The column that Rick Reilly wrote for ESPN.com on Wednesday accomplished two things. One, it somehow made the “Jeter’s favorite movies” column from the other day look like a fine piece of journalistic art. Secondly, it made Reilly look like someone who was one step away from writing fan fiction about Jeter’s personal life.
Reilly’s column is a letter written to Jeter’s nonexistent children, describing to them how awesome of a baseball player their father was. But Reilly doesn’t use objective facts to praise Jeter – he goes all-out with the comparisons. In this column, Jeter is described by Reilly as each of the following.
-A kind of prince in baseball cleats
-George Clooney in pinstripes
-Humble, yet handsome, and hard to hate
-A good magician
-The best player in baseball for ten years straight (which might be the biggest falsehood in the entire article, but I digress)
-Everything men wanted to be
-A rooster’s crow
-A bit of a germ freak
I don’t even know what to say. If someone who had never watched a baseball game before and had read this article, they would think that Reilly was talking about a divine figure rather than a simple baseball player. Reilly was *this close* to turning his column into a written edition of The Chris Farley Show.
“Hey Derek, remember that time in Oakland where you flipped the ball to Jorge? THAT WAS AWESOME!” That’s how Reilly came across in this piece – not like a journalist lamenting the end of a great career, but like a fanboy wanting to profess his adoration for his favorite player.
If this happened with any another columnist, and any other player, at any other outlet, this column wouldn’t even have been published. But because it’s by Rick Reilly, about Derek Jeter, and at ESPN, it’s simply par for the course.
Reilly’s ESPN.com column vanishes from existence July 1st and it looks like he’s going to be going out with all guns blazing.
[ESPN]
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