Bill Simmons aside, Dave Portnoy released his first book, Cancel Me if You Can, this week. The memoir arrives with a seven-figure advance behind it and a business story that already stretches back to 2003.
Barstool Sports in Boston
2003 is where the pitch began, when Barstool Sports launched as a print sports newspaper in Boston. Portnoy says it was supposed to cover anything guys would discuss sitting around at a bar watching sports, a loose brief that he says also somehow ends up benefiting us.
$600 million is the scale Portnoy now puts on the business, and the book treats that figure as the payoff for years of noise, hustling, and self-mythmaking. He also says he made an ad for a business that never bought one in the early days of the print edition, which reads less like a polished origin story than a record of improvisation.
Seven-Figure Sum
A seven-figure sum is what Portnoy says he got to write the book, which tells you the market value here is not just the pages but the persona attached to them. Cancel Me if You Can is a 300-page product built around that persona, and the release turns his own notoriety into the commodity being sold.
The book also folds in uglier material: Portnoy says he published a photo of Lindsay Lohan without the right to use it, made a rape joke on his blog, and printed shirts reading Nailing Putts Banging Sluts after Tiger Woods' many affairs were revealed in 2009. That mix of bragging and self-exposure keeps the memoir from reading like clean brand management.
Sexism and Scores
Much of the book, by the article's account, is spent settling scores, praising Portnoy, and defending him against accusations that he is sexist. That puts a sharper edge on the release than a standard celebrity memoir: it is both a commercial book and a legalistic, reputation-shaping argument about the public image built around Barstool Sports.
Portnoy has also threatened to run for office, which makes the release feel less like a closing chapter than a test case for how far a media figure can turn personal controversy into a marketable back catalog. Whether Cancel Me if You Can is meant to be read seriously or mainly to sit on a shelf is the unanswered question left standing after the launch.
