Rick Reilly’s always been there. It’s just that we’ve noticed him more lately.
He grew up in Golden and Boulder, went to the University of Colorado, passed through Denver on his way into the sportswriting cosmos and, except for a two-year sojourn in Los Angeles, he’s always lived in Denver.
He is Sports Illustrated’s most high-profile columnist, an author, lecturer, stand-up comic, sometimes TV personality and, lately, an oft-sighted man-about-town on the city’s trendy Cherry Creek watering-hole carousel. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he’s as witty in person as he is in print.
He plays, as they say, younger than his age, which is 48. Sometimes he plays too young. Earlier this month he had to have surgery to repair an Achilles tendon he ripped playing basketball.
In his 22nd year at SI, Reilly and his column are anchored at the back of the magazine where he gets to roam the world for stories, not always confined to the world of sports. He writes about sports the way Aesop wrote about crows.
“I just write about people who happen to do sports. There’s nothing better,” he said.
“Sports is so woven through the fabric of life. For some reason, you can tell better stories and occasionally make a moral point that people will accept because it’s about your daughter’s seventh-grade basketball team or the 100-year-old guy that’s jogging in the park, whatever it is. That stuff is bigger than sports.”
He has never wavered from the sports beat. “When I was at CU, I had a professor who took me aside one time when I started getting bylines, a sophomore in college, and she goes, ‘You gotta get out of sports. You’re better than sports.’ Now I realize, no way, no way I’m better than sports because sports is so great for getting over how you feel about life.”
And, unlike many sportswriters, he’s ignored the siren call to ESPN or other regular TV work. “What’s the matter with writing? Isn’t writing good enough? Writing is so fun. I’ve been on TV a lot. I’ve never had someone come up and go, ‘What you said on TV made me think of my grandfather.’ No. But I get it all the time with the column.
“All this business of sportswriters becoming TV stars, and they just talk and have 9,000 opinions – ‘He should be fired. He shouldn’t. They should trade him. He should quit. He should be jailed.’ How could you have that many opinions?”
His share of jerks
He is a card-carrying member of the brotherhood of sportswriters, the one Gene Fowler wrote about in his book “Timber Line”: “I believe every newspaperman looks back on his sports-reporting days as the best of all. The characters are of raw material, the games filled with direct action; it is a world which reflects one’s own gay youth, without the intrusion of old men’s defeatist mottoes and old women’s dismal taboos. There are friendships which are life-lasting, and familiarity that does not breed contempt.”
Except when the athletes turn out to be prickly jerks. Reilly’s come across his share. “Baseball players are the worst because they’re so insular. They are together way too much. It’s just such an inside joke, everything is inside and unwritten rules – ‘Don’t show me up’ – and all that kind of thing.
“Hockey players, on the other hand, are the best. They stand up to greet you and put in their teeth. It’s all ‘Yessir, nosir.”‘
You won’t find any sympathy for Barry Bonds either. “I hope all his records stay in the book, with a little tiny syringe next to each one. Wouldn’t that be great? I think that’s the best we can hope for.”
Contest started career
Reilly’s sportswriting career began when he was a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
“I won a contest, the Colorado state high school sportswriting contest. I was working at a bank my freshman year because my dad made me work.
“I begged this woman (at work) every day – she was married to Gary Burns, the sports editor at the Boulder Daily Camera – ‘Please, can I meet your husband?’ He was the guy who judged the contest.
“After six months of begging, she said, ‘All right, I’ll tell him about you.’ I got the job the next day.”
From there, it was one step up after another. It’s a storybook tale, if your name is Cinderella.
“When I got to The Denver Post, that was the biggest break I ever got. I had applied and sent my application 10 times, I’ll bet. I’m sure it’s sitting in somebody’s drawer. This guy, Buddy Martin, got the job as sports editor and hired me. I thought I’d never go higher than The Denver Post.”
Two years later, he was off to the Los Angeles Times after a story he wrote for The Post appeared on Page 1 of the Times and its editors hired him. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I thought, ‘I can never do any better than this.’ I hated L.A., but I love that paper.”
When the Summer Olympics landed in Los Angeles in 1984, Sports Illustrated was there to cover it. “They go, ‘How would you like to work for us?’ I go, ‘I don’t believe it!’ It was great.”
The walls of his home office are splattered with photographs of him with prominent people, including Muhammad Ali, Michele Wie and, yes, even President Clinton, with whom he played golf and who wrote on their photo, “Some days the course wins!”
But even the Yellow Brick Road has potholes. He and his wife, Linda, divorced last year and share custody of their three children. It was, he said, an abrupt detour on the road of life. “It hurts breaking up your house. I married my high school sweetheart, a great lady. We’re still pals. We were married 21 years and dated seven before that. But she wised up, and I’m out.”
His circle of friends rallied around him, but the biggest comfort came from an unexpected source. “John Elway helped me through my divorce. He was really good. He was like a Hall of Fame therapist. We sat and talked, and he really helped me through it. There’s a lot of bad stages to it. You forget who he was because he was so good on this. He doesn’t want to talk football, and I don’t want to talk sports, so it’s great. He’s been a great friend about it.”
A familiar presence
Elway, who knew what he was talking about because he’d just gone through a divorce of his own, and Reilly are familiar faces in the adult playland that is Cherry Creek. He pops into Brix, a Cherry Creek hangout, and every other person in the room seems to know him personally. Hugs all around.
Reilly is also found frequently in the company of other writers, including J.R. Moehringer, Adam Schefter and Bill Husted, and their companions.
One of his favorite yarns about their nights on the town – a place Reilly says is home to “a lot of fun people. Is that the way to say that?” – features Husted and his dating preferences. “He’s always dating widows. You know J.R. Moehringer? We’re like, we came up with there’s four stages of grieving when your husband dies in Denver. There’s disbelief, anger, Husted, acceptance.”
Another of his best friends and sometimes running mate on the Cherry Creek circuit is one-time Post sportswriter Schefter, who now works for NFL Network in New York. He raves on Reilly’s skills. “His mind is so fertile. He uses phrases that nobody could think of. I used to read him in college and be in awe of him. I’m not kidding. It would be like a young violinist getting to meet Yo-Yo Ma. That’s the way I view him. It’s mind-boggling to me because he’s one of my best friends.”
A pantheon of idols
Reilly’s latest in a string of nine books, following the best-selling “Who’s Your Caddy?” and “Slo-Mo!”, “Missing Links” and “Life of Reilly,” is “Shanks for Nothing,” an offbeat novel about an industrial-strength country club “being to golf what Velveeta was to French culinary schools” and populated by oddballs with monikers like “Two Down,” “Cementhead” and “Froghair.”
That the characters and the setting call to mind Damon Runyon is no coincidence. “Oh, my God!” shouted Reilly, laughing heartily. “He’s my favorite! I’m so glad you said that.
“I have four biggies. Jim Murray, the great Jim Murray. I knew him well. It was like you were the star and he was the Bakersfield prep writer. That’s how it was with him.
“The best piece I ever wrote was on Jim Murray. He lost his vision, his wife died, his son died of an overdose, he couldn’t find the other son. And here was this guy with a tragic life making everybody in L.A. laugh. Finally, things turned around, and he married a great girl. What a cool guy.”
Others in his pantheon of writing idols: Dan Jenkins, Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin. “They all did something Oscar Wilde said, and it’s my No.1 rule for writing – Never write a sentence you’ve already read. If you can do that, you’re writing is good and it’s special and it jumps off the page. Why write, ‘He beat the crap out of him’ when you can say, ‘He turned him into six feet of lumps’ or ‘He was a complicated scab’?”
He does have one still-unconquered mountain to climb. “I’ll tell you what job I’d love. To do the ’60 Minutes’ thing, if Andy Rooney ever quit. I think he’s great. He was a great writer. The thing about shows like ’60 Minutes’ and ‘CBS Sunday Morning,’ they still value the written word.”
For now, he’s happy. “The divorce was hard, but other than that, life’s good.”
As he often does, he even makes light of the Sisyphean chore of producing a column for SI week in, week out. “It’s been so great. There’s no heavy lifting. Go to the swimsuit shoot every year. You only have to write 800 words. I can clear my throat in 800 words.”
Staff writer Dick Kreck can be reached at 303-820-1456 or at dkreck@denverpost.com
