Rick is a native of Peoria, Illinois and a graduate of Northwestern University where he was an All-Big Ten cornerback and a two-time All-Big Ten Academic selection. He graduated in 1971 with a B.A. in English Literature, and after a brief shot at the NFL he began his writing career.
Rick has written for newspapers and magazines as varied as Esquire, National Wildlife, Premiere, TV Guide, Playboy, Men’s Journal, PTA Magazine, American Libraries, Baseball Digest, Outside, and others. In 1972, Sports Illustrated published his first national article. It was about the jolt of being done with football, and being forced to, as Kansas City head coach Hank Stram advised him, “get on with your life.” That article would eventually become a book and later be made into a film.
Rick was a Special Contributor for Sports Illustrated for eight years, before joining the magazine full time as a Senior Writer in 1981. In 1995 he left SI to become the senior sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, a position he holds to this day. He has written nine books and has had his articles collected in over two dozen anthologies. His work was nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize. He has been named Illinois Sportswriter of the Year eight times and has had eight stories named to the Best American Sports Writing anthology. In 2018 he received the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for a series he wrote on violence in inner city Chicago high schools and the saving force of sport. In 2020 he received the Dan Jenkins Excellence in Sports Writing Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of Texas. And in 2021 he was voted into the National Sports Media Hall of Fame.
If being a college athlete and award winning writer wasn’t enough, Rick is a musician and part of a band, the Del-Crustaceans, that started when he was a senior in college with buddies from a poetry class. They are still performing to this day. He is also an artist with his work ranging from pen and ink drawings, to sketches, Day-Glo signs, and even spray-painted graffiti on urban walls. In 2018 he had his first showing at the Adventureland Gallery in Chicago