Rick Reilly: "His SI story on Greg Norman’s collapse at the 1996 Masters is a masterpiece of deadline writing, witty and sad and true."

There has been far too much glee at the news of Rick Reilly ending his ESPN.com columns and shifting mostly to television work.

He still puts out classic Reilly columns from time to time, but as Josh Levin notes in a fine summation of the changing nature of sportswriting, readers know it when the passion isn't there.

It’s not just that Reilly is out of ideas. It’s that the sands have shifted underneath him over the last three decades. These days, we demand Simmons-grade sports nerdery, and fans catch on if you lack the gene. We don’t want to spend time with someone who just doesn’t care. When I counted all of Reilly’s tooth jokes back in 2008—at that point, he’d made at least 116—I noted that his work was showing “signs of complacency.” Now, a little more than five years later, those look like the toothsome glory days.

If you’ve been reading Reilly since his days as a Sports Illustrated feature writer, you know there were few better back when he used to give a damn. At his best, Reilly’s columns were funny, incisive, and agenda-setting. His features were beautifully wrought. His SI story on Greg Norman’s collapse at the 1996 Masters is a masterpiece of deadline writing, witty and sad and true.

Upon announcing his departure on Wednesday, the 56-year-old Reilly said, “I’ve been writing sports for a living, non-stop, since I was 20. I figured out recently that I’ve published over two million words, all on sports.” Even if you’re giving yourself double credit for “electro-shock, three-alarm, bat-guano nuts,” that’s still a lot of words, and at least a million of them were great. I’ll be lucky to pile up a tenth that many.

Some great sportswriters never retire. Reilly’s hero (and Twitter avatar) Jim Murray succumbed to cardiac arrest at age 78; his last column, filed from Del Mar racetrack, ran in the Los Angeles Times the day he died. The 84-year-old Dan Jenkins, who Reilly followed on the golf beat at SI, told Grantland’s Bryan Curtis that he’s going to keep writing “Till they carry me out. What would I do? I don’t paint.”