Rick Reilly confounds Justin Thomas with extremely awkward Ryder Cup question

Veteran sportswriter and notorious awkward (if not entirely bad) joke–teller (and joke-misser) Rick Reilly really put U.S. Ryder Cup team member Justin Thomas in a mind pretzel on Wednesday morning.

Reilly, now writing for The Athletic in the twilight of an illustrious career that has included stays at Sports Illustrated and ESPN, showed up to Thomas’ media availability at Le Golf National just outside Paris and began with this question: “How much shame is there having your dad be a sportswriter?”

Thomas was perplexed.

So, Reilly asked again: “Your father being a sportswriter, is there a lot of shame in that?”

Thomas’ father isn’t a sportswriter. He’s a golf pro at a course in Kentucky. Mike Thomas is chronicling his son’s Ryder Cup matches in a diary for the Louisville Courier Journal this week, which is most likely what Reilly was referring to. There’s probably a joke in there somewhere about an athlete’s distrust of sports media, but maybe don’t start a news conference by asking a guy if he’s ashamed of his father?

Let’s just stick to the bad golf jokes, Rick.

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Ben Rohrbach is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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