Dave Portnoy has turned his long-running public feud with criticism, and the business built around it, into a book. Cancel Me if You Can, his first book, was released this week, giving Barstool Sports founder and owner a new way to sell the story of how he built his brand and why it keeps drawing attention.
The book is 300 pages long, and Portnoy admitted he got a seven-figure sum to write it. That alone explains why readers are looking at it now: this is not a side project or a vanity pamphlet, but a paid commercial release tied to one of the most recognizable and polarizing figures in sports media.
Portnoy has said Barstool Sports was supposed to encompass anything that guys would discuss sitting around at a bar watching sports. He launched it in 2003 as a print sports newspaper in Boston, and the book reaches back to those early days while also tracing the way the company has morphed into something very different, now described as a TikTok account that reposts other people’s funny videos.
That distance between the origin story and the finished product is where the book’s appeal, and its problem, sit side by side. Portnoy is packaging the old Barstool mythology as a memoir, but the material he is selling is also the material that made him controversial in the first place: a business ad he once ran for a company that never bought one, a photo of Lindsay Lohan he published without the right to use it, a rape joke on his blog and the 2009 shirts that read Nailing Putts Banging Sluts after Tiger Woods’ many affairs were revealed. Portnoy’s own defense is that Barstool was meant to reflect what men actually say at a bar, but the book’s contents show how often that idea has collided with accusations of sexism.
So the real question is not whether Portnoy can relive the past. He already has. It is how much of Cancel Me if You Can gives readers anything they have not seen before, and how much of that seven-figure advance bought them a new cover on an old controversy.
