Hey, did you notice that lots of young, smart *straightens tie* sportswriters on the internet had been a lot happier and less angry at the world the last four months? You say you hadn’t? Well, that’s because we’re all ingrates who took Rick Reilly’s absence for granted. Oh, if only someone had told me a week ago that he was coming back, I would have savored our last days apart. But he’s back, and he’s wasted no time reminding us that he’s an insensitive doofus.
https://twitter.com/ReillyRick/status/606141619973160960
*cracks knuckles*
Okay, so I won’t even try to parse where he thought the joke was there, beyond just pointing at stuff and… expecting people to laugh, I guess? It wasn’t until I read the tweet a third time that I realized Reilly was equating David Letterman’s retirement and Bill Simmons’ firing, which makes me sigh heavily for multiple reasons. But whatever unearned smugness he was surely feeling over the departure of two media giants (of vastly different size) with whom he clearly equates himself is still not the most offensive part of this tweet.
Caitlyn Jenner is a brave woman who is now the most famous transgender person on the planet. She has, sadly, already been subjected to many predictably dumb opinions. Reilly’s tweet isn’t even one of the dumbest. But it’s still insensitive, transphobic and casually dismissive to call her “my boy Bruce.”
There will be no long rant in this article, but all I will say is that the point of Caitlyn “coming out” as a woman is to assert that she has always been a woman, and is finally ready to be honest about herself in public. Reilly’s stupid, unfunny tweet about how the world’s so different now that I’ve returned from my Italian sojourn unsurprisingly misses the point about literally everything he mentioned. Letterman and Simmons will be fine, and so will Caitlyn, but she deserves better.
Well, Rick, at least you didn’t make a Holocaust joke this time. Any time you want to go back on vacation would be fine with us.
