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ESPN columnist Rick Reilly began at the Los Angeles Times in the same year as his friend and sports colleague Mike Penner. Reilly and his wife helped Penner make the transition to a new identity as Christine Daniels, he writes in a piece for ESPN Magazine.
Mike was a little quiet, a little reclusive, a lot brilliant. He hated going to locker rooms. He preferred staying home, making mix tapes and writing sentences that were chunks of perfection. He once described then-Angels GM Mike Port's fractured syntax as "Port-uguese."Christine was the opposite: gregarious, 100 mph talker, always looking to cover an event, to be seen, the Funmeter pegged, the curls bouncing. She was flirty, always lightly grabbing your arm when she talked, covering her mouth when she laughed, which seemed like all the time.
"Mike hasn't bought shoes in six years," Christine told me once. "I've got 50 new pairs!"
What's heartbreaking is that they were the same person.
Reilly sheds not much light on the suicide, but notes that Daniels once addressed why the transformation at age 49: "Survival...It was this or die."