Rick Reilly leaves Sports Illustrated - now confirmed by NYT

I've been telling you people for months: Double Down for Poster of the Year.

 

From the ESPN release:
Said Reilly in the release: "This is an itch I've wanted to scratch for a long time. For a guy who loves sports, ESPN is the ultimate. I feel like a mouse locked in a cheese store. I don't know where to start first. I'm thrilled with the opportunity to speak to a whole new audience in a whole new way."

Judging by that corny simile, he's speaking to audiences pretty much the same. How soon til he says someone's tougher than a $2 steak?

 

Yes, but to a new audience, that line will feel as cool as the other side of the pillow fresh as the produce aisle at Whole Foods.

 

That simile was like ... you know, whatever.

 

We kind of buried the lede on Mr. Reilly's new job. He'll also be doing the back-page column for the magazine.

 

In keeping with what Double Down wrote, Reilly's perceived decline is partly real, and partly due to our changes as readers. When you've read someone for 20 years, it's hard for him to continue to surprise or impress you. It can be done, but it's exceedingly rare. I think that's part of what's happened with Reilly -- if we were coming upon him for the first time, we'd probably think more highly of his current product. I'm not saying he doesn't coast sometimes, but some of the negative reaction to his stuff isn't because it's so bad, it's because we've seen him do similar stuff before.

That said, I'll still read SI every week even if Patrick proves a disappointment, which I think he will. I was never one of those who went straight to the back of the book for RR. I've always appreciated SI as much for its "midlevel" writers as for its stars. I like to see how Farber, Wertheim, Taylor, Murphy, Wahl, etc can take a routine feature and elevate it into something a little more special with a really good lede, some skillful turns of phrase and an ending that rings the right bell. As long as SI still gives me that, along with the occasional really special story by Smith, Price et al, I'm willing to wade through the short-attention span stuff to get there.

 

Thank the editors, too. Much of SI is, is due to them.

 

No questions as to whether the LSU press box incident was factual?

 

Anywhere.

He actually said that.

 

I'm never sure that we're the best judges of what SI (or theMag, et al) should be.

We read Reilly and think, 'What happened to that guy'.....younger reader reads Reilly and cracks up. We see a cover story By Gary Smith (or others), we might have a professional interest in reading it, even if the subject is a snooze. Average reader says, 'subject is a snooze, not reading it.' Guarantee you, most readers DON'T know Smith, because--wait for it--he's not on TV. But they know Kurkjian and Gammons and a (TV) host of others.

Our standards are just not the same as the general readership, which is not to insult the general readership--their interests are far purer than ours, in many ways.

 

Funny, TBL didn't ask him about the little visit to the LSU press box.

How can you report on this as such major news and then ignore the question?

Even if he said no comment, it's worth the rebuttal.