A Pro's Prose: The Rhetoric of Rick Reilly
The job of the skilled sportswriter is to go where the cameras can't go, to find out exactly what hungry readers who already know the outcome need to know, and to beat television at a story it thinks it has already covered.
(David Halberstam)
Not to quarrel with Halberstam, but how about adding another bullet to the sportswriter's job description: grab your reader's attention in the opening line and hold on tight till the end.
The way Rick Reilly does it, for example.
I'm not saying that Reilly is the Shakespeare of the Press Box. That was (and forever will be) Red Smith. I'm not even suggesting that Reilly is as smart and talented a writer as Gary Smith, his old colleague at Sports Illustrated.
But Reilly is a clever writer and a good writer. And not just a good sportswriter either, though he has been voted the National Sportswriter of the Year 11 times.
A columnist for 22 years, Reilly recently left Sports Illustrated to join ESPN. And that's as fine an excuse as any to celebrate his rhetorical achievements--by way of a few figures of speech culled from "The Life of Reilly."
A pair of horn-rimmed glasses marched up to me last week and said, "You're from Denver, right? Why didn't you people put a roof on Coors Field? This World Series is going to be freezing!"Who's the character in the horn-rimmed glasses? We don't care and neither does Reilly. His only function is to prompt an encomium to Coors Field, and the synecdoche that snaps opens the column also serves to snap it shut: "And you want to put a roof on Coors Field, Mr. Horn-rims?"
("Mile-High Madness," October 23, 2007)
Let's say you went to Starbucks, ordered your double espresso mocha half-soy grande and didn't get it for 37 years. Might you be a tad . . . bitter? So tell me, why are the 47 people who got their Green Bay Packers season tickets this year so freaking happy? Some of them have been waiting since 1970! My God, that was the year the Beatles broke up.By comparing the decades-long wait for Packers tickets to an order for coffee, Reilly yanks his national base of readers into a regional story, dramatizing the absurd circumstances and inviting identification. The question posed in the second sentence is answered (through interviews with fans) in the rest of the column--a neat little strategy called hypophora.
("Be the 74,659th In Line!" October 10, 2007)
In America, you do not quit at the top. You do not quit when you're the leading rusher in the NFL. You do not quit when there's millions left on the table. But Tiki Barber, a 31-year-old Giants running back, is retiring at the end of this season, his 10th in pro football--and the country wants to sue.No, it doesn't carry quite the same resonance as the refrain in Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but Reilly's repetition of the phrase "You do not quit" is insistent and attention-getting in its own anaphoric way.
("A Barber Who Won't Cut It Close," November 7, 2006)
We have no Warsaw, Krakow or Gdansk, yet nowhere are there more polls than in America.Puns don't earn points for sophistication--especially when one of them involves strippers. But Reilly does get our attention. Besides, he deserves credit for the near chiasmus in the story's close: "I'd just like to say, if politicians can restrict exit polling, why can't all polling make an exit?"
We love polls more than strippers love poles. There is no question we can't answer with a poll: Which is the best college football team? Who shall die, Quisp or Cap'n Crunch? What shall my foreign policy be?
("Should You Read This Column?" December 11, 2002)
They should've buried Lance Armstrong this time. They had him laid out like a yard sale on a Pyrenees road. Had him sick, white-mouthed and dizzy. Had him riding in the weeds, riding borrowed bikes and cracked bikes. Hell, once they had him carrying his bike. Had him scabbed and swollen, hip throbbing, saddle sores mounting, out of water and luck and hope.
But they didn't bury him. Couldn't.
Now here he is, with his first beer and the last laugh on Sunday night in his swank Paris hotel suite, sitting gingerly on a saddle sore--"the size of Pikes Peak," he says--and toasting his ugliest yet most magnificent Tour de France victory, his fifth straight. But cinq nearly sank him.
("Hurts So Good," August 6, 2003)
Write on, Rick Reilly.
Whose sports writing do you enjoy reading long after the season is over and all bets have been paid off? Let us know by clicking on the "comments" button below.
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