Rick Telander
Encyclopedia
Rick Telander is the senior sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...

. Hired in 1995 from Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...

 where he was a Senior Writer, Telander's presence at the newspaper was expected to counter the stable of sports columnists the rival Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...

 had.

Telander is a native of Peoria, Illinois
Peoria, Illinois
Peoria is the largest city on the Illinois River and the county seat of Peoria County, Illinois, in the United States. It is named after the Peoria tribe. As of the 2010 census, the city was the seventh-most populated in Illinois, with a population of 115,007, and is the third-most populated...

 and attended Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

 on a football
American football
American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 scholarship. He played for coach Alex Agase
Alex Agase
-External links:...

 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
Mike Adamle
Michael David "Mike" Adamle is a sports personality and former National Football League player. He is best known as the co-host of American Gladiators series for seven years....

, who is also now a member of the Chicago media.

After graduating from Northwestern, Telander was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs
Kansas City Chiefs
The Kansas City Chiefs are a professional American football team based in Kansas City, Missouri. They are a member of the Western Division of the American Football Conference in the National Football League . Originally named the Dallas Texans, the club was founded by Lamar Hunt in 1960 as a...

 in 1971
1971 NFL Draft
The 1971 National Football League Draft was held on January 28–29, 1971.-Player selections:-Round one:-Round two:-Round three:-Round four:-Round five:-Round six:-Round seven:-Round eight:-Round nine:-Round ten:...

 but was cut in training camp. Soon after, he moved to New York where he played basketball on city playgrounds and wrote the book Heaven Is A Playground
Heaven Is a Playground
Heaven Is a Playground is a 1976 book by Rick Telander. It describes Telander's observations of the streetball culture in Brooklyn during the summer of 1974. Among the players featured in the book are Fly Williams and Albert King...

, which later was made into a movie. In the 1980s, he was a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...

 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 Miami
The University of Miami is a private, non-sectarian university founded in 1925 with its main campus in Coral Gables, Florida, a medical campus in Miami city proper at Civic Center, and an oceanographic research facility on Virginia Key., the university currently enrolls 15,629 students in 12...

, University of Oklahoma
University of Oklahoma
The University of Oklahoma is a coeducational public research university located in Norman, Oklahoma. Founded in 1890, it existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two became the state of Oklahoma. the university had 29,931 students enrolled, most located at its...

, University of South Carolina
University of South Carolina steroid scandal
In October 1988, Sports Illustrated published a lengthy article on alleged steroid abuse in the football program at the University of South Carolina...

, and Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University is a private university in Dallas, Texas, United States. Founded in 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, SMU operates campuses in Dallas, Plano, and Taos, New Mexico. SMU is owned by the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church...

. He also observed what he believed to be hypocrisy by the National Collegiate Athletic Association
National Collegiate Athletic Association
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is a semi-voluntary association of 1,281 institutions, conferences, organizations and individuals that organizes the athletic programs of many colleges and universities in the United States...

 as the college athletes would help the NCAA and the member schools make money, yet couldn't share in the wealth. Telander's 1990 book The Hundred-Yard Lie addressed the problems in college football.

In Dec. 1985, Telander was invited to be a regular panelist on The Sportswriters on TV, a debut weekly show featuring the Chicago Tribune's
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...

 Bill Jauss, the Daily Southtown's
Daily Southtown
The SouthtownStar is a newspaper of the Chicago, Illinois metropolitan area that covers the south suburbs of Chicago and the South Side neighborhoods of the city - a wide region known as the Chicago Southland. Its popular slogan is "People Up North Just Don't Get It"...

 Bill Gleason and former boxing promoter Ben Bentley. Telander was 20 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
The Sports Reporters
The Sports Reporters is a sports talk show that airs on ESPN at 9:30 a.m. ET every Sunday morning . It is broadcast from Bristol, Connecticut at the main ESPN studios. However, before 1999, it was broadcast from a studio in Manhattan. and from 1999-2010 it was recorded at the ESPN Zone at Times...

 (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
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...

, and host a radio show on WSCR
WSCR
WSCR is a sports radio station in the Chicago, Illinois radio market. The station is owned by CBS Radio and transmits on 670 kHz on the AM dial. Its transmitter is located just off Army Trail Road in Bloomingdale, which is a western suburb of Chicago. It is known as "The Score," and has been on...

.

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 six times (most recently 2008) and has won six Peter Lisagor Wards 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.

2008 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot controversy

In January 2008, Telander caused waves by refusing to submit a 2008 baseball Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame
A hall of fame, wall of fame, walk of fame, walk of stars or avenue of stars is a type of attraction established for any field of endeavor to honor individuals of noteworthy achievement in that field...

 ballot, citing frustration with steroid
Steroid
A steroid is a type of organic compound that contains a characteristic arrangement of four cycloalkane rings that are joined to each other. Examples of steroids include the dietary fat cholesterol, the sex hormones estradiol and testosterone, and the anti-inflammatory drug dexamethasone.The core...

 issues troubling baseball. He mentioned in his January 9, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times
Chicago Sun-Times
The Chicago Sun-Times is an American daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois. It is the flagship paper of the Sun-Times Media Group.-History:The Chicago Sun-Times is the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the city...

 column how he can't trust anyone on the ballot, and as such can't vote for any of them. Telander used Andre Dawson
Andre Dawson
Andre Nolan Dawson , nicknamed "The Hawk", is an American former center fielder and right fielder. During a 21-year baseball career, he played for four different teams, spending most of his career with the Montreal Expos and Chicago Cubs .An 8-time National League All-Star, he was named the...

 as an example of someone he doesn't believe ever used steroids, but also said he (Telander) could never completely know for certain. Of note is the fact that Telander voted for two known steroid users, José Canseco
José Canseco
José Canseco Capas, Jr. is a Cuban-American professional baseball manager, outfielder, and designated hitter for the Yuma Scorpions of the North American League and former Major League Baseball player. He is the identical twin brother of former major league player and current teammate Ozzie Canseco...

 and Ken Caminiti
Ken Caminiti
Kenneth Gene Caminiti was an American third baseman in Major League Baseball and the 1996 National League Most Valuable Player. He was born in Hanford, California, and attended San Jose State University...

 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
Mike North
Mike North is an American radio sports personality working for Clear Channel Communications as a weekend host on their Fox Sports Radio subsidiary. He was the co-host of the Monsters in the Morning with Dan Jiggetts on Comcast SportsNet Chicago in 2009 and was a sports talk radio show host at WSCR...

 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.

Next Year Day

In 2008, Telander partnered with The Heckler (newspaper)
The Heckler (newspaper)
The Heckler is a satirical sports newspaper created in 2003 by Brad Zibung and George Ellis . It is based in Chicago and chronicles the pratfalls of the fabled Chicago Cubs baseball club as well as other major Chicago sports teams and athletes.The Heckler has received acclaim from the Chicago...

 to host the 100th Annual Next Year Day. Nearly 1,000 people attended, including famous Cubs fan Bill Murray
Bill Murray
William James "Bill" Murray is an American actor and comedian. He first gained national exposure on Saturday Night Live in which he earned an Emmy Award and later went on to star in a number of critically and commercially successful comedic films, including Caddyshack , Ghostbusters , and...

. The 101st Annual Next Year Day was held Friday, April 3, 2009, at Harry Caray's Tavern in Chicago's River North neighborhood.
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