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What: “The Life of Reilly”

Where: Total/Sports Illustrated, $22.95

So it is Christmas Eve and your shopping list has a few names peeping through the scratchouts. If any of those names like sports, try this offering.

Rick Reilly has been a star at Sports Illustrated for 15 years because he writes like a dream. It wasn’t always that way. He went there from here, learning the difference between nouns and verbs in the halls of The Times and learning the true greatness of writing by hanging around the late Jim Murray. Reilly has written a great amount about Murray, continues to idolize him and declares, to anybody who will listen, that Murray was the best ever. When Reilly was on Murray’s team in the early 1980s, he was just like the rest of us, a happy member of a supporting cast.

But off he went to Sports Illustrated, the magazine that Murray helped create years ago. Reilly was seeking fame and fortune and found both. After years of writing some of the finest-crafted sports stories of our time, he has become the magazine’s back-page columnist, and his weekly offerings are a can’t-miss. Some of them are in this book, which is a collection of his best work. Since he is only in his 40s, this won’t be his last, certainly. Think of it as The First of the Second Best.

Reilly quotes Murray in the introduction as telling him: “There’s no city ordinance says they gotta read you. Make them want to.” Doesn’t sound a lot like Murray, but it works.

There is a column about student-athlete Andy Katzenmoyer, the one-time Ohio State linebacker, who could tackle everything but a textbook.

“It’s funny about Katzenmoyer,” Reilly wrote, on Aug. 31, 1998. “He can fend off three linemen the size of small duplexes and grab a 230-pound running back by the bottom lip and plant him like a rhododendron, but he can’t seem to get his butt out of bed for class.”

On Nov. 9, 1998, Reilly wrote a column about the NBA strike and used a group of striking Peterbilt truck workers in Madison, Tenn., as a backdrop to his commentary

“Every NBA gazillionaire with the gall to feel one gram sorry for himself needs to cart himself and his jewelry to Madison,” Reilly wrote.

He later called the NBA strike similar to a “death match between Michael Bolton and Julio Iglesias. It would be wonderful if, somehow, both sides could lose.”

He also wrote a gut-wrenching column early this year, March 20, about John Wooden and how the coach cherishes his memory of his deceased wife, Nell.

Reilly ends the column as follows: “He [Wooden] smiles. ‘I’m not afraid to die.’ he says. ‘Death is my only chance to be with her again.’ ”

Reilly concludes, “Problem is, we still need him here.”