Sis! Boom! Bah! Humbug! by Rick Reilly

971 Words2 Pages

In the essay “Sis! Boom! Bah! Humbug!” by Rick Reilly he analyzes the sport of cheerleading and tells us why he does not care for the sport. His essay starts off stating “ Every Friday night on America’s high school football fields it’s the same old story. Broken bones. Senseless Violence. Clashing egos. “ I think that Reilly has a good opening sentence because right away it grasps the readers attention because it is so strongly worded. It was also good that he starts his first paragraph off with a statistic and a fact, but after that the rest of the essay seems to flow with just his own stories and personal opinions of what he thinks about the sport.

There are millions of cheerleaders in America and all around the world today. They stand in front of hundreds of fans and try their best to get the crowd pumped up. They stand outside braving the cold as they are rained, sleeted, and even snowed on. It’s probably the only sport I can think of where you would have to wear hardly any warm clothing and still have to pump the crowd up. How can you not call that a sport?

Reilly’s Sports Illustrated column is not only inaccurate and full of unreliable information, but also he targeted cheerleaders based on one of his personal opinions. He didn’t write his article based on statistics and reliable information. Reilly simply wrote it based on what he thought with very few sources. In the first sentence he states “Every Friday night on America’s high school football fields, it’s the same old story. Broken bones. Senseless violence. Clashing egos.” To an extent this may be true for some cheerleaders, but the way that this opening statement is worded, it makes it sound like Reilly is saying this for every cheerleader out there. If this state...

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... that is not what this argument is supposed to state. It’s almost like he was trying to freak people out about the sport with the story about the plastic surgery. Every sport has injuries, it doesn’t matter what it is. We see it all the time, whether it be cheerleading, football, basketball, hockey, figure skating, soccer, it really doesn’t matter, it happens with practically every sport. Even though this injury sounds awful and happened with cheerleading, that doesn’t mean that it happens to every cheerleader. The chances of this happening are very slim. So, to write this story in his article really wasn’t necessary. This essay should have included more evidence to back all the arguments up, and it didn’t. It was very offensive toward a number of targeted groups, and was more an essay about Reilly’s personal opinion, rather than the claim he was trying to make.

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