Fight Night At The Stool
Can you believe that the Stool has been in business for almost four years now? That’s a shitload of time when you really think about it. Especially considering that Vegas set the over under on how long we’d last at two months. But here we are almost four years old and still going strong. As we rapidly approach our four year anniversary, I thought it would be fun to look back at some the best controversies/fights/enemies in the history of the Stool. So without further ado, here are my top 10 enemies in the history of Barstool Sports
The Stool vs. The Metro
The Metro was probably our first real enemy at the Stool. I used to bash them in every single issue of Barstool Sports like it was my job. In fact, in the old days when I still hawked papers outside South Station, a few of my go-to slogans were as follows:
“We’re just like the Metro only we have writers!” and the “Metro Makes You Dumber!”
Now to the Metro’s credit, I’m pretty sure they didn’t even know we existed and they’d probably be shocked to see themselves on this list but that didn’t stop me from attacking them at every opportunity. I think my biggest pet peeve with the Metro is the fact that they are a huge French conglomerate that just barged into Boston and tried to act like they were a local newspaper. That and the fact that the paper kind of sucks. Anyway over time I’ve stopped paying attention to the Metro as I think most of Boston has. I haven’t picked up a copy in over a year. But to their credit they do have an excellent bowling team as they won the Boston Media Bowling league.
The Stool vs. The Feminists
This is an ongoing battle at Barstool Sports headquarters. Every couple of months like clockwork some feminist will come out of the woodwork and launch an antiStool campaign. We’ve had everything from people crusading against us on Craigslist to people trying to bribe me not to put girls on our cover. In fact, just last week we had a website that was trying to get people to boycott our CEO’s and Office Ho's party because we were calling girls ho's. My answer to that is that a girl could be a CEO if she wanted to.
Regardless, it’s my experience that these campaigns are usually led by fat ugly girls who have low self confidence and no self esteem. Anyway, I’ve really never understood why people get upset when we put beautiful girls on our cover. It’s not like our cover models are being held at gunpoint or anything. Whenever people say we exploit girls or are sexist I always use the “great athlete and great looking girl analogy”. In my mind great athletes and hot girls are both just freaks of nature. And they are both worshipped in our society for being freaks. Honestly, what’s the difference between being born with the ability to throw a fastball 98 mph’s and being born with an ass that won’t stop? And in both cases you need to develop your natural gifts or they’ll become useless.
And just like how people have stereotypes of hot chicks, people have stereotypes of athletes i.e. stupid athlete, stupid blond. But for some reason, nobody ever accuses people of objectifying great athletes when you stick them on the cover of a magazine. You only hear that shit when you stick hot chicks on magazines. If you ask me, it’s a total double standard and makes no sense. Why would anybody care that we think a girl is hot? How is that objectifying women? We’re not saying anything about her intelligence, personality or anything else. We’re just saying she’s a smokeshow and we love looking at her. If somebody thought I was good looking enough to be on the cover of a magazine and chicks said they wanted to bang me, I’d be totally cool with it.
El Pres vs. Startlogic (Our Webhosting Company)
We just switched webhosting companies last week and all I can say is "Thank God." Our previous webhosting company was arguably the worst company in the history of modern civilization. Over the past two years, it seems like a week didn’t go by where we didn’t have some sort of major website malfunction. And without fail, they always had some wacky excuse like a nuclear bomb hit their building or something. Now one of the reasons we originally signed up with Startlogic was because they had a 99.99999% uptime guarantee and 24/7 technical support. Unfortunately, what I came to find out is both of these features only worked when the website was working. In other words, Startlogic is happy to help you as long as there is nothing to help with. And they’ll guarantee that your website is working perfectly as long as it’s working, but the second there is a problem you’re fucked. I’ve got to believe that Startlogic caused 19 suicides and put 93 companies out of business during our tenure with them. I just thank my lucky starts we were able to survive their reign of terror. My favorite trick that Startlogic used to pull is whenever they had one of their major meltdowns they’d direct you to tech support in India. Later I found out that the India guys never had a clue what was going on. They had canned answers for every possible question you could ask them. I wasted roughly 234 hours of my life talking to these guys before I got one of these clowns to admit the truth to me. Fucking Startlogic.
The Stool vs. The City of Boston
The City of Boston is a gigantic pain in my ass. I’ve complained about this a thousand times, but basically Mayor Menino is obsessed with stealing my news racks (soldiers) from the streets of Boston. So just like clockwork every couple weeks I need to break into the city dump and free them in a scene vaguely reminiscent of the ending of Clear and Present Danger. Except instead of fighting Columbian drug lords, I have to fight the wild kittens that live in the dump and make my newsracks their home. And yes I do pay Menino for permits to put the racks in the streets, but he doesn’t seem to care.
And as if this whole rack fiasco wasn’t enough, I just found out that Menino has blacklisted www.barstoolsports.com. Yup, I was sitting in Faneuil Hall the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find out that the City of Boston offered free WiFi access to people with laptops. But when I tried to log onto the Stool I received an error message saying that we were banned because of content. Who the fuck is Menino to play god with what websites people want to visit? This is clearly a violation of the 5th Amendment or one of the amendments about free speech and all that shit. But what am I going to do? You can’t fight city hall. But I’ll say this: Menino better watch out. If he keeps pushing my buttons he may end up in a dog fight in the next election. El Pres for Mayor? I like the sounds of that. And I think a platform built on newsrack legislation and freeing www.barstoolsports.com would be pretty powerful.
Bill Simmons vs. El Pres
Ah, Bill Simmons vs. El Pres. This one goes way back to the beginning of time or at the very least the beginning of the Stool. I think I’ve told this story a bazillion times already, but I still get emails from people asking what the deal with this is. So here goes nothing. Before I started Barstool Sports I called Bill Simmons virtually every day and explained what I was doing and asked if he could spare a minute to talk and lend any possible advice. He never returned my phone call. Not once. Then once we launched, I approached Simmons to do an interview with us. After a couple months he finally responded via email saying to send him the questions. So we came up with the questions and sent them over to him. Again we didn’t hear from him for two or three months. Finally, he responded, saying that he didn’t want to do the interview because “he didn’t want too much media exposure.” Naturally, I was disappointed as I’d been reading him just about as long as anybody in Boston. I’m talking way back to his digital city Boston days. Heck, his success was one of the things that inspired me to start Barstool Sports. The result of him dissing us was that we took a couple cheap shots at him in the paper despite the fact we had been huge and loyal fans from the beginning and left well enough alone.
Months later the Weekly Dig ran a Red Sox preview issue that included an interview with none other than Bill Simmons! I sent Bill Simmons an email to confirm that he did in fact grant the Dig an interview as opposed to the Weekly Dig just pulling quotes from previous articles of his. Well, much to our surprise this was the beginning of a very unfriendly email exchange between Barstool Sports and Bill Simmons. He told me it was stupid for a “fledgling” newspaper like Barstool Sports to go public with the fact he denied the interview request since he could have potentially helped us in the long run, but now he never would. So for a long time after that, whenever I saw something trying to portray Simmons as somebody who really cares about the Average Joe, I ripped him because I thought he was full of crap.
Now this all took place years ago. Simmons and I did trade emails to clear the air a few months back. Simmons explained his side of the story and basically said he gets thousands of requests similar to what we were asking and it’s impossible for him to respond quickly to everybody and differentiate the real requests from the scumbags from the waste of times, blah, blah, blah. And I’m sure there is a lot of truth in that. Simmons also honestly believes that we portrayed him unfairly. I still think I was totally fair, but we’ve pretty much let bygones be bygones and I have nothing against him anymore. But this article couldn’t exist without including this dispute on the list.
The Stool vs. The Boston Sports Review
Man, this one was like a tornado. It came and went so fast I didn’t even know what happened, but it left a lot of destruction in its path. Essentially the BSR launched two years after we did. But that didn’t stop them from proclaiming that they were the 1st free sports paper in the history of Boston. The founder was quoted in local papers (like the Metro) as saying he couldn’t believe anybody had ever done this before and things like that. Now keep in mind I knew they were coming months before they launched because they called every single one of my advertisers and tried to steal them. So naturally I was pissed and ready to go to war when they hit the street. And when they finally arrived, I wrote a scathing article ripping them apart and basically asking the Stoolies to band together against them. I concluded the article with a famous quote from the Untouchables that I thought everybody would clearly recognize as the part when DeNiro is talking about Kevin Costner:
I want you to get this fuck where he breathes! I want you to find this nancy-boy Eliot Ness, I want him DEAD! I want his family DEAD! I want his house burned to the GROUND! I wanna go there in the middle of the night and I wanna PISS ON HIS ASHES!
Well the day after this article was published I got a call from the BSR saying that I threatened the guy’s family and that they were nervous and he wanted to sue me. Now I fully admit I should have clarified that the quote from the Untouchables. I really thought everybody knew that and it was obvious that it was a joke in the context of the article. But just to be safe I wrote a retraction in the next issue telling people that I was totally joking and didn’t want any personal or bodily harm to come to the people at the BSR. I may love the Stool, but I would never threaten a guy because he started a rival newspaper.
Anyway, this naturally was the beginning of a pretty unfriendly rivalry between us and the BSR. I tried my best not to bash them, but I definitely still took my fair share of shots at them. And they did the same. In fact, I’ve heard more lies about us that have originated from the BSR than I care to remember. The good news is that the BSR quickly disappeared from the world of competitive free newspapers after a year or so. Rumor is that they are still in business somewhere, but I never see them or run into them anymore so I wish them nothing but success wherever they are.
The John Dennis Voicemail
One of the Stool’s proudest moments was when we broke the John Dennis voicemail to Ryen Russillo. We refer to it as "3 Minutes of Glory" around here. Listening to one guy threaten to kick another guy's balls through his head and rip his ears off and shove them down his ass never sounded so good. This voicemail became so huge that we even had Bill Simmons emailing us telling us that we needed to take advantage of the publicity because it only comes around once in a blue moon. Ironically this voicemail also led to the demise of the Barstool Sports Radio hour as 1510 cancelled our show because we wouldn’t take the voicemail off our website. Still, it was one of our finest moments. Also, I think this kind of signaled the arrival of the Stool and was a harbinger of things to come as www.barstoolsports.com has become one of the biggest websites in New England thanks to shit like this.
BC vs. The Stool
One of the biggest misconceptions with Barstool Sports is that El Pres hates the Superfans. Nothing could be further from the truth. But the facts are that BC fans and BC alumni have a bad habit of setting themselves up to be ripped. And it all starts with their inflated egos. For some reason, the Superfans think their athletic program is on par with ND, Texas and Michigan. Therefore whenever BC chokes in football or gets bounced from the NCAA tournament, I feel it’s my job to remind them that they kind of suck at sports. And unfortunately the Superfans' inflated sense of self worth isn’t limited to athletics. They think they are above everything and that includes exploiting pretty girls. After all, who can forget when we had a BC law student pose on the cover of our newspaper and the BC Law community went nuts saying it was a disgrace to the school. Apparently the geeks over at BC Law either are intimated by pretty girls, jealous of pretty girls or have flat out never seen one before. That’s the only conclusion I have for why they got their panties in such a bunch over the fact that one of their classmates posed for our cover. The Superfans somehow believed that a classmate posing for Barstool would tarnish the image of BC Law and hurt their chances at landing a job. Regardless, I owe these nutbags a debt of gratitude. Because without them we never would have been the front page story on the Boston Herald. So to all you BC Law School lunatics, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart.
El Pres vs. Southie Mom
Not many people know about this epic battle largely because I was afraid to tell anybody about it. But roughly two years ago to this day, a mother from South Boston did her best to put the Stool out of business. It all started during an innocent cover shoot. The photo shoot was for our Memorial Day issue so we wanted the girl to be in backyard acting like she was at Memorial Day barbecue. It was all going according to plan until we heard the ice cream truck pull up in front of the house we were at in South Boston. Naturally we thought it would be a brilliant idea to get a picture of the model in front of the ice cream truck. So we rushed out front to make it happen. Well we weren’t the only people on the street who heard the ice cream man coming. There were like 25 kids and a bunch of adults in the street getting ready to buy snow cones and rocket pops. One kid in particular caught our eye because he was wearing a Tedy Bruschi shirt. And that’s when it went downhill.
We asked the kid (12 years old) whether he wanted to be in a picture and obviously he said yes. So we took a picture of the kid in the Bruschi shirt holding an ice cream looking at our model as she ordered an ice cream from the ice cream man. On the outside it was a great concept. Unfortunately 10 minutes after the paper was published we got a call from the mother of the kid who was furious at us. She said that we had involved her kid in pornography and we probably ruined his life. (There isn’t a doubt in my mind this kid was the most popular kid in school for that week, but still I wish we never did it.) Anyway, I tried my best to explain the situation to the mother and say that there were a million people on the street and we didn’t exploit him, blah, blah, blah. But she was having none of it. She tried every trick in the book to try and get me to pay her something for all the pain and suffering. In the end she settled for just driving around South Boston and throwing all our papers in the trash so nobody would see her kid looking at a girl in a bikini. The lesson learned by El Pres is always ask a mom’s permission before shooting her 12 year old son even if the photo seems harmless enough.
So there you have it. The best fights in the history of the Barstool Sports. The good news is that as we continue to grow and as we get closer to world domination the odds are that more people will start to fight back against us. And anybody who knows El Pres, knows there is nothing I love more than a good fight.