From The Sports Guy Vault: Bill Simmons Says Tear Down Fenway Park

Let's return to the Bill Simmons Archive, a collection of Boston Sports Guy columns salvaged from the defunct AOL Digital Cities. In honor of Red Sox opening day, let's look at an old column calling for the demolition of Fenway Park—and the construction of something totally new and different in its place.

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All The Pop Culture References From Bill Simmons's Earliest Known Column

We're diving back into the Bill Simmons archive, a previously undiscovered treasure trove of Sports Guy material from AOL Digital Cities. Today's is a special one, as it takes us more than two decades back in the Simmons oeuvre. It was originally written in the fall of 1989, when Simmons was a sophomore at Holy Cross.…

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Bill Simmons's Very First Visit To ESPN

We've been dipping into the Bill Simmons archive, a salvaged cache of the Sports Guy's old columns from AOL Digital Cities, none of which survives online. Today's jaunt down memory lane is a field trip Simmons took to Bristol in 1997, under the auspices of his friend Gus Ramsey, a SportsCenter producer. It was an…

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Here's The AOL Column That Got Bill Simmons Hired By ESPN, In Which He…

ESPN's initial courtship of Bill Simmons has the air of an urban legend. Simmons wrote a column excoriating the bloated and self-congratulatory ESPY Awards, and that column was rapidly forwarded around Bristol, putting the Boston Sports Guy on ESPN's radar. Much like Aeschylus's lost plays, the ESPY diary was known…

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The Sports Guy Before ESPN: A 2000 Bill Simmons Column Is Unearthed

It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. The formative years of one of the country's most successful sports writers are lost forever, all because AOL Digital City preserved nothing. But even then the "Boston Sports Guy" had fans devoted enough to save some…

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