SI.com
Sports Illustrated's
Chris Ballard chats with ESPN.com and ESPN mag writer
Bill Simmons about the
Sonsofthesportsguy.com message board:
SI: It's an interesting phenomenon: These people are spending their days predicting what you're going to write --
BS: I don't go there, I don't like to think about it. I've been there twice. I don't go there. It's weird.
SI: It is weird. Still, how do you make sense of it, of having a community of people dedicated to you?
BS: I can't. My whole thing is that my confidence is very low as it is, so to go to a message board and read someone complaining that I'm not writing enough, or this column sucked, it's probably going to reinforce what I already thought. I don't need to see it. No one's a worse critic of me than me. My thing with my column is that it's free and I always break a sweat with it. It's not like I'm charging people and it's not like I'm mailing stuff in. I slave over my columns. When I hand them in, it kills me, because I never feel like I'm done.
