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Rick Reilly: Been a busy week, and haven’t been able to weigh in on Rick Reilly’s decision to give up his column at ESPN.com. However, several other people did. Here are some excerpts.
Matt Yoder, Awful Announcing:
The announcement comes at a very interesting time with ESPN welcoming Nate Silver and the 538 brand to its corporate umbrella beginning next Monday. It’s a true changing of the guard in Bristol, and perhaps it’s representative of the entire sportswriting industry. Out goes a multi-time national sportswriter of the year who has made his living on columns based on first-person perspective and storytelling. In comes one of the most renowned stat-junkies of modern times to lead an entire armada of writers that will be based in numbers.
Some great sportswriters never retire. Reilly’s hero (and Twitter avatar) Jim Murray succumbed to cardiac arrest at age 78; his last column, filed from Del Mar racetrack, ran in the Los Angeles Times the day he died. The 84-year-old Dan Jenkins, who Reilly followed on the golf beat at SI, told Grantland’s Bryan Curtis that he’s going to keep writing “Till they carry me out. What would I do? I don’t paint.”
But there’s no shame in moving on—in painting, or in doing four-minute features for SportsCenter. (OK, there was a fair amount of shame in this feature, but let’s choose to ignore that one.) If Reilly’s sentences are encased in amber, this at least is a 21st-century maneuver. Reilly may idolize Murray, but his career arc looks like that of Tony Kornheiser, a once-great writer who put down his pen to focus on radio and television. Kornheiser, a man who has never lacked for self-loathing, once told Real Clear Sports that he stopped writing because “I’m no good anymore.” Reilly gives himself a bit more slack. “I’m ready to try something new,” he explained on Wednesday. It was his best line in years.
In recent years, Reilly has earned criticism for various offenses such as misquoting his father-in-law, recycling old ideas and relying on the same jokes While the critiques were fair, the assumptions drawn from them were not. First, they ignored that Reilly was the closest thing sportswriting ever had to a rock star. If you’re of a certain age, you grew up reading Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated and thought, “he must have the greatest job in the world.”
Jay Mariotti, Mariottishow.com:
What they’ll never grasp is that Reilly, to the end, was excelling by hitting every note on the sportswriting scale. His piece last week on Jim Kelly and his horrific obstacles in life, including cancer, stirred tears. His recent commentary on why Tony La Russa, Joe Torre and Bobby Cox were voted immediately into baseball’s Hall of Fame — though all managed teams with stars immersed in performance-enhancing drugs — provoked widespread debate. Reilly made you think, made you cry, made you LOL, made you get to know a subject, made you love sports and hate sports and love him and hate him.
Above all, he made you read him, every column.
Dan Jenkins: Bryan Curtis of Grantland does a profile of the legend.
Jenkins is an 84-year-old golf writer of antiromantic disposition. He has a helmet of white hair and a squint that suggests cheerful orneriness. He had begun the afternoon in the Colonial dining room, where the club had put his World Golf Hall of Fame blazer in a glass case.
“Which I wasn’t going to wear anyway,” Jenkins said.
Jenkins walked from the lunchroom to the terrace. He noted Colonial’s exercise room. “Which I’m against,” he said. Jenkins noted the new tennis center. “Tennis doesn’t deserve this,” he said.
Baseball writers: Richard Deitsch of SI.com talks to baseball writers about their jobs and covering the game.
1. How would you define your job?
Jaffe: I blend a bit of reporting, a bit of opinion, a bit of humor and a whole lot of analysis. SI’s Strike Zone is a blog in that things get published at all hours of the day and have a feel of immediacy, but we’re selective about what we cover, and we strive for substance when we weigh in. My focus is generally on the biggest topic of the day — a big move, a new controversy, a look at the top pitchers available at the trade deadline, or what Mike Trout’s next contract could entail, whatever.
Neal: I don’t know if “Twins beat writer” covers it anymore. I cover a beat. I break news. I write features and game stories. But you really have two jobs now: You write for your paper and you write for your website. We also use a lot of video. I use a smartphone to record video interviews. I also head to the office to shoot video updates for the website. We blog before and after games — sometimes during games, if there’s breaking news. And, my goodness, who can forget Twitter, how it’s tied into all of the above on a daily basis. I’m open to suggestions on what the job title should be!
Peter Vecsey: Jeff Pearlman on his site does a Q/A with the long-time NBA writer.
J.P.: You started covering the Nets in 1967, and wrote your final column on July 1, 2012. That’s a ton of basketball. A ton. How do you explain your love for the sport? How didn’t it ever get old? Or stale? Or did it?
P.V.: In actuality, I started covering the Nets on a regular basis beginning in ’69-70. Before that, I wrote about every sport for two or three years. I loved baseball (and was a better player than at basketball) more than anything. But everyone wanted that beat and I had little experience and less education (115 credits shy of a college degree) to think I was ever going to get such a plum assignment. Nobody cared about the ABA or the Nets. That’s how the opportunity presented itself. For quite a while, I covered on my own time, for half the pay as a regular reporter. By the ’80s, I had lost all interest in baseball. I had always loved basketball, but soon after inhaling the beat, I became addicted. I wrote about the game, became much better playing it and even coached pros summers in the Rucker Tournament. It never gets old because rarely does a game go by without seeing something I never saw before.
Verne Lundquist: The CBS announcer was a guest on a Fang’s Bites podcast.
One of Rick’s finest moments he doesn’t get credit for was calling out Sammy Sosa to take a drug test. He was criticized for pulling a stunt in an era when baseball writers were looking the other way. Rick, of course, was right about Sammy — an otherwise average player who filled Cubs fans with drugs.