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By Root 2256 0

speech.” I said, “Students of Virginia, you can’t take this: riot, protest, have a sit-in at the president’s office, wear white T-shirts that say this is not a sign, hold up white pieces of poster board with nothing on it. You cannot let this happen at Virginia of all places, because if they start taking away your freedom of speech in the stadium, they’re going to take it away with the law next, and then pretty soon they’re going to take it away with the student elections after that.” Well, it was just my usual ranting and stuff. But these kids at Virginia read the column and started forwarding it around to each other and decided that they would protest the rules at the next game. And with two minutes to go in each quarter, seven thousand kids stood up with blank pieces of paper all over the stadium. And it did make a big splash down in Virginia, and it got the athletic director all upset and thinking, so he reversed the rule. He went back to, “Okay, you can bring your stupid signs in,” and the next year, Al Groh was fired. My point is, that would never have happened at SI. At SI people used to say, “Oh, I clipped it out and I’ve got it hanging behind my desk” or “Oh, you know, we buried it with Grandma” or “I Xeroxed it and faxed it to twenty of my friends.” Well, you take twenty people to read it at SI: you can get two thousand at ESPN.com! And so I just think it opened my eyes to what can happen there.

JEMELE HILL:

It was the Celtics–Lakers finals in 2008. With me being from Detroit, I decided I would write a Celtics column, since they were on the verge of winning the series. Growing up in Detroit, I hated the Celtics because they had such an intense rivalry with my Pistons. But I noticed a strange thing. A lot of people from Detroit were actually rooting for the Celtics because Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen are all likable and popular guys. So I wanted to write about how, even after all these years, it was still difficult to see them win. I also wanted to get on Detroit fans in a good-natured way for forgetting that we’re Detroiters; it’s ingrained in us to hate the Celtics, whether we like their players or not.

So I write the column, file it, and because it was a weekend, a Saturday, the editing chain wasn’t the same as it might be on a regular workday. I’m not sure exactly who edited the column; even now I don’t know and have never bothered to find out, because that wasn’t important to me. I just know it was read by more than one person.

Sometime late Saturday night I ran into one of our NBA editors in the media hospitality room, and he says, “Oh, we had a little bit of a problem with your column, but it got fixed.” I asked, “What was the problem?” He said, “I took something out.” He was kind of vague about it, but it didn’t seem like a big issue. I figured if it was a big deal, someone would have reached out to me already.

The next day was Sunday and I was leaving for Bristol before Game Five because I was appearing on First Take on Monday morning. I’m in the security line at LAX and all of a sudden, my cell phone starts blowing up. I’m getting call after call from the 860 area code, which is Bristol’s. The first person I talked to was one of my editors, Kevin Jackson, and he’s like, “Where are you?” I told him, and then he said, “We got a major problem.”

He then explains that the Celtics column hit like a total shitstorm. He was, like, “Have you been online today? Have you seen any of this?” I was, like, “No, literally I got up to catch my flight, and that was it.” I hadn’t seen anything. I had no clue Boston fans were outraged.

The irony is, the column wasn’t really supposed to be a dig at Boston fans but at Detroit fans who were rooting for Boston. I was calling them traitors. In the column, I named a bunch of these crazy, silly, stupid analogies, as a supposed comparison to how crazy it was for Detroiters to root for the Celtics. And one of the analogies was if a Detroit fan cheers for the Celtics that’s as bad as somebody rooting for Hitler. Stupidest thing I’ve ever written. I look at it now