Rick Reilly Gives Himself His Own Funeral In His Last Article
ESPN – Now that I’m dead, I’d like to discuss my funeral. First off, I want chili cheeseburgers. And Guinness. And the Phoenix Suns Gorilla. Love that ape. I’d like my final rankings to be on big posters hanging on the walls. So you can read them from the seats. Like so: NICEST PEOPLE: 1. Steph Curry, 2. Jim Nantz, 3. That bald guy with the mushroom-cloud ear hair who always comes up to me and tells me how much he loved my last column even though Mitch Albom usually wrote it. BIGGEST JERKS: 1. Barry Bonds, 2. Barry Bonds, 3. Robert “Arliss” Wuhl, 4. Barry Bonds, 5. Jay Cutler. MOST FUN: 1. Charles Barkley, 2. George Clooney, 3. David Feherty. LARGEST REGRETS: 1. Believed Lance Armstrong, 2. Didn’t believe Jose Canseco, 3. Sold all my Apple at 125. BEST PRESIDENTS: 1. Clinton (18 holes, sugary rules), 2. Obama (well-prepared fantasy football partner), 3. Ford (kindly, though he stepped on my foot), 4. Bush 41 (very fast, very bad golfer), 5. Carter (wouldn’t let go of my wife even though the photo was already snapped.) Up on the altar, there will be a bottle of my favorite scotch, The Macallan, for every year I’ve been alive. Each person will come up to the stage and take a shot from the year they met me, then smash the glass. If you don’t drink, we probably never met. I’ve taken the liberty of writing my own obit. I don’t want to leave it up to some obit writer who’s just had a fight with his wife and has a bottle of Smirnoff in the middle drawer. If you’ll please just send it to the papers and the websites and whatnot:
RICK REILLY, 56, sportswriter, died this week. He probably had it coming.
Reilly published or posted over 2 million words in his 37-year career. You don’t even want to know how many he wrote and killed.
Reilly tried to write the truth. He might not have always done it, but he tried. He also tried to make it all add up to something that might mean something to people.
What was strange about Reilly as a sportswriter was that his columns often had very little sports in them. They were often about people’s lives, their struggles and their victories, most of it off the field. He leaned toward human interest stories, perhaps to a fault. “Every week I read your column,” the comedian Bill Scheft once told him, “just to see what body part will be missing.”
Reilly covered every major sporting event except the Indy 500 and every minor one, including the World Sauna Championship, in which he placed 103rd. He made it to over 100 countries and every state but North Dakota.
He became passable at golf, mediocre at piano, and knew just enough magic to annoy people. He had a TV series — “Missing Links — that lasted one episode. He had his own ESPN interview show – “Homecoming” — that lasted 15.
Desperate for a column one week in 2006, he invented a foundation to protect African kids from malaria called Nothing But Nets, which has raised almost $50 million to date.
The son of an alcoholic, he made his own way. He could’ve done better. He could’ve done worse. His main deal was trying to write sentences nobody had ever read before. Also, he never was on one of those everybody-yells shows.
He saw the Northern Lights. He ran with the bulls. He saw the best humans could be and the worst, and that included himself.
Oh, and he once took $5 off Arnold Palmer on the golf course.
This is…without a shadow of a doubt…the most arrogant, conceited, pretentious sports column I’ve ever read. This makes the Derek Jeter unborn children article look like a great read. King of the Humblebrag Rick Reilly gives himself his own funeral, writing a whole article in the third person talking about all his accomplishments. I honestly didn’t think it was real. I thought it was a spoof. Its like an Onion article. Because this is exactly the sort of thing people would make fun of Reilly for and he went ahead and did it anyway.
My favorite part is how he tried to include a few things here or there trying to sound modest. Like “If I throw in that I’m just “mediocre at piano” that will balance out all the stuff I really want to brag about.” “I’m only passable at golf but I did it with every President since the Carter administration!” Just as lame as it gets. How about we just fucking wait for children to be born and wait for people to actually die before concocting these imaginary scenarios in your head so you can write about it exactly how you want? How about you sit back and hope that someone else will actually write all the kind words about your career rather than having to do it yourself? No other writer out there could do you justice, huh? Only you can capture the true essence of Reilly just like only you know Derek Jeter on a personal level deep enough to talk to his kids who don’t even exist. What a presumptuous dick.
I suppose its fitting that his last column is an over the top, dramatic, vomit inducing masterpiece of corny. You certainly went out with a bang, Rick. What a cock.
PS – “If you don’t drink, we’ve probably never met.” could be the most cringeworthy thing Rick Reilly has ever said. And I mean that. To borrow Barstool vernacular thats the biggest squid/hardo line I can think of. Squardo move. Especially considering the entire obituary is all about the different types of people you met all over the world. Were you throwing back shots with all the subjects of those human interest pieces you idiot? Sipping on MacAllan with all the people in your charities? I bet those kids in Africa loved drinking with you.
PPS – His PS is the worst part:
“I bet my buddy Two Down O’Connor, The World’s Most Avid Golf Gambler, $100 that I’d break par before I died and I never did. So he’s going to come up and pretend to sob over my coffin, but he’s really going to be looking for the $100 bill I left inside the left breast pocket of my black blazer. Please make sure I’m wearing the blue pinstripe”
Cool story Rick.