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Columnist Rick Reilly of Sports Illustrated continues the media frenzy surrounding Toby “Awesome” Dawson’s search for his birth-parents with a surprisingly poignant yet still questionable piece on Toby’s Olympic journey. I say “surprisingly” because Rick Reilly’s columns almost single-handedly caused me to cancel my subscription to SI. This is the guy who, in past columns, described a famous Korean female pool player with the words “her in all her Asian beauty.” This is the guy who once wrote that Blacks make better wide-receivers in football because, they just are faster than white athletes.

Anyways, in the column, Reilly talks about his own TRA Korean daughter “Rae” and an interesting story about how they met with the birth-mother.

“We adopted Rae at four months, and she was the anti-Toby. She thought constantly about her birth mother, who had to be a princess. Or a movie star.

So when she was 11, we flew to Seoul, even though we were told that her birth mother would not meet with us. Unwed, she’d sneaked away at 16 to have the baby, and only her sister knew. She was married now, with three kids, and she dared not be discovered. And yet — the interpreter told us — not a day went by that she didn’t think of Rae.”

Toby chimes in with his previous attitude towards finding his birth-parents: “Whether it was fear of the unknown or love of his adopted parents, Dawson showed no curiosity about the subject. Didn’t ever go by his Korean middle name — Soo Chul. Complained when his parents dragged him to Korean Heritage Camp. Didn’t want to be anything other than “a blond-haired, blue-eyed regular American kid,” he says. “All I cared about was skiing.”

Reilly then goes on to say that his daughter’s meeting with the bio-mom “filled a hole in her heart” and then suggested that Toby’s would be filled if he found his bio-parents as well…