A week before the draft, family invited …

A week before the draft, family invited us to stay in a borrowed beach house at the Jersey Shore. My kids were little, at home we barely had air-conditioning. This was a nice change, being in a busy time of year while raising a one- and four-year-old. Each morning, I commuted a few blocks to the public library, where I was glued to the laptop. That’s where I got a weird call from an editor, upending all of our draft plans. Hey, we had a great idea. Whole new plan, and one that was not attending the draft and certainly not liveblogging it. What was going on? Nothing, he said. It took four or five phone calls to find out: Simmons did not want me to liveblog the draft. Simmons threatened not (or, depending who you asked, never) to write about the draft if I did. I emailed Simmons, asking if we could talk. He replied he didn’t think we needed to talk, we were fine, but “i didn’t want to do my annual running diary if you were live blogging it from the exact same ‘watching it as it happens’ perspective, just because i feel like i’ve earned that territory over the past 6 years. but they say you’ll do it from a different angle so i’m fine with that.”