I was perusing the sports section of Waldenbooks the other day when I stumbled upon this book from former Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly. It’s entitled
Hate Mail from Cheerleaders and Other Adventures from the Life of Reilly. It’s a collection of some of Reilly’s Sports Illustrated columns.

I’ve never really liked Rick Reilly. He always struck me as being kind of a douche.

For instance, he got some attention a few years ago when he called out Sammy Sosa in the Cub’s locker room to go with him to a lab and take a urine test for steroids. Sosa freaked out and Reilly wrote a column about it.

Though he often attacked Sosa (and Barry Bonds) for using steroids, he continuously defended Lance Armstrong against allegations of blood doping and using other performance enhancers. Granted, there has never been any proof that Armstrong cheated. Then again, nobody has ever proven that Sosa or Bonds cheated either.

Speaking of Lance Armstrong, he even wrote the forward to this book.

I flipped the book over to see how much they were actually charging for this piece of drivel. Not that I wanted to buy it. What I saw on the back cover surprised me. It’s a photograph showing Reilly sitting in a chair with the same three cheerleaders from the cover. Instead of looking at him like they were pissed off — like they did on the front cover — it shows them kissing him. One of the girls was actually sitting on his lap.

Don’t they have laws against this? Even if they were supposed to be college cheerleaders and not high school cheerleaders, he’s old enough to be their father. I guess the idea of the photo is to show that though the cheerleaders were quite perturbed at Rick Reilly over something he wrote, they since softened their opinion of him to the extent that they now only want to shower him with their teenage kisses.

Something like that.

I just find it more then a little creepy. In my opinion, men Reilly’s age should be kept away from cheerleaders.