PEORIA MAGAZINE July 2022

W O R D C O U N T

FAMED SPORTSWRITER TRIES HAND AT POETRY Peoria native Rick Telander turns ‘fever dream’ into “Sweet Dreams’

BY PHIL LUCI ANO

I n the longest project of Rick Telander’s career, the renowned sportswriter aims at a new audience: Kids. Specifically, sick kids. For nearly 30 years, the Peoria native – whose professional resume includes stints at ESPN, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Sun-Times – has been working on a bedtime book that seeks to soothe ailing children. The result is the vivid and visceral Sweet Dreams: Poems and Paintings for the Child Abed . It’s not for sale yet. However, thanks to donors, copies soon will be given to children connected to RonaldMcDonald House Charities in Peoria and Chicago. Meantime, Telander is dreaming big: He wants to get

earned him multiple national sportswriting awards. Meantime, he and wife Judy raised four daughters. During his meager free time, Telander wrote eight books, including Heaven Is a Playground , later adapted into a movie and named one of the “ten best sports books of all time” by Playboy Magazine . But the ninth book? It’s been not only a labor of love, but of time – thanks to a long-ago fever dream. “I started this book, unwit tingly, almost three decades ago when I was lying in a hos pital for two-and-a-half weeks, hooked up to multiple tubes, eating nothing, so nauseated from an infected appendix and intestine that I couldn’t toler

brought himtoNorthwesternUniversity, where he rode the bench until coaches put him at defensive back, where he made All-Big Ten his senior season. In 1971, he was drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs but got cut in training camp. Sti l l, he stuck with sports. He freelanced for Sports Il lustrated before becoming a senior writer in the 1980s. He later appeared on ESPN on “The Sports Reporters” and other shows. In 1995, he joined the Chicago Sun-Times, where he continues to write a sports column. His work has

ate reading, watching TV, listening to music, or even staring at the wallpa per,” Telander said. “All I could do was make up things in my head. That’s when I wrote the first few poems for this book.” After Telander got discharged, he decided to continue to write similar poems, aiming for an audience of ailing youths. “I wanted to collect them into an illustrated book for children who might be sick in bed, or taking a nap, or

a book into the hands of every child whose family stays at any of the 350 plus RonaldMcDonald House Charities across the globe. “That’s my goal,” said Telander, 73. “Why not?” He has a long track record of setting the bar high, then hopping over it. So why not, indeed? At Peoria’s Richwoods High School, Telander was an al l-conference quarterback. A football scholarship

80 JULY 2022 PEORIA MAGAZINE