Moving On

One of my very favorite writers, Rick Reilly, recently published, according to his own calculations, his one millionth word. Even more impressive is the fact that he’s not counting his eleven books or two screenplays. No, this total has been accumulated from just his columns for Sports Illustrated and, later, ESPN The Magazine.

His most recent column, the one that pushed him over the million-word mark, is also his last for ESPN The Magazine. It seems that with success comes new opportunities (i.e. more and more television). He is stepping away from what has been his regular gig for many years (long enough to be named National Sportswriter of the Year twelve times!) to try new things. As he explains: “I'm going to try my hand at a weekly 90-second essay on "SportsCenter" beginning this spring. I'll still write longer pieces for The Mag, write my ESPN.com column, host "Homecoming," cover golf for ESPN and ABC and anchor "SportsCenter" once in a while.” For a man who once wrote a piece detailing how much of his week’s work was spent lying on a couch or putting golf balls around his office while trying to think through his next column, it seems he’ll now be quite busy.

I’ve used Reilly’s writing quite a bit in my classroom over the past few years. He has one of the most easily identifiable voices in print today. He flawlessly creates essays that can either touch your heart or raise your blood pressure while remaining playful with heaping doses of humor and sarcasm.
His final column is titled Someone Stop This Man. I’ll share just the first few paragraphs. It’s amazing but you can get a full glimpse of his playful, yet highly effective, style in just the first one hundred seventy-four words. Enjoy.



Someone Stop That Man (Excerpt)
By Rick Reilly, ESPN The Magazine, March 10, 2010

I am not generally a spiteful man. I pat toddlers' haircuts, donate to the glee club and mostly greet the world with open arms.

But when I think of coach Greg Wise of Houston's Yates High School, I become darker than Johnny Cash's closet.

The things I would like to do to Coach Wise would curl an executioner's toes. For starters, I'd like to see him dipped in seal butter and dropped into a polar bear's cage.

Coach Wise is the hammerhead who believes it's his right to toast other basketball teams by 100 points. Sometimes more. He thumped Lee High School this season by 135 points, 170-35. Wise's team was up at the half, 100-12. And full-court pressed to the very end!

Wise is to sportsmanship what tsunamis are to beach chairs. So far this season, he's beaten teams by 135, 115, 99 (twice), 98, 90 and 88 points. Trying to get to 100 points in a crushing of Westbury, his players intentionally fouled to stop the clock.

I'd like to clock him.