STEVE SAILER: World War T.

Grantland.com, Bill Simmons’s boutique SWPL sports-journalism website within ESPN, is now being widely denounced for “transphobia” after running a terrific piece of long-form investigative reporting by a young freelancer named Caleb Hannan: “Dr. V’s Magical Putter: The remarkable story behind a mysterious inventor who built a ‘scientifically superior’ golf club.”

You may wonder why World War T seems to have broken out first on the sports page. Yet there’s a reason why run-of-the-mill sportswriters have long been among the most dopily politically correct for years. Political correctness is a war on noticing, and it’s harder to not notice patterns when watching sports than almost anywhere else in life. If you turn on ESPN, you’ll notice that on average, blacks can outjump and outsprint whites, that straight men and lesbian women like sports far more than do gay men and straight women, and that men are much better than women at sports. Indeed, the rare transgender sportsman tends to make a farce out of the Plessy v. Ferguson world of women’s sports. Hence, mediocre sportswriters have often been among the most militant enemies of noticing.

Simmons, though, is perhaps the best sportswriter of the Internet era precisely because he’s a terrific pattern recognizer. He doesn’t go into locker rooms to ask what pitch the slugger hit. Instead he inhales information from numerous sources and checks the implications against the other sources. But that independence of mind also means that Simmons is always in some danger of being ratted out as a closet crimethinker.

Related: Bullying and Projection.