I'm sure more than a few of you out there read Bill Simmons, and you may have noticed that until yesterday he hadn't been writing much for ESPN over the past two weeks. The reason for that appears to be because he's not happy with the way ESPN puts shackles on him.

Here's what he said yesterday in response to an email query from Deadspin:

I still love writing my column and only re-signed last year because I really did believe that we had hashed out all the behind the scenes bullshit and come to some sort of agreement on creative lines, media criticism rules, the promotion of the column and everything else on ESPN.com. Within a few months, all of those things changed and certain promises were not kept. It's as simple as that.

If you think Simmons isn't aware that ESPN will find out about that email, you're kidding yourself. He's clearly not pleased and becoming more vocal.

Simmons has also responded by creating his blog. Well, I can't be 100% sure it's his blog, but because the first post put up today is one that Simmons said he was never able to get published and his name is on the site with an explanation, there's reason to believe it's him. He should probably work on the site design, but whatever. The story is from 1996 and revolves around former UMASS player Monty Mack when he was still in high school in South Boston.

I've cooled quite a bit on Simmons since he started going nuts on Boston teams and became more of an obnoxious fan than a funny writer, but he's still the big name in new media sports journalism.

This story is worth a read, just to see how Simmons got started.


A CHAMPION REPEATS: Spending the '96 season with South Boston's High's basketball team [The Sports Guy Blog]