Sports Illustrated To Bring Back The 'Point After' Column
Friday, December 07, 2007
Rick Reilly's departure from SI has brought on a ton of questions about the publication, but none bigger than what would replace his "Life of Reilly" column on the last page of the magazine. Sports Illustrated has decided to bring back the column Frank Deford penned from 1986 to 1998. "Point After" will grace the final pages of Sports Illustrated effective immediately, but will feature a neat little twist.
There will be a different writer doing the column each week (exciting I know). And this week's "Point After" author is Peter King! And can guess who he's talking about? Why Brett Favre of course (he is the Sportsman of the Year you know)!!!
I've covered Brett Favre throughout his pro career, and when people ask, "What's Favre really like?" I might tell a story about his dead-on imitation of Billy Bob Thornton's character in Sling Blade, or about the time on a hunting trip that I heard him tracking his prey by cooing, "Here grousy-grousy-grousy."Aw, that's cute. I thought Dan Patrick was going to be picking up where Reilly left off, but I guess that's not the case. Can we have Dr. Z do a column about his career .343 picking percentage next?
Update: Correction- The old "Point After" had the rotating writer aspect as well.
6 Comments:
The old 'Point After' never had a regular writer. Deford wrote a lot of the early columns, but he wasn't even with SI for most of the 90s. The 'rotating writer' format of the new column is the same as the old one.
What he said.
I couldn't for the life of me remember if that was the case or not. Thanks....both of you.
A full page Viagra ad would have been better than Life of Reilly. Thank God that douchebag is gone.
I miss the Reilly who could actually write feature articles(that didn't involve playing golf with celebs), rather than just columns.
'Life of Reilly' jumped the shark(as opposed to Greg Norman) when Reilly becamse SO cynical about pro sports that he started recycling column ideas, and changed the column's focus from 'Reilly's take on sports' to 'Reilly's take on what Reilly cares about', usually limited to the following:
A. Barry Bonds sucks.
B. Some tangent about sports he never liked anyway, 'inspired' by something his kids said one day.
C. 'Rick does stuff that average sports fans could never do, because they're not Rick.'
D. The 'heartwarming story of the month about some dead, brain-damaged, or dead and brain-damaged high school athlete'.(Usually paired with Reilly reaming out the 'bastards' at whichever high school who made some Scroogelike ruling that prevented said athletes from competing(and possibly drove some to suicide.)
E. The reprinted column, which increasingly fell into one of the above caregories.
I notice Reilly now has a web site asking his fans to submit story ideas(while he can't write anything for 6 months, til he takes over at ESPN). Hope it leads to better results than we've seen in recent years.
i was hoping for a patrick column as well. Or at the very least, a picture of something Awesome, like Batman.