Rick Reilly Is Woke Now
The famed (and now retired) sportswriter has taken an interest in politics that he’s channeled into a new book about President Donald Trump’s relationship to golf. Rick Reilly … welcome to the Resistance?Rick Reilly Is Woke Now
The famed (and now retired) sportswriter has taken an interest in politics that he’s channeled into a new book about President Donald Trump’s relationship to golf. Rick Reilly … welcome to the Resistance?
Among other talents, President Donald Trump has a knack for revealing surprising members of the opposition. On TV, we have Jimmy Kimmel. On sports TV, Warner Wolf. In sportswriting, we have Rick Reilly. That’s right. It’s official. Rick Reilly is woke now.
Reilly’s new book, Commander in Cheat, is one of the most surprising pieces of muckraking of the Trump era—not least to Reilly himself. A sportswriter who was decidedly unpolitical is now bouncing his trademark one-liners off the noggin of the leader of the free world. Last month, Trump autographed Bibles while surveying tornado damage in Alabama. “Trump signing Bibles is Dracula signing wooden stakes,” Reilly tweeted. It’s like Maggie Haberman left the White House beat to compete with Woj.
Two weeks ago, I met Reilly at a diner in Hermosa Beach, California. Reilly had quit sportswriting five years ago to the month. He had sun-baked cheeks and wore flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt that read “Surely Not Everybody Is Kung Fu Fighting.” When I pointed out that he looked like a beach bum, Reilly said, “This is my everyday!”
Reilly’s election night 2016 is a familiar nightmare. He was watching the returns with his old Sports Illustrated pal Gary Smith at Smith’s favorite bar in Charleston, South Carolina. They expected Hillary Clinton to win.
“At one point, we looked over and both of us had our heads between our knees,” Reilly said. “I was kind of light-headed and nauseous.”
“I mean, I could handle a conservative,” he continued. “I can live with that. I’ve had that. But just a moron who lies all the time—I just couldn’t believe we’re going to do this.”
To the nagging lefty question of “But what can I do about the Trump nightmare?” Reilly’s answer was: Write a golf book. A book that argues golf reflects and even heightens Trump’s worst qualities—that “the way Trump does golf is sort of the way he does a presidency.”
In one of the book’s funniest stories, Trump is playing golf with the old ESPN Monday Night Football crew. It’s Trump and Jon Gruden versus Mike Tirico and Ron Jaworski. Tirico, Reilly writes, hits “the 3-wood of his life” to the green. But Tirico finds his ball in a bunker 50 feet from the pin. Trump’s caddy tells Tirico that Trump, who’d reached the green first, threw it there.
In another story, Trump is playing with former Lakers coach Mike Dunleavy against two other players. Unhappy with Dunleavy’s approach shot, Trump nudges Dunleavy’s ball onto a more favorable spot on the green. (Trump strategically kicks so many golf balls that the caddies call him “Pelé.”)
Dunleavy doesn’t want the help. He wants to play by the rules. “That’s why he’s an unemployed coach and I’m worth $13 billion,” Trump says.
At Sports Illustrated in the ’90s, Reilly was the closest thing sportswriting had to a brand ambassador. It wasn’t just that Reilly was one of the best and best-paid sportswriters in America (with a salary topping $1 million). He could wring tears, laughs, and contented sighs from people who didn’t like sports. It wasn’t for nothing that the most expensive ad in SI ran next to Reilly’s back-page column.
I asked Reilly whether anyone tried talking him out of writing about Trump.
“Constantly,” Reilly said. “But don’t we have to rise up if we’re truth-tellers? … Don’t we have to stand up for what’s right, even if your house is going to get firebombed? I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but this is all true.”
Have you joined the Resistance? I asked.
“No,” Reilly said, “because I don’t know enough about politics. … But I know about golf. And what he’s doing is leaving a big, orange fucking splotch on my game.”
“I could handle a conservative. I can live with that. I’ve had that. But just a moron who lies all the time—I just couldn’t believe we’re going to do this.”
Reilly readers will find Commander in Cheat like talking to one of your friends who used to be relatively carefree and now quotes Rachel Maddow’s opening monologue to you. The Reilly style is still there—e.g., the golf exploits Trump claims are “faker than Cheez Whiz.” But there’s a baffled anger—or, better put, a lack of cocky assuredness—that has never quite surfaced in Reilly’s writing before. He begins with an epigraph: “This book is dedicated to the truth. It’s still a thing.”
“My Republican friends are like, ‘What’s this got to do with the presidency?’” Reilly said. “A lot! If you’ll cheat at something this unimportant, you’re going to cheat all the way up the line.”
He continued: “I can’t tell you how many of my buddies say, Yeah, I know. He’s a pig. He’s a liar. But I love what he’s doing for my taxes.
“Really? Do you like caging kids at the border? Do you like pulling out of the climate change [accord], which is going to end the planet? Do you like this?”
You can think of Commander in Cheat in two ways. Reilly’s muckraking has an I-can’t-believe-I’m-the-one-at-the-ramparts quality. Before Trump, Reilly could imagine writing a book about a president only if it was about presidential golf trivia. Now, he’s following Ed and Brian Krassenstein on Twitter.
It’s also important to see Commander in Cheat in the context of Reilly’s career. This is Reilly’s first published project since he quit sportswriting with the idea of exploring the big, wide world beyond it. Wokeness is the first chapter in the afterlife of Reilly.
Don’t think Donald Trump causes Reilly to live in a state of constant agitation. Reilly’s post-sportswriting life is blissful. He talks like an advocate for early retirement. Reilly meditates. He paddleboards. He has learned to play Sinatra on the piano. He is learning to speak Italian.
Reilly sits in California coffee shops hammering out screenplays and books. He has been reading novels like The Count of Monte Cristo (“Who knew that was such a great book?”) and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Reilly sounds like a guy who spent his 20s striving to be the guy, and now, at age 61, is finally getting around to experiencing his 20s.
When we last left Reilly, he was finishing up his sportswriting career with a stint at ESPN. In 2007, there was a lot of murmuring when Reilly left SI (for an ESPN salary reported at more than $2 million a year). Then there was a truckload of schadenfreude when Reilly got into a spat with his father-in-law over a Redskins column, or when he recycled conceits and even chunks of language from old columns.
“Blackie Sherrod always said, ‘A columnist has the right to repeat himself every seven years,’” Reilly explained. “Because there’s just not enough stories to write. I always thought I should sue myself.”
In hindsight, Reilly’s ESPN years feel like a changing-of-the-guard moment for sportswriting. The internet was teaching people to read sportswriting differently and to demand different things from it. Reilly was making a revanchist case for 800 words of punning, big-tent, clean-running prose. “Why can’t there be a Mike Royko of the web?” he said at the time.
What was the verdict on that? I asked Reilly.
“They don’t care,” he said of readers. “They skim. … We always were taught to kill your darlings. But now darlings are just everywhere.”
“Don’t we have to rise up if we’re truth-tellers? … Don’t we have to stand up for what’s right, even if your house is going to get firebombed? I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, but this is all true.”
Moreover, Reilly was just burned out on sportswriting. He didn’t like having to write columns when he didn’t want to. When he traveled, he wished he was home with his wife, Cynthia, and his paddleboard. “Is that a good sign, that you don’t really want to go to the Masters?” he said.
In 2013, Reilly was in the Augusta press room for something like the 35th time. As ESPN’s Wright Thompson remembered: “It was hot and we’d been sweating our asses off and he sat down next to me in Row H and I asked him, ‘Why are you here? Why aren’t you on a beach?’”
“He was really right,” Reilly said. “I wasn’t interested in it anymore.” The next March, he announced was surrendering his column. Though he made an encore return to Sports Illustrated and covered golf for a year for The Athletic (which was helpful for gathering book material), Reilly is extremely retired from sportswriting. He just wishes he’d quit earlier.
Reilly told me: “People always say, ‘What would I do [if I retired]? I would just drop dead.’ I’m like, no, you’d live! You’d see the world. You’d discover parts of yourself. You’d read all those books you never got to read because you were covering Buffalo versus Cleveland.
“I wanted to branch out. I wanted to see what else life had.”
What’s a day in the life of Rick Reilly like? I asked.
“Get up,” Reilly said. “Do the crossword. Try your luck with the wife. More coffee. Then it’s either paddleboard …” He trailed off. “Do you realize I saw whales eight straight times last year out here? It’s unbelievable.”
Reilly continued: “If not paddleboard, golf. Then come back. Write for two hours—always write for two hours in a coffee shop. Then dinner in some fabulous place, or she’ll make a dinner. Then some sort of movie or Netflix and then play piano. Do it again.”
Reilly and Cynthia spend two months a year living in Florence, Italy. There, Reilly’s schedule expands to include a 5 p.m. Campari and a late-morning ramble through a nine-hole golf course.
“It’s packed with guys in Armani suits and, you know, the colored glasses,” Reilly said. “Because this neighbor lady brings over this fabulous lunch of homemade pasta, the most beautiful veal piccata. They serve this great little wine. Then she makes homemade tiramisu.”
A Florentine golf course where the donna lays out a sumptuous feast? Italians wearing colored glasses? That, I said, sounds like the ultimate Rick Reilly column.
“Well played, sir!” Reilly said, pointing a jaunty finger at me. He shrugged. “Every now and then, I’m like, ‘Ooh, that would be a good column.’ Ah, well.”
Off the hammock and back on the beat, Reilly makes for an interesting muckraker. It’s easy to remember the SI Reilly channeling the comic style of writers like Jim Murray and Dan Jenkins—Reilly was a living fossil, in a strictly biological sense. But when Reilly was set upon a moral cause, like the lunacy of Reds owner Marge Schott or hazing at the Citadel, his one-liners became deadly weapons. “He got around like a cocky teenager,” his old SI boss Terry McDonell once wrote, “and he could talk to anybody.”
Trump, Reilly reports in Commander in Cheat, plays golf like a maniac, hitting off the tee first and then racing down the fairway in his cart. This tic allows Trump to cheat, as he often simply plays someone else’s ball, or kicks his onto the fairway. In one story in Commander in Cheat, Trump’s playing partners watch him hit his ball into the water. But when they reach Trump, they find his ball has conveniently turned up on the fairway. “Must’ve been the tide,” Trump says.
“I don’t know enough about politics. … But I know about golf. And what he’s doing is leaving a big, orange fucking splotch on my game.”
One of Reilly’s most fruitful obsessions is poking at the number of club championships Trump claims to have won at courses he owns. (At last count, Trump claimed 20.) In one memorable case, Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, club was holding its senior club championship. The same day, Trump played a round at another course, Trump Philadelphia. According to Reilly’s sources, Trump took his Philadelphia score—which was probably fudged, in any case—transposed it to Bedminster, and declared himself Bedminster’s club champion.
Reilly also turns the screws on some of his old subjects. When he asks Phil Mickelson to describe his relationship with Trump, “He looked me right in the eye for about 10 seconds,” Reilly writes, “smiled, and walked away.”
Why Reilly wrote Commander in Cheat is revealing about his writerly M.O. The reason Reilly states most often is that Trump has left a stain on golf, a sport Reilly not only covered (often at sky-touching, better-than-Jenkins levels) but played his whole life. “There are so many ways [Trump] just throws up all over golf,” Reilly said. It’s hard for me to get mad about Trump refusing to remove his hat while shaking hands after a round. But Reilly’s right to say Trump sees a golf course like he does the Oval Office.
In Commander in Cheat, you can feel the former SI big-tent columnist latching onto a noble, non-partisan idea of Truth—the motivating force of many newspaper reporters who cover Trump, as well. Of Trump’s chicanery on the course, Reilly told me, “It’s the biggest lie since ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman.’”
In yet another view, Commander in Cheat is Reilly’s chance at a second draft. Trump and then-wife Marla Maples once approached Reilly at a pro-am. In what Reilly now regards as a setup, Maples produced a Reilly column from her purse. Trump said Reilly was his favorite writer. Then Trump popped the question: “When are you going to write about ME?”
Reilly wrote up the round he and Trump played together in his 2003 book Who’s Your Caddy? Reilly noted that Trump was a shameless liar but, like a lot of reporters back then, considered him to be sorta fun. When I asked Reilly whether he’d missed anything in that encounter, he said he didn’t think so. “I just never thought he’d be president of the United Fucking States,” Reilly said.
Reilly’s best reason for writing the book is that golf, while not aid cuts to Central America, is a nifty metaphor for understanding Trump. Often, it’s the metaphor Trump uses. Just last week, Trump compared California Democrat Adam Schiff to a duffer who’s weak off the tee.
“My Republican friends are like, ‘What’s this got to do with the presidency?’ A lot! If you’ll cheat at something this unimportant, you’re going to cheat all the way up the line.”
But golf better describes Trump himself. In one story Commander in Cheat, Trump tells playing partner Bryan Marsal, the chairman of next year’s U.S. Open: “You see these two guys? They cheat. See me? I cheat. And I expect you to cheat because we’re going to beat those two guys today.” It’s a perfect distillation of Trump’s worldview: I’m a crook so everyone else must be too.
Every one of Trump’s most disgusting qualities surfaces in golf. Racism: When playing golf with Reilly, Trump handed $100 tips to Chilean course workers and says, “Now, those guys are the Donald Trumps of Chile!” Ecological terror: A caddy tells Reilly that Trump’s golf cart once contained a can of red spray paint, and that Trump marked trees his balls hit with a red “X.” The trees were removed the next day.
And then there’s Trump’s overweening misogyny. After playing at a pro-am with Trump, LPGA golfer Kris Tschetter tells Reilly: “That was the worst experience I ever had playing golf. … He hit on me, but in a kind of creepy way. ... I guess the fact I was married didn’t matter to him.”
As far as subjects go, Trump and golf is a crowded clubhouse. Reilly winced as he read David Fahrenthold and Josh Dawsey’s scoop about Trump’s “room-sized” golf simulator at the White House or Michael Bamberger’s recent investigation of Trump’s club championships. As a reporter, Reilly ran headfirst into the MAGA wall of silence. Sources told him juicy stories about playing golf with Trump, then demanded he not use them in the book.
“‘You can’t write it. They’ll kill me,’” Reilly said, recounting the conversations. “Who? ‘The crazy red hats!’ Yeah, but don’t you have a responsibility to tell the truth? ‘No, no, no. Don’t write it.’”
But Reilly hasn’t left the beat. “Now, there’s talk that one of his favorite caddies might be illegal,” he said of Trump. “I’m trying to get to the bottom of that.”
If Reilly isn’t ready to welcome himself to the Resistance, you can hardly tell from his Twitter feed. He uses hashtags like #DontheCon and #TrumpLiesMatter. He has retweeted MSNBC’s Joy Reid and quotes Carl Sandburg’s “The Liars.” He practices political activism in a family-magazine kind of way. Reilly censors curse words in his tweets and worries about Trump’s effect on children.
In any case, lefty muckraking is bound to be a short chapter in the afterlife of Reilly. When we met, Reilly had just gotten finished copies of Commander in Cheat. He could already feel himself leaving Trump’s gravitational field and drifting back toward the piano, the paddleboard, the pile of unread novels.
If Trump goes after Reilly on Twitter, Reilly has a trademark comeback waiting. “When Trump hates it or whatever,” he said, “I’m going to be like, ‘Alright, who read it to you?’”
