Tiger, Meet My Sister...: And Other Things I Probably Shouldn't Have Said
Yes, this is just a sportswriter’s clip book, but when the sportswriter is Rick Reilly, the clips are not just clips. A longtime Sports Illustrated staffer and the author of one of the funniest golf novels ever published, Missing Links (1996), Reilly is now a columnist for ESPN.com, and this volume gathers the best of his work there over the last five years. Yes, there are quite a few columns about the nice guys Reilly has encountered on the sports beat (quarterback Tim Tebow, for one; Augusta National caddie Joe Collins, for another), but, let’s face it, we’re here mainly for the other kind of columns, the ones that give it where it hurts to the not-so-nice superstars of the sporting world: Lance Armstrong, whom Reilly defended for years until he didn’t; Michael Jordan (“Jordan’s Hall of Fame talk was the Exxon Valdez of speeches”); and, of course, Tiger Woods (“Sometimes you wonder where Tiger Woods gets his public-relations advice. Gary Busey?”). But, finally, it doesn’t matter if this guy is celebrating nice or lambasting not nice. He nails it every time, and he usually leaves us laughing. --Bill Ott