On Takes, Hot and Otherwise

As a sports fan and heavy consumer of sports media, I am tested by two unavoidable threats to my sanity on a daily basis:

1.  DraftKings ads (I contend that – between podcasts, television, and blogs – I have not gone a single day since April without being exposed to some dope screaming about how I can win my share of the MILLIONAIRE MAKER prize in friendly “skilled” competition with my friends or strangers or a flock of geese with strong opinions on the DFS value of Cameron Artis-Payne)
2.  Hot takes

Ah yes, the takes. The HOTTEST of takes. While I’m of the mind that a thing doesn’t exist just because you can give it a name, this is not the case with hot takes. Hot takes have existed for centuries, but thanks to the hybrid utopia/cesspool that is the World Wide Internets, we have a name for it now. Good work guys, take five.

Hot takes are any opinion or stance on a story that’s reactionary, judgmental, and intentionally provocative simply for the sake of being provocative, not because the claim has any sort of factual merit. Basically, a hot take is every load of bullshit you hear from your drinking buddy down at McFinnegan’s about how the Eagles’ biggest mistake this season was not starting Tim Tebow at quarterback AND middle linebacker, except coming from the mouth of a supposed professional who treats this opinion with the gravitas of the Welch-McCarthy hearing.

While hot takes can technically be found in all forms of journalism, they’re most prevalent in the world of professional sports, where the only thing that matters more than winning is doing it…the right way. With heart. With passion. With never-ending intensity AND unreasonable humility. And certainly NOT with drugs, at all, for any reason.

Much like most of the posts soon to come on this blog, hot takes are the lazy way out of coming up with a compelling argument. But as in every spectrum of life, from temperature to politics to listening to Taylor Swift as an adult, there is a healthy moderation to be found. And the Internet has swung perilously back to the cynical, snarky side of writing – the side that argues everything is a sham, the corporations run everything, passion in sports is off-putting and disingenuous, nothing means anything, something something Skip Bayless sucks eggs.

Fire Joe Morgan, an "alternative" baseball site named for the former baseball player and hater of advanced-statistics of the same name, railed against hot-takers in a traditional outsider/zine-type way, and many others followed suit. But there’s a place for people who like J.J. Watt because he bleeds from the bridge of his nose every game and generally always acts like he just pinned John Cena on Monday Night Raw. (As a matter of fact, J.J. Watt might just actually be John Cena)

Part of this condition of hyper-snark could be a result of a hot take being ill-defined. To put it in perspective, I Googled “hot take” on a whim tonight and found a Wikipedia article that certainly didn’t exist when I did the same thing five months ago. The key defining trait of a hot take isn’t naïve love of sports or thinking something that happened on the field is cool – it’s the lack of effort. It burns zero calories to belly up to a keyboard and say, “JOHNNY FOOTBALL HAS A SERIOUS PROBLEM, AND THE BROWNS SHOULD CUT HIM,” or “CAM NEWTON IS SELFISH BECAUSE HE LIKES DANCING AND SMILING.” (My favorite hot take is the one where someone argues that young men or women who spend 95 percent of their lives learning to get stronger and play aggressively are expected to not show any sort of emotion when they succeed)

Take Deadspin, for example, a website I like a lot. For years, the site’s writers played the outsider card, acting as part-“Fire Joe Morgan,” part-TMZ Sports (before TMZ Sports was a thing). But the writers genuinely love the best parts of sports – athletes doing crazy, fun things – and geek out over Klay Thompson’s 37-point quarter or dumb things like everything JaVale McGee has ever done. They’ve managed to find a perfect balance between ridiculing Stephen A. Smith and expressing an enviable love of sports – and in most cases, they do it in a way that actually requires some work. Grantland also worked within this same lane until…well…*sniff*

As in the Slate article I linked to above, the coining of a term or phrase generally leads to wild overuse of the term or phrase until the dust settles.The best way to distinguish the good takes from the HOT TAEKSSS is to remember the definition. Since we started using the term about….oh, *checks watch* 35 minutes ago, that definition is going to continue growing and mutating until it turns into whatever Bill Simmons is surely trying to grow on his face nowadays.

An easy rule-of-thumb: if you could’ve come up with it yourself in three minutes, it’s probably a hot take. Take it from the guy who just wrote one.