Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
No, I’m not talking about USC’s LOL-inducing loss at Washington or the Red Sox coughing up two six-run leads to the Royals Monday night. In fact, I’m not even talking about an athlete. This giant is one of my own brethren — sports writer Rick Reilly.
It’s not his career that’s hurting, as Reilly is in the second year of a five-year, $10 million contract with ESPN (!). He still pumps out his “Life of Reilly” columns on a regular basis, in addition to doing other stories for ESPN The Magazine and hosting a TV show.
Reilly probably became most well-known for being Sports Illustrated’s back page columnist from 1997 to 2007, where he made a name for himself with his human interest pieces. He joined SI as a writer in 1985, where his great feature pieces earned him a weekly column.
But this isn’t your father’s Rick Reilly.
Now he churns out uninspired drivel about being a Cowboys cheerleader and spends time berating Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame acceptance speech. His appearance as a guest anchor on SportsCenter was painful — he reacted to a highlight of Florida A&M’s LeRoy Vann returning two punts for touchdowns by exclaiming, “Why, that’s Vann-tastic!”
Ugh. What is it about ESPN on-air time that ruins people that used to be respected? Remember when Lou Holtz was remembered as a decent college football coach? Now he’s more known for his unintelligible “pep talks” and the metric ton of spittle that flies out of his mouth every time he speaks. I don’t want to see Reilly reduced to making bad puns and sounding awkward during SC’s top 10 plays of the day.
The Rick I used to know is one of the reasons I wanted to become a sports writer in the first place. He made you care about the people he was writing about, and his features were almost poetic in their prose. But as the years ticked by, there was a decline in quality that culminated with his transfer to the evil empire of sports media. Now that he’s got more money than a sports journalist has any right to, his attention to detail (and quality and everything else that makes a good article) has fallen off a cliff.
Earlier this year, sports website Deadspin.com ran an article containing excerpts from Reilly’s best work, which like Metallica’s or Prince’s, came from the ’80s and early ’90s. Take for example this lead from a 1994 SI feature:
“On a refrigerated, colorless Saturday morning in the no-McDonald’s town of Walnut, Ill., Kenny Wilcoxen walked along the street carrying the letter he had waited for his whole life, the one that meant that after 20 years he was finally going to ref the state high school football finals. On the other side of the letter, written neatly in blue ink, was his suicide note.”
Now that’s sports writing. Contrast the previous passage with this bit from his recent column ranting about how everyone but him has a hole-in-one: “…when I read the next story about a legless 104-year-old blind nun who got her first hole-in-one Tuesday while a live wombat chewed on her clavicle…”
As much as I want that to be funny, he pulled the humor equivalent of hitting into a double play — you just wish he had never swung at all. It’s sad to see someone who once challenged Sammy Sosa to take a drug test has resorted to cheating at golf as column inspiration. To emulate one of his classic analogies, Rick Reilly is like the high school senior who stops trying once he’s been accepted to his first choice of college.
Now I don’t know if he has less time to spend on his writing at ESPN or if he just doesn’t care anymore (which I can’t blame him for, since he’s rolling in the dough). If he was just a — dare I say it — sellout, I could handle that. But now he’s a sellout whose columns suck out of control. A guy who defined sports columns is now largely irrelevant in the area that made him famous.
The saddest thing truly is the drop in Reilly’s quality of writing. Now more than ever, sports journalism needs people to produce pieces of writing that stand head and shoulders above the majority of the muck that is the sports blogosphere. Everyone has a story to tell, but it’s how you articulate it that counts — and Reilly was one of the best.
The best-case scenario is that the real Reilly is being held captive in a dark room deep somewhere in ESPN’s offices. Maybe the network signed him to a contract to accurately create a witless, awkward copy — a Robo-Reilly. Not only would that explain a lot, but it would go a long way toward me forgiving him for starting a February column with the line “I’ve been fired more than pottery.” That lead worked less than a less-making machine.
I’m a little sad and a little angry, but mainly disappointed in Reilly’s fall. He’s getting paid twice as much as he was at SI to produce garbage; it’s like doubling Emeril Lagasse’s salary just to have him cook burgers at McDonalds. I haven’t been this disappointed in someone I admired since I found out David Ortiz juiced. This isn’t an attack on Reilly’s success though, which he has earned. However, if Reilly is the flagship example of being on top of the sports journalism world, then I think I’ll toil in obscurity, if it will save my dignity.
Adam is a junior majoring in journalism. Got any favorite old-school Reilly pieces? Agree that he’s sold out? E-mail him at [email protected].