YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Simmons

lines on the record: 128
first: 2023-02-13
most recent: 2023-02-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I'm sorry, email it. Yeah. And within about 18 months, maybe 12, 15 months, I don't know, there started to be this email chain and I would get these. Emails from people I didn't know. Can you add me to the list? So I had this email list that I would send out”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a combo of Boston sports, but also like big stuff. I was doing mailbags. I remember the third column I ever did was a running dire of the NBA draft. Like the six com I ever did was the worst 30 sports movies of all time. And my friends couldn't read it at work, so I would mail them the columns and then they would mail it to a couple people.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I had, it was AOL only the first 18 months, Digital City. So none of my friends could read it at work. Nobody could read it on the World Wide Web. You had to have an AOL subscription.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, because I felt like the way that the columns and the way that sports media was back in the time was very like, it was way more adversarial. It was way less fun. And some of the writers that I had grown up with, they really seemed like fans first. And I was like, why don't people do that anymore? So it was basically Kept thinking who is writing a sports com for me and my friends. And then when I had the digital city column, which I felt like was like my last chance, and I threw myself into it.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but that hadn't even, I didn't even know that was happening. I thought I could freelance. I was like, maybe I can write scripts.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was like, just give me this one page and I'll kill it for you guys. They just didn't want to do it. So you start to wonder, is this meant to be? And I just was looking around going, man, I will still be doing this. Three years from now, I'll be in the exact same spot because none of these people are going to leave. By the time I started my own thing in 97 and I was able to get on Digital City Boston and write my column for that, I felt like it happened like probably three years too late for me. Like I really wish it had been like 24 year old me instead of 27 year old me, but better late than never, I guess.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like, fuck this guy. Who does this guy think he is? But I really felt like I was good and there was no path. And I just. I remember I spent two weeks pointed out this whole Sunday thing for the Sunday paper, this whole page that I wanted them to give me. And it was like it had like a 600 word calm. It had these lists. It looked a lot like kind of what the internet would look like 10, 12 years later. It was modeled like EW Entertainment Weekly had that little EW, the hot list. So there was like that version of that. It had a little mailbag thing, which I stole from Letterman. It was all these different things that I liked.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I was more fascinated by that because it would take three minutes to get outside, eight minutes to have your cigarette. So it was like these 15 minute breaks every 45 minutes. And I'm just looking around going, these people don't care. What is happening? I probably didn't handle it great either because I really did feel like I was better than anybody there except for maybe one or two people and I was just of the mentality like talent should win but I think of how I would have the me now would have seen that person just like a cocky”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Covering high school sports and doing all the grunt intern work. I ended up doing that for three years. And the third year I started writing for the Boston Phoenix too and got to write some really good comms and features for them.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then two years later, you're at a newspaper organizing the pizza run for that night and taking high school scores. And you're like, what happened? Where's my column?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you're really naive at that point because you just, I was like, I had this great calm in my college newspaper. So then I'll graduate and I'll go to grad school and then the Boston Global Giving a Column. And it'll be great. I'll have a column by the time I'm 25. Right.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it takes. I mean, it's like a decades long process to feel good about what you're writing about. I think the thing back then was I was funny. That I was weaving pop culture, and even back then, and that was the stuff people had mentioned me over the weekends. Like, I would make a joke about some Brady bunch episode. Yeah. And then I'd go to get, I don't know, coffee or food or whatever. And I would notice a lot of people reading my column just when I was walking around. I was like, ah, this is cool.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's furious. And then I got that column to the point that it was a conversation piece on Fridays. By the end of my freshman year, I was like, this is, I'm good at this. Like, this is something's going on here. And it became a huge part of my college career.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was mostly real sports, like professional sports, and then sometimes college sports. So I started going after our basketball coach, George Blaney. He was this guy who had kind of peaked in the late 70s and he would screw up games. And I wrote a couple comms critical about him, and it got huge waves on campus. And I was like, all right, this is interesting. Because this is me and my friends all talking about we think this guy sucks. And he probably didn't suck. You know, we're college kids. We don't know any better”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a poly major. Look, I can't defend this, and I don't even understand why I thought this way, but I was like, maybe I'll go to law school. I was like, all right, I'm going to do that. When I got to college, I wanted to have a sports column and I went to see, and by the way, I was really lucky in this respect. They had a spot for me and I wrote them a sample column and they're like, we're going to run it this week. Like, great. And then the next week it was like, I have this other idea for a calm. They were like, all right, let's run it. And so every issue of the newspaper in the four years I was there, I had a column in.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he gave a 39, and he told the class, like, this is the first 39 I've ever given. And I'm going to read it to you right now. And he finished. And then it was silent because it was good. Everybody was silent for like three seconds after. And I was like, wow, this could be my thing. But it wasn't until college that I was really like, wait, could I actually just do this?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when I moved to Stanford, I went to Greenwich Country Day in eighth and ninth grade, which was like one of the best schools in New England. And it was a completely different animal than I went to public schools in Brookline, you know. I was smart, but it wasn't like this school was this school was. Really competitive, and at the end of eighth grade in English, we had to write this essay as part of the final exam that they called the pearl. And it had to be you tied in some sort of personal thing with the book we read and was scored up to 40. The teacher who had been there who became one of the most important people for me, he'd never given a 39 out of 40. 38 was always the highest thing. So I wrote this piece and it was actually about my grandmother”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think though I read it every year to. Just kind of remember. Why I like writing and reading, even though he had a totally different style than I did, it really helped me as a writer However, Stam, it was the curiosity, right? He really wanted to figure out. What's going on with this league? Is this league going to make it? The coolest thing about it was he would dive into these different characters, and I felt like, you know, after you read that book enough times, they just feel like people that became like your friends in a weird way.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I moved to Connecticut, and that was a culture shock for 19 different reasons. But, you know, I used to go back, I used to take the train to see my dad over the weekend. I used to spend summers with my dad and stuff like that. So I would still come back. I'd come back for playoffs and things like that, but it wasn't totally the same.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This sounds good. Come in. You have complete access. And that's kind of where the NBA was. Yeah. But you go to the late 70s and early 80s, the leak had a lot of issues, and there were guys that just would get big contracts and stop trying. The league was heavily black in the 70s, which was a real issue for the networks for whatever reason. It's kind of crazy to look back now, but it was like. Halverstam wrote about this in Breaks of the Game. The league had this real issue of. How do you sell black sport to white fans, which now seems crazy, but in the 70s that was the narrative. And then Bird and Magic showed up.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I decided right now that I wanted to write a book about, I don't know, major indoor lacrosse, they would let me in, right? They'd be like, great”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that was one of the things I loved about the league it was still so I don't want to say underground, but it just like.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it went in a triple over time. Yeah. Yeah. It became the most famous modern NBA game. And it probably still is. But that game started at nine o'clock, and I was six years old, you know, and I fell asleep around the third quarter. It was like 11 o'clock. It was like almost the latest I'd been up. So actually I was sleeping across like two people because we knew everyone in our section And then sometime in the overtime, when everybody had to stand on every play, like, I just kind of had to wake me up. And I kind of like came out of this haze and saw the second and third overtimes. But we got home at like 1.30 in the morning. I remember Charlie's Angels was on. There was like a rerun of Charlie's Angels at one in the morning, and I was just like, is this what happens late at night? Yeah.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stuff like that. The first game I really remember I went to the famous game six of the 76 finals with my dad. They were playing Phoenix.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was this picture of me and Havlicek. He was on crutches with, I think, the assistant coach. I'm kind of looking up at him and they put it on the front. I think it was the front of the sports section in the Herald. And it was like, you know, little kid ass Havichek if he's ready to play. And so that was like amazing.”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and the ushers and stuff, they started to know who I was. And they used to let me walk on the court before the games and I could stand under the hoop and I could rebound. And that was really like the 75, 76, 77 season. There was, I think it was 75 playoffs. Havlichek was hurt. And I used to walk over the, this is crazy now. Nobody believed this now. I really did. I used to walk over the bench, talk to the coaches”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, hey, well, Boston, I think, is one of the biggest sports towns, and we had 14 teams, and I cared about all of them, and I was an only child. We just watched everything and I watched everything and I just, it kind of became my thing. And the biggest thing I think was my dad took me that he got one season ticket to the Celtics for the 73-74 season. So this is actually his 50th year. Wow. He used to carry me in, which he could because I was like, I turned four that first season”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the single hardest thing I've ever had to do. I never really want to do it again. I think I blacked out a couple times during it. You're making decisions on every single conceivable thing, and you're missing some stuff too. Like, all right, health insurance, how do we do that? Office, how do we do that? Oh, we need desks. How do we do that? Oh, we got to hire people. Oh, this person turned us down. Oh my God, who's going to be our accountant? You're just trying to survive. You're basically like Tom Hanks and Castaway. You've built your little raft and your goal is to just get over that first wave and you get out there. And then you're like, holy shit. Now what?”
2023-02-13 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · The Ringer: Bill Simmons · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT