Rick Reilly

Rick Reilly is an acclaimed sportswriter, screenwriter, book author, keynote speaker, and inductee into the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame. He was presented into it by legendary quarterback John Elway. Reilly was voted National Sportswriter of the Year 11 times over a career that began in 1979.

USA Today called Reilly “the closest thing sportswriting ever had to a rock star.” The Sherman Report called Reilly “easily the most read sportswriter of his generation.” The New York Daily News described him “as one of the funniest humans on the planet.” Publishers Weekly called him, “an indescribable amalgam of Dave Barry, Jim Murray, and Lewis Grizzard, with the timing of Jay Leno and the wit of Johnny Carson.” Booklist called him, “Hands down, the funniest golf writer alive.”

His latest book — "So Help Me Golf: Why We Love the Game" — is a valentine to the game — 80 new funny and emotional stories about people who've love the game as much as he does. Some of it is a memoir centering on his fear of his alcoholic father — who played golf hard and drank harder — and the peace he made with both golf and his dad. Booklist called it, "funny, ironic and inspirational." Wall Street Journal said it has, "2.5 laughs per page."

"Commander-in-Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump" is an uproarious indictment of President Donald Trump and the many ways he cheats at golf, bullies with it, and fails to pay those who build his courses. It has spent multiple weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

From 1985 until 2007, his breezy, hilarious, and yet often emotional style graced the pages of Sports Illustrated. For the last 10 there, he wrote the popular "Life of Reilly" column, which ran on the last page. It was the first signed weekly opinion column in the magazine’s long history. He is “the Tiger Woods of sports columnists,” says Bloomberg News.

Reilly is the founder of the anti-malaria effort Nothing But Nets, which has raised over $70 million to hang mosquito nets over kids in Africa, where 2,000 children die every day of the disease. A partnership with the United Nations Foundation, every dollar goes to buying the nets. Wrote the Denver Post, "Nothing but Nets is one charity that scores big."

Reilly won the 2009 Damon Runyon Award for Outstanding Contributions to Journalism, an honor previously won by Jimmy Breslin, Tim Russert, Bob Costas, Mike Royko, George Will, Ted Turner, and Tom Brokaw, among others. Three times his columns have been read into the record in the U.S. Congress. An astronaut once took his signed trading card into space.

He is the author of 15 books. Before the Trump book, Reilly’s most recent effort was "Tiger, Meet My Sister … And Other Things I Probably Shouldn’t Have Said" (Penguin) — a collection of his best columns written at ESPN, complete with postscript updates of each column at the bottom.

"Sports From Hell, My Search for the World’s Dumbest Competition" (Doubleday) was a finalist for the 2011 Thurber Prize. It’s the account of his three-year search for the dumbest sport in the world. Not to give anything away, but a good bet would be either Ferret Legging or the World Sauna Championships. It also includes embarrassing attempts by Reilly to try Nude Bicycle Racing, Zorbing, Chess Boxing, Extreme Ironing, the World Rock Paper Scissors Championships, and an unfortunate week on a women’s pro football team.

In "Who’s Your Caddy?" (Doubleday), Reilly caddies for everyone from Jack Nicklaus to Donald Trump to a $50,000-a-hole gambler. It rose to No. 3 on the New York Times bestseller list.

For two years, he was the host of ESPN’s "Homecoming with Rick Reilly", a one-hour interview show which featured Michael Phelps, Elway and Magic Johnson, among many others. It was a kind of cross between This is Your Life and Inside the Actor’s Studio, for sports. The show went deep inside the life of America’s greatest athletes. Filmed in front of a live audience, usually at the guest’s high school or college, it’s full of surprises, with home video, interviews with old teammates and coaches, family, friends, and rivals. Jerry Rice, Dwayne Wade, Chris Paul, Emmitt Smith, Billie Jean King, Donovan McNabb, and Tony Hawk have been guests, to name a few. “That was the greatest night of my life,” soccer star Landon Donovan said of it. Magic Johnson called it, “The most fun interview I’ve ever done