Rick Reilly To Start ESPN Tenure With Column On Deceased Father

By Eric Fisher, Staff Writer, SportsBusiness Journal

Reilly Set To Begin Tenure At ESPN

Rick Reilly, signed last October from SI to a five-year deal with ESPN worth a reported $17M, this week publishes his first work with the sports media monolith with an ESPN the Magazine back-page column on his recently deceased father. The column will start a regular presence in the magazine and at ESPNMag.com, as well as an online-only column from Reilly during the off-weeks of biweekly publication. “He’d always come home drunk from golf, except for the times he’d come dripping drunk,” Reilly writes about his father, Jack. “Then he’d be looking to bust something, maybe a lamp, maybe somebody’s nose; my mom’s once. To this day, the sound of spikes on cement sends a shot of ice through me. That was him coming up the sidewalk. And then one day, out of the blue, maybe 25 years ago, my dad went to one AA meeting and quit. Never had a drop after that. It was five more years before I finally believed it. Then I invited him to the Masters. He was 70, I was 30. And it was on that two-and-a-half hour ride from Atlanta to Augusta that we finally met.”

OTHER ASSIGNMENTS: Reilly, who has been traveling the world researching a book on obscure and dumb sports while he waited out the terms of his non-compete clause from SI, will also include regular essays and commentary on ESPN’s battery of TV channels. One particular project entitled "ESPN Homecoming" will involve taking star athletes back to their hometowns. ESPN the Magazine Editor-In-Chief Gary Belsky said, “Rick is a storyteller by nature, so we’ll look to use him in a wide variety of ways. Finding places to use our talent is not an issue with us. But we’ll want Rick to write all sorts of columns. This first one is intensely personal. But there will be lighter, more humorous ones, columns that react to the news of the day, and Rick himself is a fantastic reporter. So we’ll see a whole gamut of things from him.”