How Bill Simmons Went All In

The following is excerpted from a chapter of Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, by Danny Funt. The book is available for purchase now.

Bill Simmons never seemed like the type to bite his tongue. In many ways, he earned the nickname he gave himself, “the Sports Guy,” by sharing beliefs—in his ESPN column, on the pregame show NBA Countdown, on his podcast, on the long-form sports-writing site Grantland that he launched under ESPN—without a filter, as someone might while watching a game with buddies at a bar. He was also fluent in what boorish men call “locker-room talk” (like when he told a reader that his friends “lost the ability to call themselves guys the moment they allowed a female in their football fantasy league”), but his brazenness about sports usually came off as bravery, and for that he became one of ESPN’s most valuable stars.