Chuckstrong

credit: AP Photo/ Michael Conroy

Once upon a time, I couldn’t stand Rick Reilly. I knew him as the guy who wrote the column at the back of Sports Illustrated, and I disagreed with everything he ever said. In fact, a column of his made me so mad once that I wrote him an impassioned letter that expounded all the ways in which I thought he was wrong. And a jerk.

(I think I was twelve at the time.)

Reilly was in good company, though, being the recipient of one of my letters. No one was spared from my wrathful pen — not even a local TV station, The Pleasant Company (maker of American Girl dolls), or a priest at my church.

Come to think of it, I ought to thank Rick Reilly and his incendiary views for helping me get into college, since I wrote one of my admissions essays about how much I disagreed with his opinions on sports and culture.

These days, Reilly writes a regular column for The Mothership’s website. I read it from time to time, and I find myself disliking his opinions a little bit less and appreciating his perspective — and scintillating similes — a little bit more. Maybe he has softened, scaled back his m.o. (i.e., being inflammatory). Or maybe my tastes have changed. Maybe I like his work now.

Reilly’s story about Colts head coach Chuck Pagano may have iced the deal for me. Yes, the situation is heart-rending to begin with. And yes, it’s about a football coach and his family (like shooting fish in a barrel to get a reaction from this girl…). But what Reilly does right this time is let himself into the story in a meaningful way. We come to understand how Pagano’s health news has hit Reilly on a deep personal level without the focus leaving Pagano.

Reilly’s humor keeps the story from becoming all gentle crescendoes and slowed-down shots of Pagano gazing off into the distance, and in terms of sentiment, the quotations from the family and Andrew Luck do the heavy emotional lifting so Reilly can show, not tell, us about how the people around Pagano are affected by his illness.

Perhaps the “ailing athlete” trope gets overplayed; perhaps we’ll never feel quite like we felt when we first read or saw Brian’s Song. No matter how familiar the premise or theme, these are still stories worth telling. Not for a cheap pull of the heartstrings, but to remind us that even the top-of-the-world guys are fighting great battles — whether a story is written about them or not.