Rick Maese wrote a long profile of my former colleague. His story included much of what I experienced during my time working with Bayless at the Chicago Tribune.

Maese portrays Bayless as being driven, extremely regimented, and above all, totally sincere in his convictions. Even though people don’t believe it when I tell them, I can’t emphasize it enough: It is not an act with him. He believes everything he says. To the 100th power.

As someone who saw him eat nothing but rice cakes while covering the Masters together, I was amused by Maese’s lede:

The Chinese food deliveryman lights up when he sees Skip Bayless answer the door. “I thought it was you,” he says with a smile, handing over dinner.

Bayless is a regular customer. At his core, he’s a man of routine, and at the beginning of each week, he orders five days’ worth of chicken and broccoli (no sauce), his nightly dinners. Every weekend he stops by the same Manhattan deli and buys five sandwiches to bring back to his weekday home in Connecticut, his daily lunch. He’s a health nut who exercises twice a day. Every Sunday morning is church, every Friday is date night and every evening in between is the same: chicken and broccoli — and sports.

Bayless talked about his father, who he described as “evil”:

Bayless was named after his father, christened John Edward II, but was always called Skip. He was the oldest of three children and his parents owned a barbecue restaurant in Oklahoma City. Both of his parents, he says, were alcoholics, and his father was particularly rough with him. “My father was just an evil man,” he says.

Looking back, Bayless says a cold, distant upbringing might have been essential. “It was all meant to be. . . . I was on my own from the start,” he says. “You have to become self-sufficient and emotionally tough. I wouldn’t have been as good growing up under different circumstances.”

Not a fan:

“Skip was not well-liked. . . . He had an ego like nobody else in the world, and he was very reclusive,” says Dave Smith, the former sports editor of the Morning News. The editor and columnist overlapped for only nine months in 1981 before Bayless left for the rival Dallas Times Herald.

And the essence of Bayless from Stephen A.:

Stephen A. Smith, Bayless’s daily foil, briefly had questions himself. Long before they were paired together on “First Take” they did an ESPN “SportsCenter” segment on which Bayless suggested with a straight face that athletes should have an 11 p.m. curfew. Smith started laughing on air, and Bayless approached him once the red light went off. “Listen,” Bayless told him, “I. Am. Serious.”

“I think he’s insane — and he knows that — with half the things that come out of his mouth, particularly Tim Tebow,” Smith says. “But I know he means it. He means everything he says.”

And from Bayless:

So what is real? That’s the question that seems to dog Bayless. He swears, “from the bottom of my soul and my heart,” that he’s not playing a character and he’s not arguing for the sake of arguing. “That would be against my constitution, against my religion, against who I am,” he says.

At the end, there was this reader comment:

Saying “Bayless just may be the most polarizing figure in sports today” suggest someone likes him.

However, when I checked in, there were 251 reader comments. Like him or not, people definitely are paying attention.