Upsetting Day: Hate Mail from Cheerleaders

I love showing people the worst Rick Reilly column of all time (this one about Lance Armstrong).

To make that column make sense, I’m showing you this horrible Rick Reilly book (featuring an introduction by Lance Armstrong).

Observe the upper right corner. Then observe the rest of the cover. Then ask me what the hell is going on here. Because yes, my Dear Hotdogger: that book, with that cover, became a NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. It’s fronted by a repellent “did I do dat” photoshoot. Yet it had Borders shoppers wrasslin’ each other for the hardcover. Why? Rick Reilly. Rick Reilly was once the most popular humor writer in America. The short version of his appeal was “Dave Barry plus sports.” The long version is one of the luckiest accidents in the history of American writing. Because this guy is much shittier at writing than Dave Barry. Rick Reilly’s about as good at writing as he is at conceiving a book cover. I hated possessing this book. As soon as I learn how, I’m home-pulping it. And whenever I shielded myself from Reilly’s bug-eyed goof-look, by flipping that thing over…

Yikes! Computer, don’t enhance.

Computer, no!

Nooooooo I told you not to enhance! That is for investigations in fakey crime shows, not real maybe-crimes sold at Waldenbooks. The year this critically-lauded book hit stores (2008), Rick Reilly was fifty years old. Don’t get me wrong: yes, they staged dozens of photos of teenagers kissing him. But I assume nothing untoward happened. Besides what I just said. Still, horrendous book cover. I never thought I would miss the tasteful dust jackets of artist Scott Adams.

Why did this fly off shelves? In the 1990s and early 2000s, Rick Reilly fell into the most prominent writing job imaginable. His rise was a happy accident of overlapping media eras, with a major assist from horniness. Because Sports Illustrated was America’s mightiest pillar of sports media (and pillar-stiffening horniness). Sports Illustrated reached every American sports fan. A bajillion people, reading the same weekly magazine. That stranglehold peaked in the early 1990s, then ended due to the Internet and ESPN. But in the brief window before S.I.’s collapse, a young apple-cheeked Rick Reilly joined the staff, and invented a gig there writing one-page humor columns. Unlike their regular journalists, Reilly believed opinions about Tiger Woods could live in the same paragraph as a joke. Even if the joke was not funny. Jokes so unfunny as to be invisible, and theoretical. Like if comedy was a quark. Still, when Reilly debuted this pedestrian idea, it felt new. American sports fans and comedy fans read him obsessively. And Rick Reilly became famous. He became the face of Sports Illustrated, sold more than a dozen books, branched into TV writing, co-starred in a beer commercial with Rebecca Romijn. If you don’t watch sports or weren’t around for the 1990s, you missed this. But you’re the exception. Everybody else fawned all over Rick. Fawned all over him like…someone…that fawns. I dunno. Can’t think of a strong metaphor for–

Computer, I am reformatting your drive. As soon as I finish typing. Speaking of typing, Rick Reilly did almost no typing to generate Hate Mail From Cheerleaders. It’s a compilation of columns Sports Illustrated already paid for. It’s lazy to its core. It makes me miss the try-hard efforts of author Scott Adams. Hate Mail From Cheerleaders is so lazy, I felt a strange thrill when I discovered its 100 compiled columns do not include hate mail from cheerleaders. The title is almost a lie. It comes from one moment in the book’s intro, where Reilly describes receiving The Title Mail. He doesn’t quote or rebut any of it. He simply says cheerleaders sent him HATE MAIL about a column. A column where Reilly said cheerleading is not a sport, and therefore sucks. Which makes that “hate mail” normal mail. It’s the exact mail you are requesting if you say what Reilly said. It’s like being surprised that consuming water leads to urine. And yur-in for a surprise (perfect segue) if you read a nonstop stack of Rick Reilly columns. Because he’s more than a shitty writer. He is a multitude of types of shitty writers. The main type is the least shocking: a Bad Comedy Writer. That makes sense. Rick Reilly was a sports journalist, working for sports journalism editors, who declared himself a comedy writer. That didn’t result in good comedy. There was no guarantee it would! Rick Reilly was like that concept of the first fish to walk on land. You don’t know where he’s gonna walk! He barely knows! So I’m gonna gloss over the regular not-jokes to highlight Rick’s weirdest, grimmest comedy premise. Whenever Rick bonks into a tricky INSERT JOKE HERE, he solves his lack of a joke by plugging in a death threat.

That’s a death threat! Presented as comedy! With no further effort or art. It makes me miss the elevated, refined, make-a-dog-say-it hatred of humorist Scott Adams.

How did everybody let this slide? I think Rick benefited from our American expectations for sports comedy. U.S. sports culture is conservative and cruel. So Rick got lauded by reviewers as “laugh-out-loud funny”, because Rick’s only as deranged as every word of football talk radio. Still: not funny! It’s a straight-up threat to murder someone! And I know Rick’s not going to follow through on that. But his “comedy book” is a laundry list of wishing somebody would murder somebody else. Occasionally he classes it up with a fancy reference, like a “lions eating Christians” concept:

Or he branches out into calling for imprisonments, plus rapes:

That’s the vibe of most of the 300+ pages of this book. A book designated “comedy”. And that vibe peaks at the book’s end. Probably because Reilly was tired from writing several dozen new words. He gets himself over the goal line by leaning even harder on his violence crutch. He packs a vivid multi-athlete murder wish…

…and a vague threat to traumatize six-year-olds…

…into just one page. That page? The “Acknowledgements” section.

“Thanks” indeed! And if you purchased Hate Mail From Cheerleaders, here is the thanks you got. You received a little bit of new writing, from two people. You got a special introduction, penned by (respected-in-2008) Lance Armstrong. And you got Reilly-penned "postscripts''. These are a few lines of new writing, after some of the columns, to update you on how popular each column got. Also, as you saw above, many postscripts are death threats/wishes. It’s part of Rick’s whole deal. He loved putting athletes on Naughty and Nice lists, in a criminal justice sense. Reilly used his megaphone to declare himself judge, jury, and ricksecutioner. Why? Why would that be his role in society? Isn’t he merely a (Bad) Comedy Writer?

Wrong. Rick Reilly is also a Corny Charity Writer. As his might and power grew, Reilly decided writing sports-plus-jokes was not a significant enough achievement. He had to do Something Important. So he used his column to suddenly switch tones, whenever he wanted, and write tearjerker human interest stuff. One week he’d share the heartbreaking tale of a school basketball team in Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Louisiana. Another week he’d cover the global problem of malaria, using his platform to raise millions of dollars for mosquito nets. All of that is good, on its own. It’s great! But he wrote it between his other columns. Such as the column calling for the ritual execution of a Minnesota Timberwolves small forward. Or a column where he hangs out with Jack Nicholson, and chuckles about Nicholson trying to trick two ladies into a threesome. Or a column where he flies to a tropical photo shoot for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (for no reason), and brings along his 14-year-old son (for intergenerational leering reasons). I’m not making any of that up. Each scattershot premise is a real column in this book. Because Rick Reilly said and did whatever he wanted, just because. It boggles the mind. Discovering Rick Reilly’s purview as a sports writer is like discovering those medieval Catholic Popes who ruled an Italian kingdom and fathered children and poisoned eunuchs. It’s a lurid tale of the most moral and least moral man possible.

Tragically, Rick Reilly is also a Racist Writer. That’s bad on its own. But it’s a five-alarm fire when combined with the self esteem of a Corny Charity Writer and the sweaty joke-fishing of a Bad Comedy Writer. Here’s the result of that cocktail: Reilly would write Racist Shit, and then reject criticism of that (because he is a high-status Charity Man, therefore 100% Good). And then he’d respond to those foolish critics through his art (Comedy). It’s the smug writer combo move from hell. The worst example is a Reilly column where the premise was “it’s okay to stereotype Black people as fast runners, whose main value as people is their speed, and anybody who disagrees is too PC.” Then Hero Rick handwaved criticism of that racism. And then Comedy Rick took the wheel. Comedy Rick mined this incident for a wacky scenario. He invented a column of imaginary hate mail, “written” to Rick by famous people of color. The result is a long list of fake extreme anger, placed into the mouths of non-white celebrities without their permission, because…comedy!

Rick’s racism finds its fullest expression in Steroids columns. Partly because Rick is a creature of the 1990s. The ‘90s demonized baseball steroid use as a threat to every American child. So Rick’s columns call for the eternal public shaming of Black American baseball player Barry Bonds. Rick also writes a column of (fourth personality incoming) Hard-Hitting Investigator Stuff, where Rick surprise-interrogated Dominican baseball player Sammy Sosa. Reilly went to Sosa’s workplace (Wrigley Field) and got up in Sosa’s face, asking Sosa why he wouldn’t take a steroid test if he was innocent of steroids. There’s no audio or video, so we’re asked to take Reilly’s word for how this interaction went. He says Sosa was a huge jerk, therefore guilty. Because why would Sosa react poorly here? Sosa is being grilled…by a stranger…while trying to change clothes at his personal locker. Only a devious steroid-doer would get snippy about that. If there’s one setting where you should be gracious about being called a fraud/criminal, it’s after a long work day, while half-nude, in a Chicago basement.

Anyway, that’s Rick’s take on steroid use by Black and Dominican ballplayers. Later on, Rick’s book records his wisdom about White American baseball player Mark McGwire. Do you know who Mark McGwire is? Short version: basically Sammy Sosa. McGwire played the same sport as Sosa in the same division. He was Sosa’s rival in the biggest baseball event of our lifetime. They even got co-photographed in Greek god costumes by Reilly's own magazine. With the specific exception of their ethnicities, nobody in human history is as similar to Sammy Sosa as Mark McGwire. So you would think Rick’s Bold And Fearless Journalism would handle McGwire in a similar way. Right? Right?

Brave stuff. Brave, coded stuff. Reilly goes on to say we must criticize a great guy like McGwire, because that’s only fair. But Reilly was one of the last people to get around to doing that. Mark McGwire was so full of steroids, even the dysfunctional United States Congress caught him. But our Hero Detective Rick Reilly missed that one. I wonder white. I mean, white. I wonder white. White. White! Computer, please resolve this issue with my keyboard.

Rick’s position on Mark McGwite is not an outlier. It is a pattern. A pattern captured by Hate Mail From Cheerleaders, by Rick Reilly, introduction by Lance Armstrong. In 2008, Lance Armstrong was a 7-time winner of the Tour De France cycling competition. He was so dominant as a cyclist, he ran out of interesting opponents. So he retired, to date Sheryl Crow, and go on joyrides with the president. He was also multiply, credibly accused of cheating at his sport. His key teammate was on the verge of confessing to co-cheating. But with all that going on, Steroid Defeater Rick Reilly hand-picked Lance Armstrong to write his book intro. In that intro, Lance describes Rick as a great friend, brilliant journalist, and nearly Armstrong-level charity-doer. Which makes sense. Only a brilliant, unbiased journalist could post this tweet within months of Lance Armstrong confessing to cheating:

Which leads me to the crowning Rick Reilly column. Turns out Rick did care! Five years after his book hit shelves with an Armstrong intro, Rick Reilly had a new job at the new sports mega-pillar ESPN. Rick was perched there when Lance Armstrong confessed. That confession was an obvious column prompt for split personality investigator/saint/wit/racist Rick Reilly. So he tackled that big story, by zooming in, and focusing on the true victim of Lance Armstrong’s cheating. The victim: Rick Reilly.

The rest of the column is astonishing. It’s a professional journalist (“Riles”) confirming his comprehensive failure as a journalist. And he thinks he’s turning that failure into gold! Rick Reilly thinks he’s sharing a compelling and moving window into his heart. A tender look at processing a betrayal. But he does not “process” anything. He just condemns that no-good sweet talker Lance Armstrong. And he frames Armstrong’s major athletic fraud like it’s Rick Reilly’s sexy boyfriend swindling him with undetectable, extramarital fibs.

What was Riles supposed to do? Look into it?

Hot!

Hotter!

Probably hot if you know bicycle stuff! Whatever gasses your Ullrich!

…that is a big list of evidence? Sounds like Rick got handed the scoop of the decade, a couple times over, and sat on it.

Hot again!

Not as hot, to me.

An impossible lie to catch. Nobody can Be A Real Reporter towards a subject who has hung out with them. Plus, white! Also, “polishing a legend” implies hand stuff. Hand stuff Riles regrets. Hand stuff Riles wishes he could take back. So it doesn’t matter what book cover photos Rick shot, or what sexist cheerleader tropes Rick exploited for sales. In the end, the only “lovelorn teenage cheerleader archetype” in Rick Reilly’s world is the Riles Man himself.

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