“Don’t get fired, Bill.” That’s Jalen Rose’s maxim, repeated whenever he sees Bill Simmons, his ESPN colleague and periodical podcast partner, broaching dangerous territory. For better or worse, Rose was not around earlier this week, when Simmons was recording his podcast with Sal Iacono (also known as ‘Cousin Sal’ of Jimmy Kimmel Live). Had he been present, Rose might have stopped Simmons from calling NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a liar for pleading ignorance of the Ray Rice video’s contents until TMZ released it. Or Rose might have stopped Simmons from subsequently daring ESPN to reprimand him. “I really hope someone calls me or emails me and says I’m in trouble for anything I said about Roger Goodell because if one person says that to me, I’m going public,” Simmons warned. “You leave me alone. The Commissioner is a liar and I get to say that on my podcast.”
The good news is that those comments did not get Simmons fired. His punishment is a three-week suspension for failing to meet ESPN’s “journalistic standards,” according to a company statement released on Wednesday. The incident marks the latest and most dramatic development in Simmons’ prosperous yet contentious relationship with the sports media giant.
In 2001, ESPN hired Simmons, then a columnist for AOL, after Executive Vice President John A. Walsh read a piece of his mocking the ESPY awards (ESPN’s annual award show) and thought it was hilarious. Since then, Simmons has become–almost unquestionably–the most popular and influential sportswriter of the digital era. According to Rob Tannenbaum of Rolling Stone, Simmons’ podcast, the BS Report, was downloaded 32 million times last year. Simmons conceived ESPN’s Emmy-nominated documentary series 30 for 30, which spawned the Emmy-winning 30 for 30 Shorts. Grantland, the ESPN-owned website Simmons has run since 2011, gets millions of unique visitors per month. And Simmons’ writing style famously shifted the nexus of the sportswriter’s attention and sympathy from the player to the fan.
But Simmons’ casually sarcastic persona has intermittently clashed with the strict requirements of ESPN’s $50 billion leviathan. The first major battle came after he’d worked there for about a year: Simmons went on strike to protest his pay and what he saw as the over-editing of his columns. (The strike ended in a raise.) It seems, however, that his skirmishes with the company have become more common as Simmons has become a brand unto himself. In 2009, the year his bestselling The Book of Basketball came out, ESPN suspended him for two weeks from Twitter after the employees of ESPN’s Boston radio affiliate, WEEI-AM, dubbed Simmons the “Fraud of the Week,” and he responded by dubbing them “deceitful scumbags.”
The list of recent evidence of tension between ESPN and its biggest star goes on: Last year, he was banned from Twitter for three days after calling a juvenile segment on the consistently idiotic show First Take “awful and embarrassing for everyone involved… including ESPN.” In a New York Times Magazine profile published in 2011, the year Grantland launched, Simmons told Jonathan Mahler, “It’s really hard to write about sports without making fun of ESPN.” An addendum in Deadspin to Tannenbaum’s Rolling Stone profile containing 18 previously unpublished quotes that has Simmons comparing his relationship with his employer to his relationship with his wife.
While that comment implies long-term resignation, another quote from the list suggests that a split with ESPN isn’t far from Simmons’ mind. “If ESPN doesn’t have the broadcast rights to the NBA, it will make me re-evaluate what I should do next,” Simmons said to Tannenbaum. “I want to work for whoever has the NBA.” The NBA’s TV deal with ESPN expires after the 2015-16 season. Simmons’ contract expires next year.
Simmons has contemplated leaving ESPN before. When the network agreed to build Grantland around his personality, it reportedly did so to prevent him from going elsewhere. In Those Guys Have All the Fun, an oral history of ESPN published in 2011, Simmons recalled that, in a meeting regarding the “deceitful scumbag” incident, he said, “Maybe I should be able to get away with more in my column. I’ve been your best guy on the website for nine years. I should have a little more leeway. I’d get that leeway anywhere else.” (He expressed regret for those comments to Tannenbaum–admitting that, after he read the book, he was “crestfallen” because he “came off like an asshole.”)
Given this history, it isn’t unreasonable to speculate that Wednesday’s suspension may nudge Simmons closer to the door. This is particularly true because ESPN’s charge that his comments were journalistically irresponsible is absurd. Not only did they come in the context of a shit-shooting conversation in which he and Cousin Sal pick the betting lines for the week’s football games, the opinion that Goodell is being less than forthright about the Rice video, though it hasn’t been confirmed empirically, is hardly controversial. Indeed, it is an easy conclusion to deduce from a piece published by ESPN’s own Outside the Lines blog, which demonstrates that the Ravens and the NFL knew of the extent of Rice’s actions and implies that they avoided acknowledging the facts to suppress the scandal that eventually exploded.
That ESPN published that story suggests, as Business Insider’s Tony Manfred contends, that Simmons’ suspension has more to do with his attack on ESPN than his attack on Goodell. On the other hand, that story damns Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti far more directly than it does Goodell. So the possibility that ESPN did not want its employees to explicitly condemn Goodell’s character, as opposed to his competence in handling the Ray Rice situation, remains highly plausible. After all, Goodell is the commissioner of a league with which ESPN has a $15.2 billion contract. If Goodell is a liar, ESPN has shown itself willing to profit from his lies.
Either way, Simmons’ rant is proof that ESPN’s writers are not free to air their opinions about its business partners, a trend that, as Andrew Sullivan points out, is one affecting media overall. Sullivan argues that, “As journalism, including sports journalism, faces a truly tough and continuing transition, as its bottom line keeps going down, as ‘sponsored content’ dominates everything, and as media entities charge over $100 grand for a piece of native advertising, the whole idea of writers being truly able to say whatever they think is under increasing pressure.”
That is why, if Simmons were to quit his job at ESPN, it would be a statement of authorial independence that could well resonate throughout the industry. And he could do it without deeply damaging his career; with the potential to gain millions of readers, sports outlets likely would be stepping over each other to hire him.
Then again, ESPN provides the biggest existing platform for Simmons to talk and write about sports with the relentless passion that has made him so popular. Even his disgust at Goodell seems derived in large part from his love of football. “I like football and I didn’t even really care about the games yesterday because I was so mad,” he said in his diatribe. “It’s obviously affected how I watch football. It sucks! This league sucks!”
This could provide its own rationale for abandoning the company that fueled his rise to fame. If ESPN is inhibiting its journalists’ freedom to expose the hypocrisy of the league that is ruining one of his beloved games, then Bill Simmons’ continued affiliation with the network is only perpetuating the sport’s decline. So for Simmons, leaving ESPN wouldn’t have to be about saving journalism. It wouldn’t have to be about saving anything more than football.
Christopher Massie is a CJR contributing editor.