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The Mark Cuban Gay Joke ESPN Doesn't Want You To Hear [UPDATE]
For two days, Cuban vs. Simmons was billed as the marquee event at last weekend's MIT Sloan Sports Analytic Conference, sponsored by ESPN. It certainly didn't disappoint as the two took the stage late Saturday and engaged in an hour-long discussion ranging from the NBA lockout to how teams can eng...

In The 1985 NBA Finals, A Respectful Boston Garden Applauded An Injured Laker. Not Young Bill Simmons.
Game six, the deciding game of the Lakers' 1985 championship, saw Los Angeles's Michael Cooper carried to the dressing room with an injury. Despite the rivalry, most of the Boston fans gave Cooper a nice hand. But 15-year-old Bill Simmons, sitting in the fourth row from the court, merely waved—th...

Oh No, Ryan Fitzpatrick, What Did You Do To Your Hair?
Ryan, Ryan, Ryan. I thought you went to a fancy school where they taught you not to do things like this? Apparently the occasion is Stevie Johnson's contract extension, which keeps the Bills' big target around for a while. Hooray?...

13 Right-Wing Talking Points For The Simmons-Obama Podcast
As you might have heard, Bill Simmons finally scored an interview with Barack Obama this week. Now, we at Deadspin are obviously part of the Giant Liberal Gay Media Deathship, but that doesn't mean we can't at least try to strive for balance on occasion. That's why, as a favor to all the remaining G...

Deadspin Classic: ESPN Nixes Bill Simmons-Barack Obama Podcast
Bill Simmons recently sat down with President Obama for his podcast, which is up now on Grantland (and which has already spawned a delightful hashtag on Twitter). The last time the two were supposed to talk, ESPN ruined everything. Originally published April 16, 2008....

From The Sports Guy Vault: Bill Simmons Ranks The Worst Fans In Sports
Back we go into the Bill Simmons archive, where we rescue Simmons's AOL Digital Cities work from the internet aether. Today's long-lost column: "The 20 Most Annoying Sports Fans Alive," originally published June 4, 1999....

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 sopho...

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 produ...

Shawne Merriman Gave Away Super Bowl Tickets On Twitter, And Nobody Seemed To Care
"However, according to the Twitter analytics tool Topsy, only five people even submitted videos to Merrman's Twitter handle. And one wasn't even clearly a Lights Out dance." [Daily Dot]...

Here's The AOL Column That Got Bill Simmons Hired By ESPN, In Which He Calls The ESPYs A "TV Holocaust"
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...

Tennis Players Bill Simmons Would Do: Another Classic From The Secret Sports Guy Vault
It's a curious quirk of the internet that almost nothing survives of Bill Simmons's pre-ESPN work. After seeing last week's newly unearthed column from Simmons's AOL Digital City days, a reader sent along another Boston Sports Guy entry rescued from the dustbin of history. If you've got any old Simm...

"The Fans Would Throw Little Tinfoils Of Hash At Me": A 1980 Interview With Bill "Spaceman" Lee, Baseball's Stoner Evangelist
The folks at The Golden Sombrero alerted us to this wonderful piece of baseball history: a 1980 High Times interview with pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee in which Lee holds forth on drugs, Bowie Kuhn, race, reincarnation, drugs, drug use, drug abuse, which drugs Expos fans threw to him in tribute, eatin...

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 enoug...

Disney's ESPN's Bill Simmons Has Committed 98 Potential SOPA Violations On Grantland So Far
ESPN's just one of the prominently featured supporters of SOPA, the law that has your favorite non-Deadspin sites going black today....

Some Guy Got A Giant Tattoo Of Stevie Johnson's Head On His Arm
Johnson, the Bills wide receiver who was benched over the weekend, did this not so long ago. He still wound up with 1007 yards on the year. And now he tweeted a photo of the dude's tattoo. Everything about this is so dispiriting I don't know whom I should call classless. [@StevieJohnson13, via Sport...

Drayton Florence Saved The Best For Last In Earning NFL Flop Of The Season Honors
Bills cornerback Drayton Florence has made a career out of his tough-guy image (just ask Mark Sanchez) but the stunt he pulled Sunday against the New England Patriots puts him firmly in Italian soccer star territory. It was less a flop or dive and more of a hurl—a leaping, falling charade of nonse...

2011 Deadspin Hall Of Fame Nominee: A.J. Daulerio
He ruined Deadspin. He's no Will Leitch. He's the worst man in sports. He sat on top of a toilet for GQ. He dropped acid. And now he's taking his act across the room to ruin Gawker. Dick....

2011 Deadspin Hall Of Fame Nominee: Bill Simmons
He picked a fight with Charlie Pierce. He started Grantland. He scooped up our pal Katie Baker. He shamelessly hopped on the Bruins bandwagon. He told ESPN to go fuck itself. He expressed regrets about Grantland before it even launched. He almost poached the guy who's now running our little corner ...

Read Bill Simmons Before He Was The Sports Guy, From The <em>Boston Phoenix</em> Vault
The internet's not written in pencil, it's written in ink, or something. If you've spent your entire writing life online, it's likely that some Googlebot has crawled your pages, archiving every word you've ever written. But older writers who were young hacks shouldn't have to worry: their words were...

Buffalo Schoolteachers Charged With Humping In The Bathroom At This Weekend's Bills Game
Making sex in the bathroom is never the brightest nor most hygienic idea, to say nothing of the typical stall conditions at an NFL stadium used by 70,000 people. That goes for fucking on the floor of the pristine new Cowboys Stadium, and it definitely goes for whatever two grade school teachers were...