Do You Know What Beef Is?

(Boulder-CO) Beef is when you make your enemies start your Jeep. Beef is when your Mom aint safe up in the streets. And those are just a couple of things that the late B.I.G states in his song titled, Do You Know What Beef Is? But do you want to know what beef is in the basketball magazine business? Please allow me to catch you up to speed. Dime Magazine and SLAM magazine, both of which have shown love to me, are currently beefing over whose who in the game of hoops publication and the fur is starting to fly!

In a post written today on Dime’s blog, they publicly call out SLAM and its writers to a game of rock to decide who is the real and who is the phony. Here’s the best quote of the post, “Listen, to us, there’s nothing cornier than a mag beef (over the internet no less), so here’s one option: We’re both basketball magazines … let’s play ball. Name the date, name the court, and we’ll be there. We might even spot you a couple points - from what we’ve seen, you’ll need at least that much. Who are we kidding? We both know you won’t take us up on the offer.”

This all in retaliation to this statement by SLAM taken from the comments on the above post. The comment states, “So, yeah… biters. Good stuff. I can’t really be mad, though; unlike GQ, which has to try (and generally fail) to be as good as Esquire, or working comedians who have to compete for stand-up gigs and HBO specials and may or may not be jealous of each other’s TV shows, SLAM doesn’t really have any competition. If we did, I guess, they might actually be blatant and shameless enough to bite us, too — like doing an “anniversary” issue of some sort in the past month or two and having Jalen Rose write a first-person account of his days in the Fab Five. Just like we did, about a year ago, in SLAM 100. Thankfully, that competition does not exist.”

All I can say is, “WOW!”

I’m not going to pick a side, speculate who would win that pick-up game (mainly because I don’t know who would even be playing in it), or say what magazine is better for one reason or another. To be perfectly honest with you, I read them both. I like them both. They both focus on what should be focused on and that is the hot stories of the game of basketball. Furthermore, if either of them are reading this and need a real point guard, or more importantly a columnist, don’t be shy to hit me up. Free agency is a beautiful thing!