Why Blog-Hater Buzz Blurbed Blogger's Book

Is peace breaking out between the blogosphere and the mainstream media?

Six months ago, Friday Night Lights author H.G. (Buzz) Bissinger went on a nationally-televised rant against the evils of bloggers, whom he described as "dedicated to cruelty." Now he's blurbing a book by a blogger -- and not just any blogger, but the one who ridiculed him as a defiler of farm animals.

The blogger is Drew Magary, a.k.a. Big Daddy Drew, a contributor to the sports site Kissing Suzy Kolber. The book is Men With Balls, which Bissinger praises in the jacket copy as "Profane, beyond naughty, and, I have to say, just damn funny."

Bissinger did not, however, find it "damn funny" when Magary, in the wake of Bissinger's mouth-foaming appearance on HBO's Costas Now, published a blog post satirically attributed to him and entitled "Man Oh Man Do I Love to F**k Horses."

When Sporting News asked Bissinger about the post, he reacted by panning Magary's satirical skills. "Someone I knew described him as one of the great sports comedy parodists of all time. That escapes me," he said. "I guess I don't get the humor in someone f***ing a horse."

But Magary wasn't deterred. A couple weeks later, he reached out to Bissinger, via email, to invite him to a gathering of sports bloggers in Washington, D.C. "I said to him, 'Come have a drink -- as far as I'm concernd the stuff we write online doesn't have anything to do with how we relate to each other one-on-one," he recalls. "I said, 'I respect your writing, but I feel like what we do is utterly apples and oranges. It's just so different -- there's no need to sort of worry about comparing or saying one's going to drag the other down.'"

Bissinger, asked for his side of the story, recalls it this way: "We emailed privately. He was calm and I was calm. The exchange was cordial and friendly." Enough so that when Magary sent him an advance copy of Men With Balls, Bissinger agreed to blurb it. And their newfound collegiality will also be in evidence when the two read together at Gelf magazine's "Varsity Letters" event on Nov. 6.

"He couldn't have been a nicer guy," adds Magary, who says he's even come to respect Bissinger's over-the-top assault on people like him: "I sort of like what he does in terms of he's so fucking passionate that he couldn't even control himself on HBO."