Ten years ago, Bill Simmons held an Intern Contest on his Page 2 column. As a young and partially delusional sports fan with a part-time writing hobby, I was immediately convinced that this opportunity was dreamt up just for me. It was, quite simply, the most exciting thing I had seen on the Internet.

The prize was an opportunity to curate links, crop images, Internet deep-dive, sort through e-mails, and to perform any number of menial tasks for The Sports Guy himself. You know, intern stuff. Honestly, I did not care what it was; a job, any job, at ESPN was strictly of the pipe dream variety as I saw it, and here was Simmons offering one up on a silver platter.

My credentials on paper were somewhat lacking in the traditional sense, but I was not going to let that hold me back. With a Tim Tebow-esque brand of naive determination, I intended to allow my intangibles speak on my behalf. What I lacked in things like education, experience, or any knowledge of sports from before the 2000's, I made up for with a variety of crude short-story fiction samples and enough photoshop skills to make funny Internet memes (before such a thing even existed, mind you).

In reality, it was a potent combination of youth and arrogance that lead me to believe that I surely stood out as the Kentucky of Simmons’ intern tournament; not the 16-seed Hampton University that I barely was.

The format was a round-by-round, elimination style essay competition, judged by the likes of Jimmy Kimmel, Chuck Klosterman (who I had not heard of) and an assortment of Simmons’ friends. At the time, it represented a creative opportunity to get the proverbial foot-in-the-door at ESPN through a guy who wrote funny sports columns. What few of us regular folks couldn’t have known, though, was Simmons would end up being the sports voice of a generation.