Posts tagged RickReilly at FanHouse

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?

Sports columnist Rick Reilly is in the news this week because he's finally making his long-awaited debut at ESPN after years of writing for Sports Illustrated.

But he's also in the news because a columnist at the Vancouver Province lost his job for plagiarizing a column Reilly wrote in 2000 about basketball coach Al McGuire. The Province explains:

The most striking was a passage in Reilly's piece: "They say he was born 72 years ago last Thursday, but don't believe it. McGuire dropped straight out of Guys and Dolls with a martini in one hand and a basketball in the other."

Pratt wrote in Tuesday's column in The Province: "Cole was born 75 years ago, but it's more likely he dropped straight out of Guys and Dolls with a martini in one hand and a puck in the other."

Pratt's explanation is interesting.

After a long career at Sports Illustrated, Rick Reilly is about to start working for ESPN. But Reilly hasn't always thought highly of the Worldwide Leader, as he expressed in this 2004 interview:

"ESPN, I think, in a lot of ways is conducting journalism-by-rolodex," Reilly said. "It's like, 'Hey, we know these guys. We party with these guys.' It's been my complaint about a lot of televised journalism, which rules the roost now, is that they're in bed with all these leagues. So ESPN can't really give you the hard-nosed story about Major League Baseball. And they can't really break a big NFL negative story because they're in bed. They want the contract for the next year. Were they to lose the NFL contract, they'd be in real trouble. Same with the NBA."

Reilly made a good point, and one that's been expressed by a lot of media analysts. So it will be interesting to see what his own approach will be once his paychecks start coming from ESPN. Reilly was never an investigative journalist who uncovered scandals inside sports leagues, but he also wasn't afraid to rip the sports leagues when he felt it necessary. Will he still do that when he's employed by a company that has multibillion-dollar contracts with those leagues?

Rick Reilly, who last year jumped ship from Sports Illustrated to ESPN, is one of America's most popular sports writers, and almost certainly its highest paid. But he's also done a little dabbling as a screenwriter: Along with fellow former SI scribe Duncan Brantley, Reilly co-wrote Leatherheads, the new George Clooney movie.

Now the reviews of Leatherheads are in, and the advice Reilly is getting is, "Don't quit your day job":

On Ebert & Roeper, film critics Richard Roeper and Michael Phillips agreed that the acting in Leatherheads was good, the directing was good, the score was good, but there was one problem.

"All the blame for me goes on the script," Phillips said. "The two Sports Illustarted guys who wrote this, they may know their football, but they do not know their funny."

Roeper agreed: "The weakness in this movie is the script. ... The script is weak, it does kind of meander, it needed a couple of re-writes."

At least Reilly has that $2 million ESPN salary to fall back on.

The big news in the sports media world this week is that Dan Patrick, the longtime face of ESPN's SportsCenter, is joining up with Sports Illustrated, while Rick Reilly, SI's most prominent writer, is jumping ship to the Worldwide Leader.

It's not quite the Patriots trading Tom Brady to the Colts for Peyton Manning, but it's a big move for both sides. And just as there would be endless debates, after a Brady-Manning swap, about which team got the better deal, that's a good question to ask here.

From a financial standpoint, it appears that everyone is coming out ahead. Reilly's salary has been reported at $2 million, a significant bump from the already hefty salary he was making at SI. Patrick's financial package is a little harder to figure out, since he's getting a percentage of the revenue from his syndicated radio show, but suffice to say that he's doing quite nicely.

But which of their employers comes out ahead?