RIP Sports Illustrated
Looking inward of what SI meant to my life and why it disappeared from my life
The news yesterday that Sports Illustrated was laying off hundreds of employees and on the brink of extinction brought a mixture of reactions, ranging from sadness and looking for your favorite old covers, alongside the not un-accurate sentiment that “it died 11 years ago.”
SI was the gold standard for everything in sports journalism. Actually, you can eliminate the word sports. It was the pinnacle of any magazine. The photos. The writing. The layouts. The features. The Faces in the Crowd. The Life Of Reilly at the back.
My family had a subscription to SI from the early 1980s until sometime in the 1990s. Going to the mailbox every Thursday (or sometimes Friday) to retrieve a new issue was like getting a present each week.
I cut out the covers of SI’s and put them on my walls. I had Will Clark, Mark McGwire and Michael Jordan on one wall, Elle McPherson and Kathy Ireland on another wall.
My name never appeared in Sports Illustrated, but I had a famous interaction with Orel Hershiser captured as a teenager, and later did some casual reporting for the magazine.
Let’s start with the “you were lucky, Hershiser” story because it goes to show the power of SI back then.
It was roughly a week after the Dodgers upset my beloved Oakland A’s in the 1988 World Series. The new SI arrived with Hershiser on the cover. My friend Corey Kell called and asked if I read the story about Hershiser. I told Corey that I was still too depressed and didn’t want to read it. He insisted that I at least read the final paragraph.
The A’s fan that Peter Gammons quoted? It was 15-year-old me. Corey knew it was me because he was standing right next to me when I blurted it out to Hershiser. (Yes, he was a subscriber too. All the kids in my baseball-obsessed friend group had subscriptions.)
That interaction became my sales pitch to publishers when I was trying to sell a book about the 1988 Dodgers. It worked! Triumph Books published my book in 2013, Hershiser wrote the Foreword, and the Introduction chapter is all about my interactions with Hershiser over the years.
It’s no exaggeration to say I learned more about writing from reading SI than anything in a classroom. It was my gateway to Journalism and millions more are like me. It seemed like everyone at The Daily Aztec sports section had the same experience.
I devoured the 1997 book about SI, titled “The Franchise” and dreamed that one day I’d develop the talent to work for the magazine. My byline never appeared, but I did collect a few paychecks for them.
SI was so successful they used to put a MLB beat writer from every team on a quasi-retainer to just feed them background information whenever needed. I was their A’s reporter. I’m pretty sure they did the same with every NFL and NBA team.
I’d send a huge file about the A’s going into the start of each season to help prepare for their MLB preview issue. Again, none of my words ever appeared in print. Whoever was assigned the A’s, or AL West, would use my document as background before doing their own research and reporting.
Other times, it was silly stuff. I’d ask Mark Kotsay his favorite Dad joke or collect anonymous surveys from players. I’d see my uncredited work appear in SI’s pages and it would mean as much as any A1 story I wrote for The Oakland Tribune. It wasn’t a byline, but was ecstatic to add, “Reporting for Sports Illustrated” on my resume.
It’s still there on my resume because the brand meant something. At its peak, SI had over 20 million people read each issue.
The demise of magazines and newspapers over the last two decades is now old news. But I naively always felt the heavyweights in media, like SI, would continuously survive.
It’s been a slow death. SI was weekly, then it was 39 issues, then it was bi-weekly, then it was monthly.
You had a bunch of idiotic owners and decision makers that didn’t understand what SI meant. This is an actual line from 2019:
The plan is to attract “an intense community of fans”—not of Sports Illustrated but of specific teams—“who come back to the site every day,” Bill Sornsin, the C.O.O., said in a presentation. “Nobody is actually a fan of ESPN or Sports Illustrated,” he explained. “They’re a fan of the New York Giants, or the Iowa Hawkeyes, or what have you. They’re a fan of their team.”
No! Wrong! People fell in love with the magazine because of what it meant, because of its standards. You could get news about your local teams every day in the local newspaper. If SI wrote about your favorite team, it was because they did something special and deserved the coverage.
Two months ago, Futurism.com discovered that SI was publishing stories that were created by Artificial Intelligence-generated “writers.”
The symbolism was hard to miss. The most respected place for sports Journalism was exposed as fraudulent by a website that was about the future. SI was dead.
While mourning the demise of Sports Illustrated, I searched for some of my favorite covers, and read threads on social media of others doing the same. Here are some of my favorites.
I also looked inward. Why did I stop subscribing to the magazine?
I kept my subscription through college. (It’s quite likely my Dad was paying the bill.) I’m pretty sure I paid it myself after college. But like a lot of other people, I just stopped sometime in the early 2000s.
We get into habits and then we get out of habits. But it strikes me as very odd that I would stop a habit as beneficial as reading the best magazine ever created.
Former SI writer Joe Posnansky summed up eloquently the importance of the magazine:
There is no way to fully describe just how completely Sports Illustrated commanded the sports stage in those lazy days before the internet, before every game was on television. The Super Bowl wasn’t over until SI wrote the story. The Masters didn’t end until Dan Jenkins said it ended. Muhammad Ali’s fight wasn’t complete until you saw the cover in your mailbox.
Alas, Posnansky wrote those words here on Substack. I thought about it more. I spend more than $20 a month on subscriptions here on Substack. Emotionally, I’m happy to support my friends and help grown their audience.
I just looked up the current subscription price for SI. It’s $20 a year or $30 for two years. Objectively, a subscription to SI is drastically better.
We can complain about SI’s clueless executives and greedy owners all we want. But the truth is, we collectively got out of the habit of paying for magazines, of paying for quality news, because something else was available instantly for free online that may or may not be true and certainly wasn’t fact-checked.
We’re the ones who killed SI.