Does that really make him a “piece of garbage”? Does it justify punching him in the face? Or withholding life-saving first aid as he expires on the sidewalk?It’s hard to answer this question objectively, because I’m in the same profession as Shaughnessy. But I can say that Shaughnessy’s alleged faults are, to a large extent, the faults of print journalists everywhere. We all develop prose tics and patterns; we’re all kind of annoyed by self-important bloggers; we all like it when our stories make something happen; we all know bad news is more interesting to write about than good. Also, most of us aren’t matinee idols. Shaughnessy’s sins are ours; he is me, on a bad-hair day in 2020.
