Tiger, Meet My Sister...

Tiger, Meet My Sister...: And Other Things I Probably Shouldn't Have Said by Rick Reilly, 342 pages

I'm going to hazard a guess and say that most of the people who blog here, and most of the people who read this blog, are not die hard sports fanatics or hard-core athletes. I could be wrong, and if I am, I retract the previous statement. But working under that assumption, I probably need to explain that Reilly is a longtime sports columnist, first for Sports Illustrated and now for ESPN. The man has even been inducted into the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame (though so has Mitch Albom; make of that what you will).

Anywho, Tiger, Meet My Sister... is a collection of Reilly's favorite ESPN columns, and often those that have gotten him in hot water or left him with egg on his face. In this collection, Reilly reprints the column where he admits that he feels like a world class chump for believing Lance Armstrong all those years; the column where he argues against retiring the name "Redskins" from the NFL team; even the column where he skewers the double standard of blocking PED-using players from the Baseball Hall of Fame while rolling out the carpet for their managers, who must have known what was going on. (Incidentally, his targeting of Tony LaRussa in that third column has made it so he "can't eat lasagna in downtown St. Louis anymore," according to a post-script.) But with all of those controversial or embarrassing columns, Reilly has also chosen to share some truly fascinating, even emotionally charged, columns, including an interview with Archie, Peyton, and Eli Manning; a story about a blind woman making a long commute to Yankees games from her home in New Jersey; and a fun one about commuting to the Staples Center on game day with Kobe Bryant.

These columns are all, no matter what they cover, entertaining and enthralling, and laced with Reilly's trademark humor. Many times while reading this, I found myself both chuckling out loud and then reading short passages to my husband (who was probably annoyed beyond all belief, since I was interrupting his own reading time). A great collection for even casual sports fans.