Life of Reilly: The rise, fall and rise again

Agreed that it's the reporting that's the backbone of a good long story. I never understood the idea that if you can write 500 words, you can write 10,000. It's not true, but it's weird to me that people think that it's true. It's like saying someone who's a good 100-metre runner will make a great marathoner. They're two totally different ways of running.

My first editor, God bless him, would have me write these things at our paper we called attics. Little boxes that ran across the top of the page. They were 350 words or so. He would send me the box, the page, so I would have to write literally into the space. I had that much space, and there was no arguing about it. That was his way of making sure the idiot who would turn in 2,000 words on bull riding could also do the bread-and-butter stuff that newspapers demand. Writing 350 words was way, way more daunting to me and still is.

The fact that Reilly was good at features and good at back pages—800 words, maybe?—is a testament to his gifts at this prime. The other crazy hard part of that back page was that he could rarely write off events. A daily columnist can get away with two or three game columns each week. Reilly could never do that. The ideas that stand up for a week? That would have been the hardest part. He would have written dozens if not hundreds of columns over his run that never saw the light of day because they fell apart.

 

They're kowtowing to their audience?

 

There was a Twitter tempest earlier this week when Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, had the audacity to suggest not everything can just write 10,000 words. You would have thought he'd shit on a plate and served it. It's a fucking fact. People today think they can do anything. Everybody's an expert on everything. I hate it.

 

That's part of why Simmons quit that ESPN the Mag column gig, no? Because it was too hard to be timely or relevant -- with his style and perspective -- when you're writing for a biweekly.

 

With a biweekly, it was fucking impossible. You could never, ever write off an event. You could write an advance, maybe, but two weeks out, with injuries and the unpredictability of sports in general, you had every chance of looking like a moron. You basically had to write opinions or short features. Bill needs the immediacy of the moment, the charge of the now. I don't think he'd be upset to admit that.

 

So two white people on the desk is simply kowtowing to the audience, but two black people on the desk is an act of a "social justice warrior"?

You think the audience is that freaked out by black people?

 

Maybe, just maybe, it was making the decision to put who they thought were the two best people for the job into the positions.

 

Freaked out? No. But were their numbers good? Was the audience connecting with them? Did the audience want them? The demand for them wasn't there. And that's why they ain't there no more.

 

No, it was not.

 

Your assessment. Easy to make in hindsight with no knowledge of what info they had inside ESPN at the time. Hindsight makes one feel awful mighty.

 

I was gonna post the same thing.

This quote, from Rushin's Wiki profile, shows off what he does so well ...

In May, 2007, he was the Commencement Day speaker at Marquette, where he was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters for "his unique gift of documenting the human condition through his writing." "Sometimes it pays to think inside a box. And so my daughter and I lay in that box and gazed out at the dozens upon dozens of tulips my wife planted in rows last fall. They bloomed this month, tilting ever so slightly toward the sun. And I thought how remarkable it is that in nature, life wants to grow towards the light."

 

Do you have a particular insight to what was going on then? Any specifics? Because I know Jemele Hill and what her resume leading up to that was. I don't dislike her. I don't dislike Michael Smith, either. But they were ill-suited to SC6 because of their personalities and takes. It was obvious from the jump and the reality bares that out. Rob King was trying to put square pegs in round holes. It was intentional and it was an agenda. To think otherwise is naive IMHO.