Note to the mainstream sports media currently tripping over themselves to close the close the barn door of blogging whilst the livestock breed messily all over every inch of the yard: If you need someone to blame, look in the mirror. Should you rather be able to point your finger at the person who gave all of these nut jobs the inclination that they too could be a sportswriter, look no further than amongst your own, ESPN's Bill Simmons.

Mr. Simmons' existence was brought to my attention sometime during the late 1990s. One day, as I toiled on a trading desk at a large New York investment firm, I received an email from one of my coworkers containing a link which had obviously been forwarded roughly forty times before it had reached him. This was to become for me what they refer to as a watershed moment. The link was to an amateur column posted on a Digital City hosted site which was about as neatly formatted as a torn-out sheet of notebook paper, and written by someone referring to himself as "The Boston Sports Guy". The title: "Rating the Wimbledon Hotties". Dropping whatever it was that I was working on at the moment, I rushed through the rankings almost out of necessity. The link had been forwarded to ten other people on the desk and was already being discussed loudly ten feet away from me. I was dying to join in. It was sexist, juvenile, and the best thing I had read in years. This was my introduction to Bill Simmons.

If I was forced to venture a guess regarding how many of the eventual recipients of that link Simmons retained as loyal readers, I'd guess ninety percent, easy. Digital City was to remain open and minimized on my desktop during every working hour from that day forward. Anytime I had a free second, I'd refresh, praying that there would be something new. Most days, it was the links. Simmons found a way to compile dozens of must-read articles ranging from the gripping to the hilarious on a daily basis. The new batch would arrive sometime between ten and noon. I still have no idea how he did it. If we were lucky, there might be one of his mailbags (questions submitted by his smallish but shockingly literate cadre of followers) or, even better, a "Brush with Greatness" column. People would email Simmons with details of encounters with professional athletes (pre-Gawker, mind you) no matter how mundane. In cases of more salacious run-ins, the player's name would be redacted (suck it Bissinger), leaving us to guess at the identity of the transgressor. (We could usually get it.)

Looking back, the beauty of the column was that it was content, plain and simple. There were no bells, no whistles and no graphics. You couldn't believe who this "nobody" could count among his readership. From my firm alone, he could claim several high profile fans. These were guys whose names you would find in the Wall Street Journal on a daily basis. We all knew who the other readers were. It was like being part of the initiated, and having gotten two items into mailbags, I was a semi-celebrity among them.

It was apparent that Simmons had tried to take the classic route into sports journalism. He wrote about a miserable low-level job with the Boston Herald and having gone back to school to get a master's degree. It was during these pieces that he let us in on a secret. It was something that most of us suspected and now knew to be true: Sportswriters and broadcasters are, for the most part, assholes who have no interest in doing what they're doing beyond picking up a paycheck. One of the primary sins attributed to bloggers these days is their shameless bias, but I will always remember Simmons writing about being in a press box and committing the near-capital offense of asking a writer who his "team" was. The response as I remember was a sarcastic chuckle and a comment along the lines of "I don't root, son. I'm a sportswriter." Simmons made clear what we were already thinking - that is just not right. During the Costas segment described in Part I of this series, Buzz Bissinger calls Will Leitch of Deadspin on the carpet for being an unabashed St. Louis Cardinals fan, to which Leitch offers the perfect response: "So what?... [You're] no longer a fan? Why did you get into sports in the first place?"

Leitch made another point during the discussion that must have had Simmons thinking back to his Digital City days and nodding along: "It's hard goddamn work writing a blog!" I'll add that it's even harder if you want it to be any good. The moral of the Bill Simmons story is that one thing matters: Content. The new rule is that if you write well and people connect with you, they'll come back for more. If you don't, they won't. Is that what puts the fear of god into the newspaper guys? The rule used to be: Get a column in your local newspaper. People will read it because they have no choice. I, for one, am going with the new rule.

Bill Simmons is a cottage industry now. He is the undisputed star of ESPN.com. He writes a column for the magazine and hosts a podcast, "Eye of the Sports Guy". He's under contract at ESPN through 2010 and currently holds the site record for chat length, clocking in at an alarming 10 hours 56 minutes! I'm sure I speak for a lot of the old Digital City fans when I say that his success brings a little bit of sadness. It's like having your favorite club band from college start headlining arena tours. But, on the other hand, someone had to blaze the trail right? Without Bill Simmons, the whole "mainstream media vs. bloggers" debate seems a little one-sided at this point in time. Even though it's obvious that, in the future, this equation will be decidedly turned on its head, he got there first. I mean, if Thomas Edison had never invented the light bulb, we wouldn't still be sitting here in the dark, but still, you've got to give the man his due.