In Part II of The Badger Herald’s exclusive interview with New York Times best-selling author Shea Serrano, he discusses the beginning and end of his time at Grantland and that time his ninth grade girlfriend cheated on him at the zoo.

The Badger Herald: To briefly talk about Grantland, how were you approached and hired? Could you talk about the moment they first contacted you? What were you doing in your life at the time and was it Bill Simmons that contacted you directly?

Shea Serrano: I was a teacher at a middle school at the time and I was freelancing on my downtime for different magazines and such. But I wrote this thing for “LA Weekly” that Molly Lambert saw and she passed it along to her editor at Grantland. She really liked it and asked me if I had any interest in pitching something to them.

So, that’s how the relationship started. I wrote some things, they picked up one or two of them and then I tried to work my way into there the best way I could. I freelanced with them for maybe a year or so before we started talking about coming on as a staff writer. We talked about what they needed from me and what I wanted, and we got that all worked out and I signed a contract with them. I didn’t talk to Bill until after I signed a contract. I sent him an email saying, “I don’t know if you knew I got hired or not,” and then he hit me back like “Yo, it’s my fucking website, of course I know. I’m the one who hired you.” So that was a cool moment for me.

BH: Your Twitter bio still says that you are a staff writer at “Grantland.” Can you talk about the day ESPN essentially killed Grantland? All you did was post a YouTube link to “One Day” by UGK— what was going through your mind at that time?

SS: That song is my favorite UGK song. They are talking about how one day you’re here and the next day you’re gone, and that’s a really insightful thing. But by that point, everyone already knew that the website was going to be shut down eventually. I mean, [editors] Sean [Fennessey], Chris [Ryan], Mallory [Rubin] and Juliet [Litman] had already all left so there was definitely a general consensus that they were going to shut it down. I don’t know if they had always intended to shut it down. I read that they didn’t, but I didn’t know. But, we got an email one day that was just letting everyone know  — they told us as of now, we are shutting down blah blah blah. So it wasn’t super surprising. It sucked for sure, but it wasn’t something that came out of nowhere.

BH: Do your kids know what you do? Do they know who you are on the Internet?

SS: I told them I’m a writer and they don’t care. They don’t care one single bit. I took them to the bookstore when the book came out to show them, like “hey, look at this book I did,” and when we got on the best seller list, I told them “hey, we did this great thing.” And they are just like “fucking whatever dad.” They don’t care. I showed them in the back of “The Rap Year Book” and the back of the coloring book where I talked about them for a sentence or two, and after that, they thought that was cool because they understood they were famous.

BH: Do they see all the pictures you post of them on Twitter?

SS: No, they don’t have Twitter. They don’t even go on the Internet.

BH: One last thing before you go. With all of this stuff about NBA players and cheating spouses in the news, you brought up on Twitter that your 9th grade girlfriend cheated on you at the zoo. Could you please tell us more about this story?

SS: She was a ninth grade girlfriend. Her name was Angie, and she cheated on me with a boy named Mike who lived two houses down from me. I remember because she asked me if I wanted to go to the zoo with her and I couldn’t go because I was grounded. She ended up going with Mike, I guess. I don’t know the whole story. All I know is that she told me that she made out with Mike at the zoo, and I’ll never forget that — but I understood. Mike was in the 10th grade and he was tall, thin and handsome. I would’ve made out with Mike too if he asked me to. So, I don’t have any ill will towards her. But, for me, on the other hand, I looked her up on Facebook not that long ago, and her life is wrecked. I was so happy to see that.

BH: So you came out on top and that is all that matters in the end?

SS: Exactly.