What Bill Simmons wrote...

Three great paragraphs from Bill Simmons at espn.com: 

I will always appreciate this Bulls team because they did the impossible: They made a fan base that just won a title care even MORE about their own team. Last season barely matters right now. All that matters is winning the most incredible playoff series ever played. I don't even care what happens after Game 7; we can't beat the LeBrons anyway. This is our NBA Finals. Right here. The Celtics fans feel that way, and so do the Bulls fans. I can promise you.

I thought about all of these things during my marathon walk. And this, too: When I was 6, my father took me to the greatest basketball game ever played: Game 5 of the 1976 Finals. I slept through the second half, the first overtime and most of the second overtime before waking up for Havlicek's running banker. I can still see it. Happened right in front of us. The Celtics won that one in three overtimes. Thirty-three years later (ironic number), they played another three-OT classic and lost. I was a little boy for the first one; for the second one, I watched most of it with my little boy. He had no idea what was going on. When he's older, I'm going to tell him that he did.

Sports keeps moving. You get older. You pass the love down to your kids. You think you will care less ... and you don't. The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. Two toe-on-the-line 3-pointers ... I can't stop thinking about them. Add everything up and that's how I ended up 500 blocks from my house fretting about Game 7 and rehashing everything that happened in the other six.

What do I like about this? 

Those compact sentences: This is our NBA Finals. I can still see it. You pass the love down to your kids. 

The repetitive constructions: The Tony Allen sub killed me. The Pierce foul killed me. The Rose block killed me. 

The linkage between three generations of Celtics fans.

The reference to "Havlicek's running banker." (Every now and then, we ought to write for the 10 percent of our audience that needs no explanation. That 10 percent will love it, and the other 90 percent will get it from the context. "Havlicek's running banker" maintains the cadence. And in this run of sentences, cadence is more important than the information that would have been gained from, say, "before waking up with six seconds left and the Celtics down by one when John Havlicek, famous for revolutionizing the sixth-man role, took the ball and drove for a running one-hander in traffic to put the Celtics ahead 111-110 as the horn sounded.")

Take those three paragraphs and run them through your Microsoft Word spell-checker with the "readability" function activated and here's what you get:

Words per sentence: 10.7

Characters per word: 4.1

Passive sentences: 0%

Flesch reading ease: 83.2

Flesch-Kincaid grade level: 4.1

Fourth grade reading level! The speech I wrote yesterday was 11th grade.