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Chat: Rick Reilly

Join SI's award-winning columnist Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET

Click here for more on this story

Posted: Thursday March 02, 2000 06:23 PM

CNNSI.com welcomes Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly to a freewheeling online chat, Tuesday, March 7 at 2 p.m. ET.

Reilly, now in his 16th year with the magazine, is the current National Sportswriter of the Year -- and has won the award previously five times. He is the author of the popular "Life of Reilly" column and recently published a novel, Slo Mo. The book is a fictional autobiography of Slo Mo Finsternick, a 7'8" shooting guard and NBA sensation (see review, right).

From Sports Illustrated SLO-MO! by Rick Reilly, Doubleday, $23.95 Ring Lardner was one of America's greatest writers of sports fiction, and his most memorable character was pitcher Jack Keefe in the book You Know Me Al, a small-town huckleberry who was as dumb as a pair of cleats. SI's Reilly has concocted an end-of-the-century update of Lardner's classic riff, switching the setting from baseball to the NBA. Of course nowadays it's hard to imagine anyone growing up as naive as Keefe, unless he lived in a cave. But that's precisely where 7'8" Maurice (Slo-Mo) Finsternick comes from: a spelunking cult of cave dwellers. By a series of events too complicated to describe here, Finsternick learns to make long-range hook shots with such proficiency that he finds himself in the pros. There is one key difference between Slo-Mo and Keefe: Keefe was an arrogant jackass, and when someone suckered him, it served him right. But Slo-Mo is a cartoon sweetie pie (think Bullwinkle Moose in hightops), and one cringes as NBA sharks surround and devour him, mouthful by gory mouthful. His agent, a former Roto-Rooter man, robs him blind; fans mercilessly jeer him (Geek! Wimp!/Dork and punk!/ Fin-ster-nick/Can-not dunk!); and the wicked Barter Soals, a footwear executive, blackmails him into endorsing Bombs: blue-and-black bomb-shaped shoes that make insufferable ticking noises as Slo-Mo runs the floor. Reilly's heavy-handed moral -- that mutual respect and decency ought to rule pro sports as much as any other sphere of life -- doesn't make the book any less funny. But something else does, at least to this reader: Slo-Mo's depraved, true-to-life teammates, whose naughty jokes are so adolescent, only an adolescent could enjoy them. But that is also why, in all seriousness, this could be a wonderful book for teenagers, especially those who idolize pro athletes to excess. It might lead them to ask themselves the same question Slo-Mo ends up asking: Given the greed, egomania and just plain cruelty in pro basketball today, how much do I really love this game? -- Charles Hirshberg

Reilly is also the author of Missing Links, a comic golf romance, and co-author of the screenplay Leatherheads, a story centered on the 1927 Duluth Eskimos of the fledgling NFL.

Join Reilly as he fields questions in our chat room on Tuesday at 2 p.m. You can also submit a question in advance below.

 

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