Writers love to bash players who don't train their entire offseason and prepare for next year, so I was curious to find how writer Rick Reilly was fairing during his 8-month vacation between jobs. Lucky for me the Denver Westword has an interview in online edition (complete with shots at his new employer)......

"I just got back from three weeks in Argentina," Reilly says, "and I'm fixing to go to Tahiti, Thailand, New Zealand, Cabo, Europe. I'm going to drink coffee, play the piano, get up, have breakfast, go back to bed and read, and forget the job. They call it a no-compete clause. I call it bliss."

Well that sounds lovely doesn't it? But in all honesty I guess he deserves some time off to prepare after years of columns that ESPN and ABC News stole from him. Wait, what?

In a backhanded way, Comen also inspired Reilly's move to ESPN. The network did its own version of the student's story, winning an Emmy for its efforts, and scored another trophy after tackling a Reilly column about a handicapped football fan whom athletes at Middlebury College in Vermont transported to games. "That's one of the reasons I took this job," Reilly says. "I kind of got tired of them taking my column ideas and winning Emmys with them. ABC News was really good at it, too, sometimes ripping off whole sentences and not giving me credit. The hardest thing to do is find the great story that nobody is writing, so it was depressing to see these stories on ESPN and ABC, where they'd just wholesale lift things."

Well then. So you're telling me that ESPN takes ideas that other people have wrote and puts their own spin on them and reproduces them? That sounds very familiar doesn't it???

In all seriousness, I really think Reilly's debut is going to go the way of Dan Patrick. There's so much space (8 months!) between appearances that people will just forget about him. There's no time for the hype machine to stall and then kick back in.

Rick Reilly, Loving Limbo (Denver Westword)