Rick Telander Biography
Rick Telander is the senior sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Hired in 1995 from Sports Illustrated, where he was a Senior Writer, his’s presence at the newspaper was expected to counter the stable of sports columnists the rival Chicago Tribune had.
After graduating from Northwestern, Telander was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs in 1971 but was cut in training camp. He wrote a book about this experience in 2004, Like a Rose, which was made into a short film by NFL Films in 2013.
Soon after, he began his career as a freelance writer, becoming a Special Contributor to Sports Illustrated in 1973. It was that year he went to New York and wrote a lengthy piece entitled “They Always Come Home Again’’ about college basketball players who return to their city courts in the summer.
The next year he moved to New York, where he played basketball on city playgrounds and wrote the book Heaven Is A Playground, which later was made into a movie starring D.B. Sweeney.
In the 1980s, Telander was a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated and was quickly recognized as a rising star. As the college football beat writer in the mid-1980s, he reported on the scandals that plagued the University of Miami, University of Oklahoma, University of South Carolina, and Southern Methodist University.
He also observed what he believed to be hypocrisy by the National Collegiate Athletic Association as the college athletes would help the NCAA and the member schools make money, yet wouldn’t share in the wealth.
His story about South Carolina’s Tommy Chaikin and the dangers of steroid use, “The Nightmare of Steroids,’’ appeared in SI’s Oct. 24, 1988 issue. Telander’s 1990 book The Hundred-Yard Lie addressed the problems in college football.
In December 1985, Telander was invited to be a regular panelist on The Sportswriters on TV, a debut weekly show featuring the Chicago Tribune’s Bill Jauss, the Daily Southtown’s Bill Gleason, and former boxing promoter Ben Bentley.
Telander was 25 years younger than the three other panelists. The show, the first of its kind, was nationally syndicated and developed a cult following before concluding its run in 2000.
While with the Sun-Times, Telander continued writing for Sports Illustrated until 1998, when he signed a deal with ESPN. Telander would regularly contribute to ESPN: The Magazine and ESPN.com, appear on ESPN television shows like The Sports Reporters (which some critics viewed as a knockoff of the Sportswriters on TV)
and host a radio program on ESPN radio. After the multi-year deal expired, Telander sporadically would contribute to Sports Illustrated, and host a radio show on WSCR.
Telander was co-winner of the 2006 Illinois Sportswriter of the Year award as voted by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. He won the award in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2007.
He has had his work collected in The Best American Sportswriting Anthology seven times (most recently 2013, with Paul Solotaroff) and numerous other anthologies. He has won nine Peter Lisagor awards for sports journalism.
He is the author of eight books, one of which, Heaven Is A Playground, was named one of the Ten Best Sports Books of All Time by Playboy Magazine, and one of the 100 Best Sports Books by Sports Illustrated.
Rick Telander Age
Rick Telander is the senior sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Hired in 1995 from Sports Illustrated, where he was a Senior Writer. He was born in Peoria, IL, in 1950, thus Rick is 69 years old as of 2019.
Rick Telander Education | Rick Telander Early Life
He was born to Peoria, Illinois and attended Richwoods High School, where he was an All-Conference quarterback.
He attended Northwestern University on a football scholarship. He played for coach Alex Agase as a cornerback (and punter junior year), making All-Big Ten his senior season and two-time All-Big Ten Academic. His teammates included Mike Adamle, who is also now a member of the Chicago media.
Rick Telander Wife
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Rick Telander Net Worth
Rick Telander has an estimated net worth of $693768 million dollars as of 2019.
Rick Telander, the Sun-Times columnist, sells the house for over $1 million
Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander has sold his five-bedroom Lake Forest home for $1.055 million.
A Peoria native and a star cornerback at Northwestern University, Telander, 66, joined the Sun-Times from Sports Illustrated in 1995.
Telander has sold his Victorian farmhouse-style house in East Lake Forest, which he has owned since 1984. Built in 1907, the 3,500-square-foot house was expanded in 1990 with a three-story addition and has a two-story coach house. Other features include 4 1/2 baths, a great room with a fireplace, a lower-level rec room, tall ceilings, hickory floors, a mudroom, and an office.
“It was a beautiful house. We had four kids and all are finally out of the house, and we just wanted to move to someplace smaller now,” Telander told Elite Street. He had lived there for more than 31 years.
He said he and his wife are renting a home in Lake Bluff while they consider where to go next. The house had been listed for $1.079 million.
Rick Telander Books
His’s Most Popular Books
Heaven Is a Playground (Second Edition)
In Life, First You Kick-Ass: Reflections on the 1985 Bears and Wisdom from Da Coach
IN THE YEAR OF THE BULL: Zen, Air and the Pursuit of Sacred and Profane Hoops
Heroes: A Novel
String Music
Series By Rick Telander
Best American Sports Writing
Rick Telander Art
The world knows Rick Telander for his sportswriting—after the former Northwestern football star was cut by the Kansas City Chiefs in training camp, he shifted to journalism, covering playground basketball in New York.
That led to his first book, Heaven Is a Playground, in 1976. By the 1980s, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. A job as a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times brought him back to his home state in 1995, where the Peoria native has remained; he’s in the beginning stages of a book on violence in the city, sparked by his recent series on Orr High School’s basketball team.
Telander may be an ex-jock, but he proves that sports writing is not the toy department of journalism. Ask him about Pete Rose, and he’ll back up his opinion with theories based on a recent re-reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
And the breadth of his interests includes something that, until now, most of the public and most of his friends have not known: Telander is an artist.
He’s been drawing and painting for most of his life, but recently turned most of his attention to it. The result is a first-ever public show slated for June 1 at Adventureland and hosted by one of his artistic mentors, Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick.
Telander, now 69, lives in Highwood with his wife where he has a large art studio on the second floor of their home. There, he met with a reporter who talked to him about his lifelong love affair with art.
Rick Telander Awards
Telander was awarded the Ring Lardner Award for Excellence in Sports Journalism by the Union League Club of Chicago. Frank Deford presented Telander with the award.
Rick Telander Twitter
Rick Telander 2008 Hall of Fame ballot controversy
In January 2008, Telander caused controversy by refusing to submit a 2008 baseball Hall of Fame ballot, citing frustration with steroid issues troubling baseball.
He mentioned in his January 9. 2008 Chicago Sun-Times column how he could not trust, and therefore could not vote, for anyone on the ballot.
Telander used Andre Dawson as an example of someone he does not believe ever used steroids, but could not be certain about. Of note is the fact that Telander voted for two known steroid users, José Canseco and Ken Caminiti, in the previous year’s Hall of Fame ballot.
He did this, as he wrote in his Sun-Times column, as a protest, arguing that the shame of steroid users and the “Steroid Era” should be preserved this way for all generations to witness.
The fury erupted very publicly after Chicago sports-talk radio show host Mike North took Telander to task while interviewing Andre Dawson on January 9, 2008.
Telander eventually called Dawson personally, read his column to the former star, and the issue was laid to rest. Telander wrote an article that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens should not get in the Hall of Fame because of their use of steroids and that they lack integrity.
Rick Telander Next Year Day
In 2008, Telander partnered with The Heckler and owner Brad Zibung to host the 100th Annual Next Year Day. Nearly 1,000 people attended, including famous Cubs fan Bill Murray, who sang with Telander’s band, the Del-Crustaceans.
The 101st Annual Next Year Day was held Friday, April 3, 2009, at Harry Caray’s Tavern in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Two more parties were held through the years.
Rick Telander 2011
Former South Carolina assistant coach Jim Washburn, just hired by Philadelphia Eagles, apologizes again for steroid scandal he helped create (and which sent him to prison), as documented in Telander’s SI story with Tommy Chaikin. Ref: CSNPhilly.com, Feb 10, 2011, by Frank Reuben: “Eagle’s Washburn Still Confronting Steroid Nightmare.’’
Rick Telander2013 “Dangerous Obstructions” article
In April 2013, Telander wrote an article in the Chicago Sun-Times highlighting dangerous NBA court-side obstructions.
Apparently unaware that the Toronto Raptors’ baseline signs were images painted on the floor of the court which appear as three-dimensional images on TV, he wrote “The Toronto Raptors have a long ‘Raptors’ sign on the floor, just a foot behind each baseline. The sign sticks up in the air about three feet, like a triangular billboard. Stupid. Stop it”. The article was widely mocked