Kingdom Come

Bill Simmons is the best pop culture writer in the world.

There, I said it.

I've been checking out a lot of pop culture writers lately to get ideas for this side project. Chuck Klosterman, Charlie Brooker, Malcom Gladwell, that one cat who writes for Esquire, etc... it never hit me that my favorite writer, whom I had considered to be a "sports writer", is actually the most popular and probably the best pop culture writer of all.

Simmons never milked or pimped himself as a pop culture writer. He's known as the sports guy and he writes on a sports website. But somehow, his random obscure 90210 references or De Niro/Pacino comparisons won people over. He's got a bigger following (much bigger) than all the other cats I just mentioned.

Want an idea of how powerful Simmons is?

A few weeks ago a college kid wrote to Bill Simmon's mailbagsaying him and a group of buddies were planning on going to a WNBA (women's professional basketball league) game just for the sake of heckling the league and their players (Women's professional sports is the butt of many jokes by American men). Simmons of course condoned the behavior openly on his mailbag.

The kids went to the game and heckled the hell out of star WNBA player Diana Taurasi. A Chicago-based journalist for the Daily Herald mentioned the hecklers in her summary of the game. The hecklers, delighted at being mentioned, emailed the link to Bill Simmons, who then put the link on his next mailbag

So many people clicked on the link from Simmons mailbag that it nearly CRASHED the Daily Herald site. Don't just take my word for it. The journalist for Daily Herald recently wrote this:

"Apparently one of those charming chanters had written a letter about the group's plans for Taurasi that was posted on ESPN.com by popular writer Bill Simmons. Simmons included it as part of a quick-hitting, tongue-in-cheek Q-and-A mailbag.

After the game, the chanter then wrote to the mailbag and said he and his buddies were mentioned in my story and a link to the Daily Herald's Web site was provided.

At the Herald, we had no idea what was about to hit us.

Our Web site was inundated by people linking to the story, to the point that Herald officials initially thought the site was under attack.

The spike in traffic set a Daily Herald record, beating the old record set during the last election. For days, the story ranked as the most-read story of the day. And it's still in the top 50.

To me, it's baffling.

Either Simmons has a die-hard following that is the size of a small country, or people truly delight in reading about the misfortunes of others, particularly well-paid athletes and celebrities."------------Simmons' mailbag--which is just Simmons answering letters about sports, movies, music, and other random crap--draws so much traffic that a link on the mailbag could drastically boost traffic for another site.Now this, is how you build an "online following".The best thing about Simmons is that unlike Jimmy Kimmel (his good friend) or say Howard Stern, he isn't a one trick wonder who can only crack jokes and clown people. Simmons is actually a damn good journalist and writer. The dude wrote a farewell piece for his dead dog and the piece made rounds around dogowners blogs and became possibly the most sentimental read of the year for petowners.ESPN will be running a 30 for 30 series to celebrate their 30th anniversary. The idea is that 30 Hollywood filmmakers will each make a hard hitting and insightful documentary on a sports story from the past 30 years. There's been heavy buzz for the series because these aren't just fluff sports stories, but rather hard hitting stuff: the Allen Iverson piece is an eyeopening tale of racism in Virginia. There's another piece on how the Yugoslavian basketball team was ripped apart by the Bosnian war. There are stories on Nascar racer Tim Richmond and baller Magic Johnson shocking the world with their announcement of AIDS.Well...I had known about the ESPN 30 for 30 series for a while. But I just found out minutes ago that it was BILL SIMMONS' idea. He pitched it to his bosses at ESPN, they loved it. Simmons then laid the foundation by finding the first few filmmakers and brainstormed the first ideas.Bill Simmons is the biggest sports writer in the world. I've known that for a while. But he's possibly the most popular pop culture writer as well. He has 729,233 Twitter followers. His podcast is one of the most popular podcast on iTunes. His mailbag draws more readers than the Daily Herald's entire website.All this and he's really a diehard sports fan who also loves geeky shit like Rocky, WWF, Pearl Jam, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off.