Bi𝓰ll Simmons welcomed former ESPN boss John Skipper as a guest this week, and they shed some light on the former’s forced departure from the network in 2015.
The popular Simmons was suspended by Skipper, then ESPN’s president, for public comments critical of NFL commissioner Roger Goode꧟ll’s handling of the Ray Rice domestic-violence situation. His contract was not renewed by the network thereafter, before moving on to form The Ringer and signing a deal with HBO, including the short-lived weekly show “Any Given Wednesday.”
“You were so mad at me. I think you were the maddest that anyone’s ever been at me,” Simmons told Skipper during a nearly two-hour conversation on “The Bill Simmons Podcast.”
”I think you and Jemele Hill were the beneficiaries of two of the very few temper tantrums I’ve ever had,” Skipper replied, referring to another former ESPN personality. “I have very few temper tantrums, but that was one of them. … I always saw al🅺l the work you did, but we weren’t dealing with each other day to day, so✃ when you would pop back into my life, it was because it was some kind of problem.”
Simmons insisted he stands by his public criticism of Goodell, but said he reg🙈retted essentially daring his ESPN bosses to fire him over it.
“It was basically, ‘And I dare anybody to do anything,’” Skipper recalled. “It’s funny how you remember these things. I was standing on a sidewalk in Raleigh, North Carolina, visiting some friends of mine and yelling into the phone at you. You said, ‘Look, we put the damn thing up [online] and I didn’t have time to listen to it and yeah, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have challenged [ESPN].’ But I don’t think you ever apologized for the remark.”
Simmons: “I will never apologize for that. And then when I wa𓆉s suspend꧂ed, you had somebody else tell me.”
Skipper: “Yeah, I was probably a coward.”
Simmons: “So I was mad about t♑hat and then you called me to talk and I 𝕴wouldn’t talk to you. We were like 13-year-olds. … But I took it so personally that I couldn’t even talk to you about it. I honestly felt like it was like fighting with my dad or something.”
The two met for dinner in Los Angeles during Simmons’ suspension, and wܫhile Skipper says the decision to sever the relationship already was made, he suspected the pa🏅rting was mutual.
“I did ultimately come to believe that you weren’t going to be happy within the constraints of ESPN,” Skipper said. “It always gave me sort of a bad vibe when I had to be the bad guy. … But yeah, we can talk about the morning when I decided we weren’t going to renew your contract, all I did was beat you to the punch, because you weren’t going to stay and I knew that.”
Skipper announced his own departure from ESPN in 2017 amid what he said was a cocaine extortion plot. He now i🎀s the executive chairman for the sports streaming service DAZN, which is one of the sponsors of Simmons’ podcast.