[Vision2020] Extreme Makeover (Rick Reilly)

[Tom Hansen]

>From the June 29, 2007 "Life of Reilly" (by Rick Reilly) column in Sports
Illustrated -

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Extreme Makeover
By Rick Reilly

At book signings you never know who's going to suddenly be standing in front
of you.  Sure, you'll recognize them.  But when a very tall woman came up to
me at a book signing in L.A., stuck out her hand, and said, "Rick, I'm
Christine Daniels," my mouth fell open like a bad draw bridge.

Because the last time I saw this woman, she was a man.

Her name was Mike Penner, and he and I came up together at the Los Angeles
Times.  She and I.  Whatever.

We were both young sportswriters there in the early 1980s.  We'd play hoops
every Friday, clubbing each other half to death, nearly coming to blows over
it, then laughing about it over tacos afterward.  We'd glug beers together,
catch concerts together, work games together.

And now here she was in two-inch heels, an elegant brown dress, eye shadow,
lip gloss, and a purse.  And, don't take this the wrong way, not bad
looking.  Better than she ever was as a guy, put it that way.

I'd heard about the change, of course.  Everybody in sports had.  Mike
announced it in an amazing column in the Times in April.  Said he was taking
time off and coming back as Ms. Daniels.  And my first thought was, Damn,
this guy was really hurting for a column idea.

Gal.  Whatever.

And my second thought was, How come none of us knew?  Don't know what kind
of hints transsexuals give off, but I sure didn't see any.  Not a neatnik.
Didn't match his underwear to his socks.  Never wanted to get the boys
together for makeovers.  Nothing.  Made me think I wasn't much of a friend.

And now here she was, 6'3" in heels, blue eyes I'd never noticed before,
shoulder-length blonde hair, earrings, and this soft like little Gwyneth
Paltrow voice I hardly recognized.

"Wow!" I said, bolting up from behind the table, unsure where to put my
arms, setting an all-time record for wretched awkwardness.  "What do I do
with you?" I blurted.  

"Well," she cooed, "a hug would be nice."  So we hugged.  Not sure we'd ever
done that before, unless it was in a pileup for a rebound.

Over a couple bottles of wine, I heard the whole amazing story.  As a little
boy, he'd tell his cousins, "I want to be a girl!"  As a teen, he'd secretly
dog-ear pages of dresses he wanted in the Sears catalogue.  As a married
man, he'd lock the door, dress up in frilly things, take Polaroids, then
stuff all of it into a tool box and double lock it.  Tool box on the
outside, lingerie on the inside.

"We are born with this," he wrote in that coming-out column.  "We fight it
as long as we can, and in the end it wins."

The last few years the battle was killing him.  He dreamed of the day he
could shave his legs.  He'd walk past the women's room and cry.  He'd comb
through his columns, trying to get all the "cutes" and "lovelies" and
softness out of them, paranoid about giving himself away.

Now it was Christine clubbing Mike half to death.  "I wasn't suicidal," she
says, "but I could see it from there."

Finally, last August, Mike made the move that his body and mind and two
therapists and three antidepressants were screaming for.  He separated from
his wife, got an apartment, began hormone therapy, and started living
round-the-clock as the woman she knew she was. (She won't say whether she'll
have surgery.)

And now we have the old adventures of new Christine.  She's back, writing
about the world of L.A. sports as incisively and hilariously as Mike ever
did.  She's kept 95% of her friends and lost 100% of the hell.

She's not ready to date, but a guy the other night wouldn't take no for an
answer.  "I had to push him away," she says.  I'm thinking the guy had to be
a bit surprised to find himself flying against a wall.

Next week she plans to pick out one of her 50 pairs of new shoes, slip on
something pretty, and start covering games again.  Which means going into
locker rooms.  Gulp.

"People ask me, 'Will you be nervous?  Are you worried what kind of reaction
you're going to get?'  And I'm like, Are you kidding?  I'll be much less
nervous than I used to be.  I always hated locker rooms.  I hated the whole
jocky, towel-snapping scene.  The men in locker rooms were nothing like the
person I was."

Maybe I wasn't a very good friend to Mike.  But I think I will be better
friends with Christine.  It'll be easy.  In 24 years I've never seen him
like this.

Her.  Whatever.

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho

"We're a town of about 23,000 with 10,000 college students. The college
students are not very active in local elections (thank goodness!)."

- Dale Courtney (March 28, 2007)