Back in May, ESPN fired Bill Simmons unexpectedly, thus forcing sports fans everywhere (read: Boston) to go to Gisele Bundchen's Twitter page in order to to read the boastful ramblings of someone who regularly fellates Tom Brady.
We kid Simmons, but he's really one of the funniest and most insightful sports journalists working today, and he deserved better than to be unceremoniously canned in very public fashion. Now, ESPN has twisted the knife by shutting down Grantland, the irreverent sports and pop culture site that Simmons created in 2011.
Many of the site's writers stated that they found out they'd been laid off only when they saw the network's tweets about the site being suspended.
In a statement, ESPN said that it plans to honor the contracts of all current Grantland writers and hopes to hire many of them to write for other ESPN platforms.
So while several casualties of the move have lamented the end of the site, most of them have kept any outrage they may be feeling in check. But not Simmons:
"I loved everyone I worked with at G and loved what we built. Watching good/kind/talented people get treated so callously = simply appalling," Simmons tweeted moments ago.
The 46-year-old journalist has butted heads with ESPN many times over the course of his career. He was most recently suspended by the network last year for calling NFL commissioner Roger Goodell a "liar."
His termination a few months later is believed to be the result of his tense relationship with network brass.
In a statement, ESPN claimed that the decision to shut down Grantland has nothing to do with Simmons or the nature of the site's content, but was simply a result of the need to "direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise."
We're sure Simmons will have more to say on the topic in the very near future.
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