By Tom Schreier
The idea that Rick Reilly and Bill Simmons could be competing is as aged and over as a good dental joke. That fight is over, and Simmons won in a knockout.
– Will Leitch writing for Sports on Earth, 11/15/12
The rise of Bill Simmons is personal for me. At the risk of being too Simmons-y and really writing about myself instead of the subject at hand — I assure you, I will try not to — I’ll start with an anecdote.
I was sitting at a bar in Uptown on a first date shortly after graduating college. As usual, the first question asked is “What do you do?” and, of course, I had to come up with a decent answer.
The short version: I write about sports.
The long version: I just graduated from a school in Northern California. I am living at home, working at an auto shop and writing for a company called Bleacher Report where I interned at two summers ago. I am not being paid to write; I am being paid minimum wage to either sort out or ship auto parts from used Pontiacs, Chevys or other front wheel drive GM vehicles. There are five employees at the auto shop — I’m the only one that doesn’t know anything about cars. I know your alternator from your fuel pump; your upper intake manifold from your lower intake manifold. That’s about it.
The long version sucks (it’s, well, too long), and the short version doesn’t make much sense. If you’re writing about sports and not getting paid, it’s a hobby. And being a recent graduate from a four-year university that’s living at home and working a minimum-wage job in a field that I have no expertise in is only going to confuse someone and stall the conversation in a hurry — inevitably making the first date that much more awkward.
We haven’t even gotten our food yet, so I improvise. I point up at the TV in the bar and gesture at a greying middle-aged man that has a striking resemblance to Ellen Degeneres. “See that guy,” I say. “He worked at a bar until his 30s, got recognized by ESPN, and now is on television and writes a column that thousands of people read on a weekly basis. I want to do what he does.”
***
I always say that there’s two things that convinced me that I should become a sportswriter. The first is when Ted Robinson, a broadcaster for the San Francisco 49ers, read my first story in the Santa Clara University newspaper and told me to meet him for coffee. I was never a coffee drinker, even in college, but I sat down at a local Starbucks and discussed the sports media business with him. He put me in contact with Dave Finocchio at Bleacher Report, I got an internship, and the rest is history.
Robinson was the guy that convinced me that I was good enough to make it as a sportswriter, so long as I was willing to grind it out for a while, and that’s all I needed to know. I didn’t want to be led down the garden path — get so far only to realize I wasn’t good enough to do it professionally — and he was like a scout telling a young player that he could reach the majors.
The second moment came, ironically, in a class titled Physics of Star Trek. My professor had edited a parenting magazine years ago and had enjoyed my first paper for the class. It was a simple topic — do you believe there’s life in space? or something to that effect — and I ran with it. I somehow turned that topic into a joke about how I could care less about extraterrestrials and was more concerned about surviving my 21st birthday (little did I know that my concern was warranted). Kesten pulled me aside after class, said the article was fantastic, and told me to meet him in his office. About five minutes into our conversation, he dropped a bomb without realizing it: “You should try and be like Bill Simmons.”
I stared at him blankly. Laughed. And then stared at him again. He couldn’t be serious, right? To go back to the scout analogy, that’s like pulling a college baseball player aside and saying, “Hey, you know you should try and hit like Miguel Cabrera.” It was a compliment and a hefty challenge rolled into one. But hey, I was mentioned in the same sentence as Bill Simmons, and that was pretty cool.
***
Simmons and I don’t have much in common, but two things stick out to me. One, we both went to small private schools that have crappy basketball teams and aren’t thrilled with it. Secondly, and far more importantly, we both started online. Simmons obviously took a different route and was more of a novelty at the time — now almost everyone starts online in some capacity. He went to grad school, worked in the newspapers and then eventually got his own column at an AOL site. I interned at Bleacher Report between my sophomore and junior years of college, continued to write for the site while applying to just about any and every newspaper that had an opening during my first few months out, thankful when I actually got a rejection letter rather than no response. I was in the running for a job in Owatonna, didn’t get it, and then mutually parted with my job at the auto shop so I could go all in trying to get a job with b/r.
The bottom line with Simmons is that his value to me is more symbolic than anything. Instead of starting at a small-town newspaper, grinding it out for a few years and then bouncing metro to metro before landing his dream job, he wrote online, got picked up by ESPN after insulting the ESPYs in a live blog, and they turned him into a superstar.
I used to write my columns like his — long, tangential*, unedited and often about myself — when I was blogging with a few other Bleacher Report guys on a website called The Fan Manifesto. In some ways it was cathartic, I was either squeezing in columns between work and job applications or trying to write five to eight in-depth stories a week for b/r, and in other ways it was trying to get discovered.
*With subtext like this.
What I learned is that it wasn’t really Simmons’ style that got him a spot at ESPN or a multi-million dollar contract. I have to believe that he got a spot at ESPN because he was somewhat of a novelty and he made them look edgy in comparison — sure he was talented and had his own unique style, but he was also one of the first writers to make a name for himself on the internet. As Albert Burneko pointed out in a recent article, Simmons is basically a replacement-level writer. “Pioneering sports blogger! Tasteful employer of excellent writers! Elite podcaster! Good at coming up with documentary series ideas!” he wrote. “Lousy writer. His writing is bad and not good.” I wouldn’t go that far, but a pure writer is only as good as his reporting, and Simmons doesn’t really do much reporting.
Everyone has their own opinion on Simmons’ writing, of course, but Burneko backs his up by pointing out that that Simmons is writing less, he obviously doesn’t have first-hand quotes or reporting, and that he’s no longer the common man. As Burneko writes, Simmons penned a recent column about whether to attend the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight or Clippers/Spurs Game 7. That’s not a common man problem, both are extremely expensive and packed with celebrities, and a vintage Simmons column would have been about how he would handle trying to watch both events, and the Kentucky Derby, on television that day.
Simmons is no longer the Boston sports guy because he lives in Los Angeles. He writes less — which isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, but his stuff now is still long-winded, lightly edited and often a mailbag — and is running the risk of becoming a guy like Tony Kornheiser. The Pardon the Interruption panelist was once a great columnist for The Washington Post, but told Real Clear Sports in 2013, “I miss writing enough that I wouldn’t do it anymore. I can’t cause I’m no good anymore.”
More to the point, Simmons runs the risk of becoming the next Rick Reilly. That phrase would sound odd to any Gen Xer who grew up with Reilly writing on the back page of Sports Illustrated, a columnist with prime real estate that could humor you and make you cry — often in the same column. Once a great reporter himself, Reilly was on top of the sportswriting world when ESPN signed him away in 2007 in an attempt to put Sports Illustrated on life support.
Reilly was a bust at ESPN. As Slate’s Josh Levin pointed out in a mock eulogy to Reilly, who no longer writes columns for the Worldwide Leader, “Rick Reilly checked out years ago. Now, he’s finally leaving.” Reilly had been caught copying his own work, rewriting his own jokes and even entire columns from years past, and seemed lost in a changing media environment. “As Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch points out, the mothballing of Reilly’s word processor will allow ESPN.com to reshape its home page, giving Nate Silver and the new FiveThirtyEight.com a prime promotional slot alongside Bill Simmons and Grantland,” wrote Levin. “As Silver rises, Reilly disappears—there can be no better symbol of the triumph of modern journalism over the worst habits of the old-school press.”
***
In 2012 Will Leitch, a founding editor of Deadspin and current writer at Sports on Earth, wrote a column declaring victory for Bill Simmons over Rick Reilly. Both were on the front page of ESPN, one would eventually go, and the other would soon follow, but in a head-to-head matchup, Simmons had triumphed over an 11-time Sportswriter of the Year award winner who once ruled the sportswriting world. “I harp on the Simmons thing because no one’s reputation suffered more from his rise than Reilly’s,” Leitch wrote. “Reilly essentially morphed, to quote myself, from Jim Murray to Henny Youngman. He was for all intents and purposes outhustled by a younger, hungrier man.” Simmons created Grantland. He was behind the 30 for 30 documentaries. His podcast is popular. And, hey, his column is still widely read.
The media landscape is rapidly changing in an age where journalism isn’t as profitable as it once was, with personalities constantly jumping from company to company trying to find the right platform for their work, so in a vacuum Simmons’ departure from ESPN isn’t that out of the ordinary.
At the time Leitch wrote that, he was working for a startup website headed by former Sports Illustrated senior writer Joe Posnanski. Sports on Earth was, in some ways, Posnanski’s Grantland — a joint project between USA Today and MLB Advanced Media that was supposed to bring highbrow writing to the internet using established, name-brand writers. Posnanski left to become a national columnist at NBC in 2013, however, leaving the reigns to Leitch. To put this in perspective, Posnanski worked as a columnist at the Kansas City Star from 1996 to 2009, was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated from 2009-12. Started up Sports On Earth in 2012; left in 2013, and now is part of the nascent NBC Sportsworld, which appears like a site in the same vein as Grantland and Sports on Earth, although it doesn’t have much staff and probably doesn’t have great traffic numbers either.
Sports on Earth is dying a slow, painful death in Posnanski’s absence. In early August 2014 USA Today announced it was pulling out of the project and most of the staff found out that they had been laid off via Twitter. SoE is still around, but isn’t any more viable than a newspaper at this point. That whole scenario begs to question: What happens to Grantland without Simmons?
Slate’s Justin Peters wrote that Simmons “has been the worst thing about Grantland for a very long time, and I mean that as a compliment” in an article begging ESPN to keep Grantland, which is a prestige project and isn’t profitable on its own. Simmons, he wrote, is an infrequent contributor to his own site and is more focused on television, radio and podcasts, but has built the site into something that “has a chance to stand even taller in his absence.”
ESPN president John Skipper, the man who decided not to renew Simmons’ contract, seems to agree. He told the New York Times, who broke the news of Simmons’ firing, “It long ago went from being a Bill Simmons site to one that can stand on its own.” In an ironic twist, Leitch, now the face of Sports on Earth, has been suggested as Simmons’ replacement at Grantland.
It would be unfortunate if Grantland went the way of Sports on Earth, but it’s hard to keep an unprofitable site running at a time where everyone is pinching pennies — although ESPN is certainly doing fine due to their massive TV contracts. As much as the people at Sports on Earth don’t want to admit it, SportsGrid may have been on to something when they said SoE was too highbrow. At the end of the day, sportswriting is a business — something I was reminded of daily when I was at Bleacher Report. That’s why they have the WAG articles. That’s why they have lists upon lists upon lists. That’s why they took advantage of people like me, young aspiring writers looking to break into an industry in turmoil, in order to help launch their site after a brutal first year. At the end of the day, it comes down to the money.
When Richard Deitsch asked former b/r CEO Brian Grey if the content on his site tasteful, Grey didn’t answer with a simple yes or a no. “I go back to our readers and the response we get from our audience and the consumption we see from our audience and the avidity they have for our content,” he said. “I think tasteful is a subjective term and the best way for us to evaluate that is are people consuming our content and finding what we are producing engaging.”
Jason McIntyre at The Big Lead suggested that ESPN balked at Simmons’ $6 million per year demands because the things he is best known for don’t make money. Simmons’ legacy isn’t his column, it’s 30 for 30 and Grantland. Simply put, his column often tells a story about himself; 30 for 30 and Grantland often tell the stories of other people.
Simmons is falling for the same folly Reilly did — he thinks he’s too important. Consumers of media eventually got sick of Reilly’s complacency, no matter what he did at Sports Illustrated. He went out on his own terms, but to a younger audience that wasn’t as familiar with his best work, he went out disgracefully. With Simmons, ESPN simply reminded him he is expendable.
Simmons will end up somewhere else, and where he ends up matters. He needs to go somewhere where he’s pushed, somewhere where his foundation is in writing — something he repeatedly says is important to him — and somewhere where he can recreate 30 for 30 and Grantland. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will happen. I believe he will end up at Bleacher Report, where things are relatively unmonitored and they have money to burn. Most importantly, they are owned by Turner, which has NBA rights. Part of Reilly’s problem is that he went from Sports Illustrated, where he was highly edited and held in check by high journalistic standards, to ESPN where he was given too much freedom and not enough to do. The same could happen to Simmons.
The great irony in this is that Simmons may end up at the very place I was when I saw him on TV around three years ago. I was on a date wondering how to explain my professional aspirations, working at a job where I would eventually be laid off and writing for a company that would ultimately take advantage of me. Even then, before I really knew what Bleacher Report was all about, I knew I had to get out of there. It’s the ultimate place to get yourself in trouble: Relatively unmonitored, where opinion is emphasized over reporting and there’s a ton of money being thrown around.
Simmons may have defeated Reilly at ESPN, but can he save himself from his own undoing?
Tom Schreier can be heard at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays with Ben Holsen and Mike Morris and co-hosts a morning show 8-10 a.m. on Sundays.
Follow @tschreier3