Friends, I’m traveling again this week, so I regret to say that I have another abbreviated column for you. (Everything should be back to normal for the remainder of the season, though.) I will take this opportunity, however, to share a few recent Phil Simms-related items of interest from the Block & Tackle mailbag.
During my correspondence with Susan C., the reader whose email request prompted the publication of The Compleat Phil Simms (So Far) in this space a few weeks back, Susan offered up her own morsel of Simmsian poetry trivia. The Phil Simms poems in the column are just Simms’ words playfully transcribed, but Susan came across Phil Simms in an actual poem written by an actual respected poet, Louise Glück. And it’s dialogue-based free verse, no less, much like the “poems” that appear here in the column from time to time.
The work is called “Meadowlands 3,” and I’ve embedded a portion above as an image because I can’t quite reproduce the formatting in The A.V. Club’s CMS, which quite reasonably is not designed to accommodate innovative poetry typesetting. Here’s a link to the entire poem. Who knew that Phil Simms had such a fine literary pedigree? I only knew that he deserved one.
Another reader reached out via Twitter to tell me about an earlier example of a sportscaster named Phil whose words were turned into poetry: The 1993 book O Holy Cow recast the musings of Yankees shortstop-turned-broadcaster Phil Rizzuto as verse. The poems are fun and sometimes even poignant, although Rizzuto didn’t have the incoherence that lends such magic to Simms’ linguistic flights of fancy.
Finally, loyal B&T reader 6StringMercenary was inspired by an exchange with some of his fellow commenters to turn one of the Simms poems into a song—or, as he billed it, a “Simms hymn.” 6SM hastened to note that the track was recorded hastily in a cubicle and does not represent his best production practices, but who cares? I was delighted by it, so here it is:
Ah yeah you know
Look
We never know, we think—you know
Sometimes we get a feel
for a game
I mean, of course did not have any sensation
or feelings
That it coulda be like this
But I’ll go back to what I saw
on Friday
How hard they were practicing
The energy
—Phillip Lentronomus Simms