The Life in My Years

Back when I was a tweener/teener, that is to say the olden times, when describing Mick Jagger as spry wasn’t meant as a compliment to a nimble octogenarian rocker, and Dick Nixon was seen as the ultimate in political corruption (Little did we suspect), my three favorite magazines were Playboy, Mad, and Sports Illustrated.

Playboy, for a pimply faced kid’s obvious reason, but also for the oft doubted reason that there was some good copy to be found between bare boobs and bottoms. “Oh sure you liked the writing,” said the doubter. No, really, Playboy is where I discovered not just the female mysteries that parents of their innocent boys didn’t want them to know about. It’s where I discovered the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Jean Shepherd (He’s the guy who wrote A Christmas Story. You know, “You’ll poke your eye out kid.”). I remember trying to stifle my laughter at midnight whenever I was reading a Shepherd short story under the bed covers by flashlight. Since I knew that my parents wouldn’t be down with their kid gawking at the naughty bits I hid the copies that I managed to get my hands on in a field behind the house (Under the mattress is too obvious).

Mad was something I shared with my dad because we shared a love of satire.

And then there was SI. In 1970, a copy of Sports Illustrated ran you 60 cents and it was worth every penny; hell a hundred times that. Sports Illustrated was my first subscription, one that I kept for more than a decade. Every week, I looked forward to the new issue’s arrival in the mail. It took me maybe an hour to devour it cover to cover and I kept stacks of them in my closet.

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The list of writers who contributed to Sports Illustrated is a veritable hall of fame of sports scribes, that includes Dan Jenkins, Ron Fimrite, Tex Maule, George Plimpton, Roy Blount Jr, and Armen Keteyian. These were giants of the genre, names that only would register with, and be appreciated by, OGs like me. If you’re a literary snob who thinks sports writing is just mindless fluffery, then just stop here, go away and do yourself a favor by not commenting because you’ll just embarrass yourself.

SI was imposing enough to attract some illustrious figures from outside of the sports writing sphere. John Steinbeck wrote about fishing; Robert Frost covered the 1956 MLB All-Star Game; William Faulkner contributed to SI twice in 1955, one time covering a New York Rangers hockey game and a few months later, the Kentucky Derby, and in 1968, Jack Kerouac wrote a piece about his personal football life. In 1960, John F. Kennedy used SI to help launch his program to make Americans more aware of physical fitness, and in 1967, Bill Russell went beyond sports to write a piece about Muhammad Ali’s decision to sit out the Vietnam War.

My favorite contributor was Frank Deford, who wrote for SI for 27 years, beginning in 1962. I briefly met Mister Deford (Yes, Mister Deford as he deserves that deference) on the 13th of June, 2012 at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club. When he autographed a copy of his book, Over Time, for me I gushed and fawned like a starstruck teenager, likely making a fool out of myself. I didn’t give a fuck about that then and I don’t now. That was Frank Deford and that man could flat out write.

Maybe it was fitting that at that very moment, Matt Cain of the San Francisco Giants was a few miles away pitching a perfect game at AT&T Park (now called Oracle Park). Damn, what I wouldn’t have given to be sitting in a press box at the ball yard with Mister Deford at that event.

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In 2012, SI was probably already in the final rounds of a bout that it will certainly lose; just another victim of the internet. (No, I’m not a luddite, but that being said, not everything that’s new is perfect. Maybe I’m just sounding like a stodgy old fuck when I say that there was something nice about being able to grab a single print copy of The New York Times, or The Atlantic or any other journal just to read a compelling article without having to go through a paywall to subscribe or “take advantage” of the “free trial offer” and then have to remember to cancel the “free trial” before it turned into a year long subscription. Finding a print copy of any newspaper or magazine of worth is damn nigh impossible and when you do find one, it’s usually nothing more than a pamphlet)

Last Friday I was stunned by the news that Sports Illustrated had just laid off its entire staff. Stunned but still not surprised. And while the count hasn’t yet reached ten, SI is flat on the mat, as dazed as Sonny Liston, after Ali (then, Cassius Clay) connected with a first round shot to Liston’s melon.

This came just a few months after it was revealed that SI articles written under the byline, Drew Ortiz and likely other phonies, were AI generated (further proof that not everything new is necessarily good). SI even featured a photo of the “author,” an AI generated image of an obnoxious looking fictitious hipster. Talk about your punch below the belt.

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What has SI on the brink? The same thing that brought down Sears, Gymboree, Toys ‘R’ Us, Payless ShoeSource, Sports Authority, Radio Shack, The Limited, Wet Seal, Claire’s, Aeropostale and countless other businesses large and small. The same thing that has kicked millions of hard working people to the curb. Greed. Plain old, shithouse greed. The soulless avarice that treats creativity, art, innovation, imagination and hard work as bothersome impediments to making a dirty buck. SI and other stalwarts and their staffs are the victims of pirates like hedge fund managers, private equity bosses, over compensated CEOs and hapless uninspiring consultants who conspire to decide fates while hidden in corporate boardrooms; freebooters who can’t see past their next boat, summer house in The Keys, or a new Bentley.

Sports Illustrated was done in by debt and corporate shenanigans. In January of 2018, SI was purchased along with Time Inc. by Meredith National Media Group. Less than a year later, Meredith sold SI to Authentic Brands Group for $110 million. That same year, 2019, ABG turned and sold SI’s publishing rights to a company called Maven (which would later have its name changed to The Arena Group). The deal called for Arena to pay ABG $15 million a year for ten years.

When Arena found that it was having trouble meeting that annual nut, it did the ridiculous, which is often the most predictable when short sighted rapacious plunderers are at the helm. It laid off the sports magazine’s sports editors because … because … because who in the fuck knows. Why would a company in dire straights give pink slips to its experts? Don’t ask me ask a consultant. Their stock in trade is stupidity.

In August of this year, a company called Simplify Inventions, headed up by a guy named Manoj Bhargava, bought a majority share of Arena. A short time after that, the error riddled AI articles were exposed, which led to an internal investigation. Bhargava held a corporate town hall, and in the fine tradition of CEOs everywhere said, “The amount of useless stuff you guys do is staggering.” Way to inspire the team there Manoj.

The jig was finally up when Arena Group failed to make a debt payment and ABG revoked the publishing license. The next day, Manoj stepped down. Because when the going gets tough the CEO pulls the ripcord on his golden parachute.

According to an article in The Intelligencer, morale was at a low for months. Yeah, that’s what happens when private equity suits treat the revenue producers like shit. It’s what happens when hedge fund buccaneers pass around a company and ravish it like it’s a drug dazed hooker.

SI and other stalwarts were brought down by people whose idea of excellence isn’t the next great product, or sterling customer service, or a piece of journalism that inspires and captures the imagination. They were toppled by people fattening their already obscenely large bank accounts; morally bankrupt empty suits who measure their own merit in pennies saved, jobs slashed and how much more burden they can heap on an already overworked staff. Their idea of a role model is miserly old Scrooge before Marley and his ghostly cohorts made him “woke.”

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It’s been years since I’ve regularly read SI. While I never really followed its travails, I had noticed in the electronic version that its quality had been greatly diminished, despite the work of contributors such as Peter King, Selena Roberts, and Dan Patrick. I guess maybe that’s a good thing because my memories of SI will be of rushing home to the mailbox to see who would be pictured on the cover, who would be named Sportsperson of the Year or which teams were favored to win their sport’s respective titles. I looked forward to the breathtaking, action stopping photos of a bat connecting with a 90 mile an hour fastball, or the bone crushing impact of a linebacker decleating a wide receiver, the majesty of a thoroughbred, or the coinciding grace, power and beauty of an Olympic gymnast.

Sports Illustrated covered sport as it related to important societal issues in articles about the NFL and social justice, Title IX, sports washing, and the corrupt practices of sports governing bodies such as FIFA, the NCAA and the IOC. There was the humorous and fun in an insightful, entertaining piece by George Plimpton about his brief stint as a backup quarterback for the Detroit Lions; a story that begat a book that begat a movie starring Alan Alda. In 1990, SI ran a heartwarming piece about the brief life and euthanasia of Secretariat.

Sports Illustrated wasn’t just balls and strikes, scores, standings and stats. Sports Illustrated was a raconteur. It was a teller of stories by masters of the craft that were inspiring, tragic, poetic, dramatic and poignant. It often ventured outside of the boundary lines of sports and games, yet even when it confined itself to the world of sports, it was covering a segment of society that captivates most of the public. SI will be missed long after the knaves who brought it down will be dead and forgotten. It deserved better than it got.