Interview: Bill Simmons, ESPN’s ‘The Sports Guy’/Author of The Book of Basketball

ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons is back in Boston signing copies of his new book, The Book of Basketball today. | Photo by Steven Barry courtesy of ESPN Books. Before ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons became one of these most popular sports columnist in the country he was simply known as “The Boston Sports Guy” writing for Digital City Boston (what Bill has described as “AOL’s digital newspaper”). More than a decade later, the Holy Cross/Boston University alum has ventured beyond the sports column and into television; as a former writer for “Jimmy Kimmel Live” , documentaries; as executive producer of ESPN’s 30 For 30 series and books; his latest The Book of Basketball just hit shelves this week. Despite all that success, Bill says he’s “still pissed that he never wrote a column for the Globe while newspapers were alive,” at least that’s what he told the Huffington Post . To promote the release of his 700 page NBA book, “The Sports Guy” is venturing out on a month-long book tour . Today, he comes back to the city where it all started with two signings: Barnes & Noble in the Prudential Center at 12:30 p.m. and Hurricane O’Reilly’s at 4 p.m. Last week we had the chance to catch up with Bill before he packed his bags and left his Los Angeles home. Simmons gave us his take on Springfield, his temporary separation with baseball, Randy Moss and more. You said the original plan for the book was to blow up the Basketball Hall of Fame and reconstruct it like an Egyptian pyramid. Would you like to see hall of fames be constructed based on importance rather than chronologically? Totally. And that’s one of the reasons why I did it. I never understood the hall of fame concept. I make the case in the book. It’s one of those ideas where the answer is: ‘Well that’s the way we’ve always done it.’ Anytime that’s the answer, that’s a horrible answer. If we applied that to everything else it would be like: ‘Alright, we’re not going to have cell phones because we’ve always had these rotary phones and that’s the way we’ve done it.’ You can’t think that way. If you were an alien and you just landed here from another planet and you went to the hall of fame, you’d have no idea which guys mattered and which guys didn’t. Seems to me that for a hall of fame to work effectively you have to convey the importance of each guy who made it somehow. That’s how I came up with levels and some sort of countdown and the top four is a pantheon. I’ve got the 12 best guys ever. The Basketball Hall of Fame doesn’t seem to have the same mystique that the other two hall of fames, football and baseball, have. See, I don’t think the Football Hall of Fame does either. Baseball’s the only one. For baseball it’s two things, it’s the name - Cooperstown sounds awesome. You want to go to Cooperstown. You don’t want to go to Springfield. There’s nothing exciting about that name. The other thing about Cooperstown is it’s hard to get to. The drive itself it’s cool. You feel like Norman Dale driving to Hickory High School for the first time. There’s a mystique to it that Springfield doesn’t have. It’s actually pretty depressing. I’d say it’s a very poor man’s Anaheim. That’s why in the book, I said I wanted to move it to French Lick, Indiana. I think it should be in Indiana because it’s not where basketball was born, but it’s the capital of basketball. I wish we could do it, I wish the NBA had the balls to just do an NBA hall of fame and put it there but I know they never will. Why do you think race has been such an important issue with the NBA? Because smaller rosters and basically from 1960 on the majority of the best players were black and that’s never happened in another sport. The tickets are expensive. It’s a mostly white audience paying to see a mostly black group of players. When you consider the way racial relationships have evolved since the 1950s, that’s a pretty interesting dynamic. In the 1960s, four of the best five guys in the league were black. You had (Bill) Russell, Wilt (Chamberlin), Elgin Baylor, Oscar (Robertson) and then you had Jerry West. Four of the best guys in the league were black while blacks in this country were fighting for civil rights at the same time. That was kind of the foundation. Then in the late 1970s

the league became very black all of the sudden. Guys were overpaid. The fans and the media turned against it. You can go and research it, there are newspaper articles and Sports Illustrated did a story ‘Is the League Too Black?’ Can you imagine anyone writing that now? So it’s always been an issue. Eventually it changed with Bird and Magic and then MJ - he was really the first black player that the league was able to really market and sell to all types of people. From then it’s been pretty good. It surfaced again in the mid-to-late 90’s with Allen Iverson. People had trouble identifying with the cornrows and tattoos. In the Mark Cuban and Colin Cowherd episodes of your podcast, you mention that you think there’s no real need for beat reporters covering teams anymore. If someone were to come to you and say they were thinking of taking a job as a beat reporter covering the Celtics or any other team, what sort of advice would you give them to make their reporting relevant? I think there are guys that are doing a good job. Unfortunately they do such a good job that they get hired by a bigger company. It’s not a high paying job and you have to travel all the time. The people who do it seem to be overqualified to do it. Sports has changed. I know what’s going on with my team. I can watch my team. Back in the 70s, a lot of these games weren’t shown, so you had to learn a lot about what was going on with your team through the beat writer. Now I think I don’t need the beat writer unless he’s going to give me something that I’m not getting. What I want is inside access, I want stories from the locker room. I want overheard quotes from the game. If you’re going to be sitting at a press table at mid-court than give me some anecdotes. What did Lamar Odom say when he yelled at Ron Artest? With the way newspaper deadlines work, where they’re working on three different versions of the same story and their deadline is during the game, sometimes they’re working and not even watching or listening to the game. In Los Angeles Magazine, you said that the Manny/Steroids story has had an effect on your baseball fandom. Would you say that this has freed up your time for your new favorite sports of soccer and MMA? I had a rough year with baseball. I’m sure I’ll be fine next year but the Manny/Papi thing, combined with the fact that I didn’t like watching the Red Sox this season, combined with the fact that the Yankees got their mojo back, combined with the five hour games, it was just not a good year for me with baseball. It’s like one of those marriages where I end up moving out for eight weeks and I’m living in a hotel room trying to figure out if we should stay together. I think the playoffs brought me back a little. I think we’re going to be alright. I’m a Vikings fan and I’m jealous of the fact that you get to root for my favorite player of all time - Randy Moss. How has Bill Belichick been able to make him un-interesting off the field? I think Randy Moss’ problem has always been that he’s a front runner. When things are going great, he’s fine. When things are bad, he checks out. He needs a quarterback that he respects and a coach that he respects, and he’ll be fine. That’s just the way he is. You can say that it’s a flaw or you can say that what he needs to succeed. With the Patriots, the thing fell out of the sky for him and it’s been an awesome situation and he’s been great. I think that’s a flaw for his career. He can only succeed under certain circumstances. He’s conditionally great which is different from just being great. He’s great for these specific reasons which is different from someone like Jerry Rice, who would have great, no matter what team picked him. On paper, Randy and Boston should not have been a great match but everyone loves him. He’s one of the leaders of the team. I think he’s been a great Patriot. He’s so much fun to watch. It’s breathtaking when they throw it deep to him. For more Bill Simmons, check out LAist’s interview

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Interview: Bill Simmons, ESPN’s ‘The Sports Guy’/Author of The Book of Basketball