Bill Simmons

William John Simmons III (born September 25, 1969) is an American podcaster, sportswriter, and cultural critic who is the founder and CEO of the sports and pop culture website The Ringer.

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.

While attending the College of the Holy Cross Simmons wrote a column for the school paper, The Crusader, called "Ramblings" and later served as the paper's sports editor.

He also restarted the school's parody newspaper and started a 12-14-page, underground, handwritten magazine about the people in his freshman hall called "The Velvet Edge."

He graduated in 1992 with a B.A. in political science (his primary focus was the Middle East, which he often cites in his columns by way of saying his sportswriting career has nothing to do with his degree) and a GPA of 3.04.

Subsequently, while living in Brookline, Massachusetts, he studied at Boston University, where he received his master's degree in print journalism two years later.

For eight years following grad school, Simmons lived in Charlestown working various jobs before eventually landing a job at ESPN.

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.

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 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.

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.

In the summer of 2002, Jimmy Kimmel had been trying to get Simmons to write for his new late-night talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live! which was to premiere after the Super Bowl.

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.

Kimmel kept on "badgering" him and by mid-September Kimmel had him "on the ropes."

It was crucial for Simmons that he could write for the show and on ESPN.com and in ESPN The Magazine, which was possible because of the Disney connection with 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 on November 16, 2002 and began working in April 2003 as a comedy writer for the show.

Simmons called it "the best move I ever made" and said it was one of the best experiences of his life.

He left the show in the spring of 2004 after a year and a half of writing for the show.

He wanted to focus full-time on his column, since his writing was starting to slip and he did not have enough time to work on columns or even think about them.

Simmons remained in California.

Simmons founded The Ringer, a sports and pop culture website and podcast network, in 2016 and serves as 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 is known for a style of writing characterized by mixing sports knowledge and analysis, pop culture references, his non-sports-related personal life and for being written from the viewpoint of a passionate sports fan.