FanHouse Rick Reilly

Each Wednesday during the golf season, FanHouse will be bringing you the top five names in golf and why they are important this week. Did Barack Obama play 18 holes with Tiger Woods? Did a certain player do something off the course that made him or her a hot topic? Or was just playing golf enough to get the pot stirring? Join us for a new weekly ranking feature we call Making the Cut.

5. Danny Lee -- He is only 18, but Lee has made some waves in his amateur career and just this week decided to turn pro, after using his Masters invitation from his U.S. Amateur win. If you don't think he's ready for the PGA Tour, you're very wrong. Earlier this year, Lee won the Johnnie Walker Classic, a European Tour event that has such esteemed former champions as Adam Scott, Greg Norman, Ernie Els and Mr. Woods. Lee was the youngest winner ever on the European Tour, and will be in the field at the Zurich Classic of New Orleans for his first tournament as a pro.

Each Friday throughout the season, I'll provide you with my predictions on whose stock is on the rise and whose is failing miserably like the American job market pretty much everything these days. It's a neat little segment entitled Buys and Sells. There are a few teams/players/issues to buy and a few to sell.

One of the most popular trends in the blogosphere over the last few months has been the creation of fake Twitter accounts. From Brian Burke to Rick Reilly and tons of people in between, they have been popping up all over the place.

Twitter is a unique site in that, as long as they are parodies, fake accounts are not prohibited by their terms of service. Of course, they still reserve the right to censor accounts as they please -- hooray internet communism! -- but for the most part, they let these fake accounts be. Today, we'll take a look at some of the best that in fake Twitters that the NHL has to offer.

If you are a die-hard sports fan like me, you probably get your sports news the same way. You read things online, you check your Google reader every few minutes to see updated news, and you keep ESPNews on in the background just in case a press conference or something is breaking.

What you might not do is tune in to ESPN that much anymore, just because most of the shows are aimed at people that might not have enough time in their day to read up on everything going on, so hitting the big stories is good enough. (Or you might just avoid most of the shows because, at times, they can be obnoxious.)

Good news if you're more on the side of sports features that don't really break the concrete, if you will. ESPN has decided to give Rick Reilly, their $17 million dollar journalist hire, his own television show called "Homecoming." Trust me, it gets better.

ESPN2's new series -- Homecoming -- challenges that old adage "you can't go home again." Hosted by 10-time Sportswriter of the Year Rick Reilly, Homecoming will debut Friday, Jan. 9, at 8 p.m. ET with an episode on Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers in his hometown of Raleigh, N.C. The following week, Pro Football Hall of Famer John Elway returns to Van Nuys, Calif. The shows are the first two of a six-part series featuring one-on-one, hour-long interviews of today's top names in sports from the towns and cities where they grew up.

Recently, a study indicated that in the 2008 presidential election, Senator John McCain has received substantially more negative reporting than Senator Barack Obama. The study's authors suggest that this may be less a reflection of bias, but more a reflection of Obama running a more effective campaign. (Or perhaps not being photographed making goofy faces after a debate.)

Rick Reilly wrote a gushing essay relating his experience getting Obama to help him with his fantasy football team. He wanted to "see what sort of president" they'd make. I'm not sure I'd want fantasy football obsessives running the free world, or else you'd end up with these people with their fingers on the button. <shudder>

To be fair and balanced, Reilly contacted both campaigns to see if they would do it, but only Obama took him up on it. Given McCain's high profile football mixup, McCain's campaign probably doesn't want him doing picks.

So Reilly meets Obama, and it results in a massive Reilly mancrush. Really, it is slightly embarrassing. Probably even to Obama. But if you are the sort of voter who wants to know whether a candidate is the sort of person you'd like to share a beer with, I guess this is that sort of essay.

Recently, a study indicated that in the 2008 presidential election, Senator John McCain has received substantially more negative reporting than Senator Barack Obama. The study's authors suggest that this may be less a reflection of bias, but more a reflection of Obama running a more effective campaign. (or perhaps not being photographed making goofy faces after a debate.)

Rick Reilly wrote a gushing essay relating his experience getting Obama to help him with his fantasy football team. He wanted to "see what sort of president" they'd make. I'm not sure I'd want fantasy football obsessives running the free world, or else you'd end up with these people with their fingers on the button. <shudder>

To be fair and balanced, Reilly contacted both campaigns to see if they would do it, but only Obama took him up on it. Given McCain's high profile football mixup, McCain's campaign probably doesn't want him doing picks.

So Reilly meets Obama, and it results in a massive Reilly mancrush. Really, it is slightly embarrassing. Probably even to Obama. But if you are the sort of voter who wants to know whether a candidate is the sort of person you'd like to share a beer with, I guess this is that sort of essay.

Millionaire ESPN scribe Rick Reilly -- and likely plenty of others -- think so. Signal To Noise caught this exchange on PTI yesterday:

The Four-Letter's $3 million a year poaching, Rick Reilly, subbed for Tony Kornheiser on PTI yesterday, via satellite from Denver with Michael Wilbon in-studio in D.C., and parroted what I'm fairly sure may be a common impulse among a certain segment of sportswriters regarding the current state of the baseball playoffs: he stated his preference for a Red Sox-Dodgers World Series, proclaiming the Tampa Bay Rays "bad for baseball."

S2N draws that out into distinctions -- whether it's bad for baseball, or bad for the business of baseball. Those are the correct distinctions to make. But it doesn't make Rick Reilly right.

Over the long term, I find it hard to believe a team like the Rays, so consistently horrible at baseball, going worst-to-first in the course of a single year is bad for baseball. If anything, it co-opts one of the things that has made the NFL so popular -- the supposed parity that allows any team, no matter how destitute, to go all Rising Phoenix in one year. This is a good thing for baseball. It creates hope. Sports fans like to have hope.

It's official: local sports columnists losing their jobs after plagiarizing Rick Reilly is a full-fledged trend. Or at least, it's happened twice.

In June we told you about a sports talk radio host who was fired from his second job as a columnist for the Vancouver Province for lifting material for Reilly. And now comes John Sleeper of the Everett County Herald, who has resigned after a similar offense. I do give Sleeper credit for his contrition:

That's Sin No. 1 in the profession I love. I don't expect anyone to understand. I don't understand, either.

Now, I'm on the outside, looking in. And that is the way it should be.

I resigned last week because I damaged this newspaper's credibility. I could have drawn it out during a six-week suspension, but I knew that even if by some miracle I was allowed back, suspicion's dark cloud would never leave. Better to end it now and pursue the next phase of my life.

Reilly, who recently left Sports Illustrated for ESPN, is America's highest-paid sports writer, so I guess it's not too surprising that other sports writers want to be just like him. But it is surprising that they think they can get away with it.

If you're watching, then you already know: Rick Reilly is part of ESPN's Home Run Derby coverage, and he's had a weird night. He seems determined to moralize at every instance, to imbue the Home Run Derby with manufactured meaning where there is none. (We've got all the meaning we need with Josh Hamilton's 28 monstrous home runs, thank you very much.) But by far the weirdest part of Reilly's evening has been the below argument on behalf of some sort of Derby affirmative action. For Reilly's taste, there are just way too many white dudes hitting dingers tonight:

Rick Reilly: "I question the selection ... no disrespect, but we got eight white guys here. This is like a Kiwanis club meeting. Five of the last eight last champions have been Hispanic and we don't have a Hispanic player out here. Five of the top 25 home run hitters active, and none of them are here -- no Griffey, no Howard, no Tejada, no Abreu, no Pujols, no Manny. So I was very surprised ..."

Karl Ravech: "Interesting concept."

I suppose he finally impaled himself with his laptop (or perhaps you prefer, "swallowed his own tongue"?) in joy over too much winning in Beantown, but it appears as if everyone's favorite Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, is taking the summer off. From his refurbished home page (and not matrix-like chronological blog).

Quick announcement from Bill: ESPN was gracious enough to give me 10 weeks off to finish my second book. My column will return right before Week 1 of the NFL season, just in time for another year of crappy football picks! If you're a fan of the "B.S. Report," we're still doing weekly podcasts, but that's it. Enjoy the summer.

I have yet to compile all my columns for write a book, much less prepare to write two of them, so I certainly don't want to chastise him for not doing what he, I assume, gets paid to do. And perhaps this little sabbatical was part of the deal that got him back in bed with the WWL to begin with.

Or maybe it was his little foray into the dangerous, albeit exciting, world of the blogosphere that got him all reminiscent about returning to his roots. But that seems a little too optimistic.

Whatever it was, we won't be reading Simmons until the NFL season starts up, which is a shame, because going that long without a mention of J-Bug is like Joey trying to make it through a foursome-filled night without knocking back a wine cooler or forty. (Plus, we're fine. We've got Reilly!)

Via Daulerio at Deadspin

There's nothing that gets me worked up more than lazy sports writing. These days, the internet makes pesky things like "fact-checking" so easy that they can be done simultaneously with writing. Unfortunately, that's not always how things work. In his latest piece for ESPN the Magazine, Rick Reilly (with his, as he put it, "ridonkulous" ESPN salary), gives us this paragraph in regards to this umpire beaning incident.

It happened on May 31 in the Georgia high school Class AAA championship game. Stephens County was losing to Cartersville 9-1 early, partly because nine straight SCHS batters had struck out. The last ring-up so hacked off superstar shortstop Ethan Martin-who had just been drafted 15th overall by the Dodgers-that he threw his helmet in protest. But that figured. Martin and his brother, Cody, who was pitching, reportedly had been complaining about balls and strikes the entire game.

The emphasis is mine, because the draft was on June 5th, meaning it's quite literally impossible for Martin to have "just been drafted" because the game was six days before the draft. Now, I get that this seems like a small thing to be whining over. It's an easily glossed over nit that an editor should've caught and we should move on with our lives ... right?