Rick Telander

Rick Telander is the senior sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Hired in 1995 from Sports Illustrated, 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 had.

Telander is a native of 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.

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.

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