His unabashed crushes on Paul Pierce, everyone on the Red Sox roster and Tom friggin’ Brady make me want to fly to LA and slap him in the face with a selection of big foam fingers from every other team in every major sporting league.
Just who the f*ck is Bill Simmons?
I’ll tell you. William (Bill) J. Simmons is an online sports writing and podcasting star who was born September 25, 1969 and grew up in sports crazy Massachusetts.
After college at Holy Cross (Worcester, Mass) and Boston University he became a writer at the Boston Herald covering High School sports before starting his career as an online writer with AOL in 1997. Simmons is widely regarded as one of the pioneers in the internet content age, but that isn’t the half of it.
To tell you the brutal, awful, ugly truth, Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, @sportsguy33 is nothing more than a Boston sports fan who took his love of sports and writing, put them together and hit it big. I want to be happy for him, I really do. But he talks about Boston sports so much that I kind of hate him on the inside.
His unabashed crushes on Paul Pierce, everyone on the Red Sox roster and Tom friggin’ Brady make me want to fly to LA and slap him in the face with a selection of big foam fingers from every other team in every major sporting league.
Yes, Bill Simmons is an incredibly talented and funny man who really does know his sports. Yes he has 1,330,560 followers on Twitter at the time of this article. Yes his podcast, The B.S. Report, was downloaded more than 25 million times in 2009. Yes he was part of the original writing staff on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Yes he is a 2-time New York Times Best Sellers List #1 author for 2005’s Now I Can Die in Peace based on the 2004 World Series Winning Boston Red Sox and 2009’s The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy where Simmons breaks down the history of the NBA from the beginning to the present. And yes his mail bag columns on ESPN.com are some of the most popular pieces that the website runs every month.
But don’t let all of that fool you. Bill Simmons may fill in sometimes on Pardon the Interruption but that doesn’t make him the be all and end all. And even though I’m so jealous of him that I’m writing this piece like I hate him, you should not start liking him.
Simmons is just a regular dude with a funny voice, a crush on Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB Josh Freeman and more love for the original Beverly Hills 90210 than any man in the universe. He’s married, has 2 kids and has season tickets to the Los Angeles Clippers. THE CLIPPERS! Ha! Who buys Clippers seats? And this has nothing to do with Blake Griffin, don’t let him tell you that. He’s had these tickets for years.
Bill Simmons may have my dream gig, he may be what I strive to be as a writer, online presence and sports fan. He may be one of my professional idols and heroes. He may even be in my top 10 list of people that I want to meet and talk to in my life. At the end of the day though, he’s just a dude who followed his gut and his heart and made life work. He went out and got it.
If you love sports as much as I do you owe it to yourself to pay attention to Bill Simmons.
Follow him on Twitter, listen to the B.S. Report and read his columns on ESPN.com – you won’t be disappointed.
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