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By Root 2256 0

been at SI for twenty-two years, I loved it, I think it’s the best magazine in the country, it’s got the most loyal readership—but I just had done it. And I wanted to shake up my life. And he said, “Think of it as a Chinese menu: take three from column A, two from column B, and five from column C,” and so he let me just totally carve out what I wanted to do. And what I wanted to do is do an interview show on TV, I wanted to learn how to write on the Internet, I wanted to see if I could bring my kind of writing to TV, I wanted to still do televised essays like I did for NBC for a while on golf and tennis—and he said, “You got it!” And Skipper just wouldn’t take no for an answer. Every time SI would offer something else, he would go 50 percent higher. And I’m, like, “Wow, it sounds fun, it sounds like a change of pace, and I really like him; he’s one of my favorite guys.” And so I jumped at it.

I can almost tell a guy coming up to me in an airport or restaurant, depending on his age, what he’s going to say to me. If he’s over forty or forty-five, he’s going to say, “Why did you leave Sports Illustrated? Oh, my God, that was the first thing we’d read. I’d call my son and we’d talk about it or call my dad and we’d talk about it.” And they’d say, “Why’d you give up writing?” And I’m, like, “I haven’t given up writing. I do the exact same kind of column every week on ESPN.com and in ESPN: The Magazine, and they always go, “You do?” And then if it’s a young guy, he’ll come up and say something like, “I read you on ESPN.com all the time. Where were you before this?” It’s like two totally separate worlds.

JAY LOVINGER:

Reilly was the king of Sports Illustrated and now he’s not even a factor—but he makes a huge amount of money. He’s probably the highest-paid person ever, a writer for a normal publication. Bill Simmons might be the closest one. If Bill was making less than Oprah Winfrey, it wouldn’t be close enough. Only “Bill World” will ever satisfy Bill. He’s really made it big, though, hasn’t he? I wonder sometimes what’s going on out there in America.

By the way, Reilly was a total pro when I worked with him. Hardworking total pro. I don’t know if that’s still the case. I think that kind of money can really spoil you.

RICK REILLY:

Bill Simmons writes so many words. I kid him, you can only get five thousand words on Kevin Garnett for this week. But he breaks it up in kind of a brilliant way so that people can skim and look for stuff that they want to read. I still like well-chosen words. I think it’s harder to be short. It’s, you know, the old line, “I’m sorry this piece is so long, I didn’t have time to make it short.” He’s obviously a brilliant writer. I think he needs a Greyhound bus full of editors. He doesn’t want any words cut. But that’s because he grew up with no fences. I grew up with an eight-hundred-word fence: that’s how long a column was. He has no predetermined length of what a column is, because in the cyber world he can go until it’s done.

I hadn’t read him much till I got there. I hadn’t met him. He said something on the radio, on Boston radio or something, like “What do you think about working with Rick Reilly?” And he said something like “He needs me.” Ha ha, which is kind of funny. And then someone from the New York Times asked me, “What do you think of Simmons’s writing?” and I pretended the phone wasn’t working and didn’t answer. So he kind of had to apologize to me for that, and I had to apologize to him for that. And now we get along fine. I just think we are two completely different types of writers. He loves the games, he loves the score, he loves the trades, and who’s going to win and how many points the guy had—I’m just writing about people. All I really love is the stories about “people who happen to play sports,” and I just find that sports has some really great human stories. So I think it’s a pretty good mix. He loves the games and I love the people who play them.

JEMELE HILL, Columnist:

When you get to ESPN, people assume you’re more seasoned than you actually are, but it changes your life.