This editor’s letter appears in the Mar. 7, 2016 issue of Sports Illustrated.

Rick Reilly is back in these pages, and we are thrilled. It has been more than 400 issues since he wrote the Dec. 3, 2007, Life of Reilly, the back-page space that defined the writer and, to a large extent, SI for more than a decade. From 1996 through ’07, Reilly wrote all but a small handful of our back-page columns; in seven of those years he was named National Sportswriter of the Year.

I arrived at Sports Illustrated in the spring of 1992. Then, Reilly was as celebrated for his longform chops as he later would be for his back-page excellence. It was tear-it-out-of-the-magazine-tape-it-to-the-wall-and-nerdily-recite-it-back-to-your-coworkers good. His stories mixed urgency, humor, pathos and tragedy, often in the same paragraph. I had my favorites. We all did.

On angry, well-traveled slugger Jack Clark, July 22, 1991:

​​This is the house that Jack Built. This is the 6,000 square feet of games and toys and affection that Jack Clark made for his four kids, not at all like the house he grew up in, not at all like the silent one his own father made. In this house in Danville, Calif., he is so much more like his mother, soft and flowing like whipped cream. Out there, playing baseball, he is so much like his father. Swings angry. Talks angry. Leaves angry. Next city.

On the living hell of being a first-year, or “knob,” at the Citadel, Sept. 14, 1992:

You ask permission to eat, leave, pass, cough, sneeze and scratch your nose. You serve everybody at mess and hope you can stuff in a forkful before mealtime has elapsed. You polish your shoes and your brass until midnight and then your French and chemistry until two, and you hope the guy who blows reveille dies in his sleep.

O.K., enough. Here’s how this week’s cover story happened.

Continue reading Editor’s letter: The return of Rick Reilly.