Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [349]
I also edited Olbermann, at Sports Illustrated. He was a pain in the ass and a whining little baby, but ultimately he was more professional than Simmons. If you edited Keith, he’d whine and scream as if you had betrayed him in some way, but then he’d read the thing, and if the editing was actually helpful, he’d respond—unlike Bill, who would just say no. Bill’s thing is “I know what I’m doing, so that’s it.” You know: “Don’t touch anything.” It was more satisfying editing Olbermann.
JIMMY KIMMEL:
Simmons is a guy I really like. ESPN.com was my homepage for a long time. I’m not the kind of person who posts things, and I’d never heard of Bill, I’d just happened upon him myself, but he wrote some things that really rang true with me—even some non-sports things. The thing that really made me take notice is that he wrote about the movie Fast Break, which was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I couldn’t believe that anyone else had even seen it. But Bill gave a detailed analysis of the film. Then a few months later, he wrote something nice about my appearance on a Shaquille O’Neal roast, and I sent him an e-mail thanking him. We started corresponding, and when I got a talk show, I hired him to be one of the writers. He’s a character. He likes analyzing the show more than writing for it. He’s great to work with, a very funny guy who came up with a lot of good ideas, and I miss having him here.
JOHN SKIPPER:
When I went to run ESPN.com, I am not sure I had ever been on the site. I didn’t know the first thing about the Internet; I was not an early adopter of technology. In fact, I believed in not being overly involved in the agony and the ecstasy of the early adopters—“Oh, we’re the leaders of a new movement!” It’s almost evangelical.
John and I didn’t have that. We’re not leading a movement; we’re coming over there to create great content. So we hire Hunter Thompson and David Halberstam and Ralph Wiley and Bill Simmons; we like to read. By the way, you look at the Internet from 2001 to 2003—we brought in feature writers and design and photography; we magazine’d ESPN.com. The piece we did miss early on, we missed the big piece on technology. Technology is part of the content.
RICK REILLY, Columnist:
In 1997, Skipper came to me and said, “Look, we’re starting a new magazine, and we want you to write for it.” And so a guy named John Papanek, who used to be at SI, and I met a bunch, and I was, like, “Why would I leave SI for this?” and it was going to be a big, broad, cheap-looking magazine, and they were going to have columns by the announcers, and I just thought it sounded awful. And he says, “No, it’s going to be great! It’s going to be like Inside Sports.”
So I thought about it and said no. Five years later, when I had my contract renewed, they came to me again, and I got closer but still felt like the magazine wasn’t anywhere nearly as good as SI. But because Skipper had given me this attention in 1997, I went to SI and said, “Look, they’re offering me this great job!” And my boss, a guy named Bill Colson, said, “Well, what do you want?” And I said, “I want to write the back-page column every week,” because they’d never had anybody write it every week, and I just felt like it needed one guy. And they said okay. And so I really loved doing that. And it worked out great, and then in 2002, they said, “Will you come this time?” And I said no—but I got a little raise out of it. Then in 2007, Skipper sees me at the NBA All-Star Game, and he said, “This time I’m not going to take no for an answer. Whatever they offer you, I am going to offer more.” It’s like you put your finger in your ear to make sure, did he just say that? I was ready to try something new. I’d