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The Most Hated Man in Boston

By ADAM REILLY  |  July 10, 2007

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.

070622_shaugnessy_main2
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.

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Related: Blowing up, The curly-haried boyfriend, Wild and Crispy, More more >
  Topics: Media -- Dont Quote Me , Adam Gaffin, AFC East Division, AL Central Division,  More more >
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Comments
The Most Hated Man in Boston
I think Shaughnessy-haters need to grow some balls and quit whining about how "mean" he is. The fact is: Schilling is an ego-maniac, Republican asshole and Manny probably did quit at the end of 2005. As for his writing style: in these times when Americans can't seem to remember what happened yesterday, Shaughnessy makes reference to things that happened throughout the entire history of baseball. Baseball is a game of tradition; the attention given to the numbers and records of the game are testament to that. The people who designed the "kick Shaghnessy's ass" game probably do live in their mother's basement. And to make fun of someone because he's not pretty is childish and lame. His columns are smart and funny and I always look forward to the next one.
By Ian Donnis on 06/21/2007 at 11:47:03
The Most Hated Man in Boston
"Maybe, in the end, Shaughnessy's situation says as much about Boston as it does about the man himself." Pish posh. No city likes a hot-dogging, malicious columnist who sees it as his mission to antagonize players and fans. He wants to be the center of attention, and he realized, like a two year old, that it's really easy to get attention by acting up. This is a truth universally acknowledged, not something that only happens inside Route 128. There was a fine, well-grounded discussion of his anti-Schilling column at the blog Fire Joe Morgan: //tinyurl.com/2rohhj
By Ian Donnis on 06/21/2007 at 1:14:49
The Most Hated Man in Boston
I'm tired of all of this Dan bashing as well. I look forward to read Dan's column but I don't have time to maintain a blog to discuss it - I have a life.
By Ian Donnis on 06/21/2007 at 2:54:22
The Most Hated Man in Boston
Boston fans want their columnists to be cheerleaders, just like the fanboys with the favorite bloggers. Like his columns or not, he is by far the gutsiest columnist out there. Doesn't care if what he writes pisses off players, managers the front office or fans. I'll take that any day over the jock-sniffing bloggers who rave on about their buddies Schill, Youk, Wake, etc.
By Ian Donnis on 06/21/2007 at 3:51:39
The Most Hated Man in Boston
Oh man! I forgot to mention his column the morning after Reggie Lewis had died. Everyone was upset and in shock... except Dan. He was super pissed. At the Celtics. On page one, he demanded, "Where was teflon CEO Dave Gavitt?," although Reggie had chosen different doctors than did the Celts. Dan's little act got him onto Nightline that night. By that point, he had climbed down a bit from his initial, "Why did Chris Ford murder Reggie?" take on it to a "this raises serious questions" pose. It really showed that his instinct-- even in a deeply upsetting tragedy-- is to go nuclear, act accusatory and outraged, and gin up a controversy. Facts be damned. Hmmm... doing a few minutes of Googling, I see he regrets that column, which is to his credit... but it's without acknowledging that he was bizarrely off-base: "If I could pull that one back, I would ‘cause people didn’t have time to absorb the impact of it."
By Ian Donnis on 06/24/2007 at 6:38:46
The Most Hated Man in Boston
It would appear that Mr. Reilly is offended at the Shaughnessy-detractors for their use of offensive language; he quotes two of them as calling him, among other things, a "piece of garbage". It is obvious that Reilly does not recognize why they both chose the same phrase: Shaughnessy used this very phrase in an out-of-bounds attack on former Red Sox player Jose Offerman. WBZ sportscaster Steve Burton even gave him an opportunity in an on-air segment to back down a bit from what he had written, but Shaughnessy refused. And yet Reilly wonders why people don't like him! Note to Reilly: Don't be writing articles about subjects that you know not well.
By Ian Donnis on 06/24/2007 at 8:10:44
The Most Hated Man in Boston
Adam; I don't know how you could possibly write a story about "Why Dan Shaughnessy is the biggest asshole in Boston!" and not include his pervasive, personal, elitist, vendetta against UMass. Dan-o not only took joy in trying to run John Calipari out of town, he can't stomach any UMass Athletic success. His snobbish opinion permeates the breadth of all of his writing about the University. Furthermore, his ceaseless support of the Boston Globe when it wrote its indefensible "Investigative piece" regarding the grades of the UMass Basketball team in 1995, which I might remind all were splashed all over the front page of the Boston Globe, is as sickening as it is legendary. Notice you've never seen an article regarding the grades of any other Boston area nationally competitive NCAA program by Dan-o! Just the program he despises! Adam, Do your homework before you sit at your keyboard to write in the future. 250,000 UMass Alumni living in Massachusetts are collectively wondering after they read your article; "How could he have missed that?" Otherwise, you aricle is pretty good and I agree with the premise; "Dan-o is the biggest Asshole in Boston!" MCD
By Ian Donnis on 06/26/2007 at 5:30:39

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