Background and career
William John Simmons III (born September 25, 1969) is an American sports podcaster, sportswriter, and cultural critic. He is the founder of the sports and pop culture website The Ringer. Simmons first gained attention with his website as "The Boston Sports Guy" and was recruited by ESPN in 2001, where he eventually operated the website Grantland and worked for until 2015. At ESPN, he wrote for ESPN.com, hosted his own podcast on ESPN.com titled The B.S. Report and was an analyst for two years on NBA Countdown. Simmons founded The Ringer, a sports and pop culture website and podcast network, in 2016 and is its CEO. He hosted Any Given Wednesday with Bill Simmons on HBO for one season in 2016. At The Ringer, he hosts The Bill Simmons Podcast.
Simmons was born on September 25, 1969, to William Simmons and Jan Corbo. His father was a school administrator, and his stepmother, Molly Clark, is a doctor. Simmons was an only child and grew up in Marlborough and Brookline, Massachusetts, before moving to Stamford, Connecticut, to live with his mother after his parents divorced when he was 9. He attended the Greenwich Country Day School and then Brunswick School in Greenwich, Connecticut, for high school. In 1988, he completed a postgraduate year at Choate Rosemary Hall, a prep school located in Wallingford, Connecticut. As a child, Simmons read David Halberstam's book The Breaks of the Game, which he credited as the single most formative development in his sportswriting career. After high school, Simmons attended the College of the Holy Cross. As an undergraduate at Holy Cross, he wrote a column for the school paper, The Crusader, called "Ramblings" and later became the paper's sports editor. He also restarted the school's parody newspaper and started a 12- to 14-page, underground, handwritten magazine about the people in his freshman hall called The Velvet Edge. He graduated from Holy Cross in 1992 with a B.A. degree in political science with a focus on the Middle East with a GPA of 3.04. Subsequently, while living in Brookline, Massachusetts, he studied at Boston University, where he earned a master's degree in print journalism two years later.
For eight years following grad school, Simmons lived in Charlestown working various jobs. The September after grad school, Simmons started working at the Boston Herald as a high school sports reporter and editorial assistant, mainly "answering phones... organizing food runs, [and] working on the Sunday football scores section." Three years later, he got a job as a freelancer for Boston Phoenix but was broke within three months and started bartending. In 1997, unable to get a newspaper job, Simmons "badgered" Digital City Boston of AOL into giving him a column, and he started the web site BostonSportsGuy.com while working as a bartender and waiter at night. He decided to call his column "Sports Guy" since the site had a "Movie Guy." Originally, the column was only available on AOL, and Simmons forwarded the column to his friends. He began receiving e-mails from people asking if they could be put on his mailing list. For the first 18 months, Simmons would send it to about 100 people, until it became available on the web in November 1998. The website quickly built up a reputation as many of Simmons' friends from high school and college were e-mailing it to each other. In 2001, his website averaged 10,000 readers and 45,000 hits per day.
Simmons gained fame as "The Boston Sports Guy", which earned him a job offer from ESPN in 2001 to write three guest columns. His second column was "Is Clemens the Antichrist?", which became one of the most e-mailed articles on the site that year. Becoming one of the most popular columnists on the site, Simmons was given his own section of ESPN.com's Page 2, which helped both himself and Page 2 gain widespread popularity. In the first sixteen months Simmons wrote for Page 2, its viewership doubled. In late 2004, ESPN launched an online cartoon based on his columns, which Simmons later called a "debacle" and decided to stop. Simmons wrote a column per month for his page titled "Sports Guy's World". As a lead columnist, Simmons was one of the country's most widely read sports writers and is considered a pioneer of sportswriting on the Internet. His readership grew steadily over the following years. In 2005, according to ESPN, Simmons' column averaged 500,000 unique visitors a month. According to comScore, Simmons' column had averaged 1.4 million pageviews and 460,000 unique visitors per month between June and November 2009. In 2007, Simmons and Connor Schell conceived the idea for 30 for 30, a series of 30 documentaries commemorating the 30th year of the "ESPN era." Simmons and Schell took special interest in "stories that resonated at the time but were eventually forgotten for whatever reason." The series premiered in October 2009, with "King's Ransom" directed by Peter Berg. Simmons served as executive producer on the project until he left ESPN in 2015. In May 2007, Simmons began a podcast for ESPN.com called Eye of the Sportsguy. In June 2007, the podcast was changed to The B.S. Report with a new theme song written by Ronald Jenkees. Simmons created one or two hour-long podcasts a week, generally carrying one theme throughout, talking to everyone from sports and media notables to his friends. The B.S. Report was regularly the most downloaded podcast on ESPN.com, averaging 2 million downloads a month. In 2009, The B.S. Report was downloaded more than 25.4 million times. Simmons began writing a bi-weekly 800-word column for ESPN The Magazine in 2002 but convinced ESPN after three years to give him 1,200 words. In July 2009, Simmons announced his retirement from the magazine but continued to write for the Page 2 website. In October 2007, it was announced that Simmons joined the television series E:60 as a special contributor. In May 2010, it was reported that Simmons and ESPN came to an agreement on a new contract, although no official announcement was made on the terms. Since 2009, Simmons has also been a moderator and panelist at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Starting in the 2012-2013 NBA season, Simmons joined the NBA Countdown pregame show as a panelist/contributor during ESPN/ABC's coverage of the NBA. He left the show prior to the 2014–2015 season in order to debut The Grantland Basketball Show, ESPN's first Grantland-branded television program. ESPN announced in May 2015 that Simmons' contract, which was due to expire in September 2015, would not be renewed.
In the summer of 2002, Jimmy Kimmel began trying to convince Simmons to write for his new late-night talk show, which was to premiere after Super Bowl XXXVII the following winter. Simmons refused for most of the summer because he did not want to cut back on his columns and move to the West Coast away from his family and Boston teams. However, Kimmel kept "badgering" him and by mid-September, Kimmel had convinced him to join the show as a writer. Simmons was able to continue writing for ESPN.com and in ESPN The Magazine, which was possible because Disney owned both ESPN and ABC. He has also stated that he joined the show because he was burned out from his column, felt he needed a change, and always wanted to write for a talk show. Simmons left Boston and moved to California in November 2002 and began working in April 2003 as a comedy writer for the Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Simmons has since referred to it as "the best move [he] ever made." He left the show in the spring of 2004, after a year and a half of writing for the show, in order to focus full-time on his column. However, Simmons remained in California.
Simmons served as the editor-in-chief of Grantland, a website owned by ESPN covering sports and pop culture that launched on June 8, 2011. The website's name was a reference to deceased sportswriter Grantland Rice, though it was reportedly not Simmons' choice for the name. Sports blog Deadspin had previously reported in 2010 that Simmons was working on a "top secret editorial project." Some key contributors to the website included Jalen Rose, Zach Lowe, Kirk Goldsberry and Wesley Morris. In August 2014, ESPN announced that Simmons would be leaving NBA Countdown to produce an 18 episode primetime show for ESPN through his site called The Grantland Basketball Show—later changed to The Grantland Basketball Hour—which would debut in October 2014. In these episodes, Simmons discussed NBA-related current events as well as some of his more popular sports columns with his co-host Jalen Rose. Special guests included fellow journalists, pop culture celebrities, as well as current and former coaches and athletes. Months after ESPN decided not to renew its contract with Simmons, ESPN shut down the Grantland website on October 30, 2015.
