Sports Illustrated, which has been on life support for the past few years, died a quiet death yesterday when The Arena Group missed a quarterly payment to Authentic Brands Group, as a result of which Authentic Brands Group terminated its license to publish the magazine. Of the 100 or so remaining employees, most were laid off immediately and the rest are expected to be gone within three months.
An ignominious death for a once proud publication and a weekly read for all sports fans? I think so.
None of this surprises me but it still makes me sad and more than a little nostalgic for times not so long ago when Sports Illustrated mattered. I miss those days terribly and that's what I want to write about this morning, as I sip my coffee at Frothy Monkey, the only coffee shop in the neighborhood with the temerity to open and serve a full menu on a Saturday morning with snow and ice on the ground and the temperature hovering at 6 degrees. I guess this is an obituary of sorts, personal to me but one to which others my age can relate.
I can't think of Sports Illustrated without thinking about my mom. As I've written in this space many times before, my mom loved sports like no other woman I've ever known. For better or worse, I inherited my love of sports from her. Our shared love of sports was part of what made our relationship so unique and so close. Whether it was deliberate and intentional on her part or not, it was one of the ways she filled the role of father and mother to me in my youth after my father's death in the early 1970's.
For as long as I can remember, Sports Illustrated arrived like clockwork every week in the mailbox at the end of the driveway of the house where I grew up in Brentwood, Tennessee. My mom and I debated who should have been on the cover of that week's edition of the magazine, more often than not disagreeing with SI's cover choice. It's hard to believe today but being on the cover of SI in those days was a big, big deal.
On so many nights, I lay on the couch reading Sports Illustrated while she sat in her chair - "Archie Bunker's chair," we called it, because it has hers and not mine or my sisters - and discussed with her a Frank Deford or Gary Smith long form piece as I finished it. Often times, the long form piece was about an obscure sport, outdoor activity, or sports person that I knew nothing about. Those conversations with my mom were the best, though, as we discussed what we had learned.
When Sports Illustrated arrived, I turned first to the table of contents with great anticipation, so I could see who had written the four or five feature pieces in that week's issue. Paul Zimmerman on the NFL? Yes! Curry Kirkpatrick on college basketball? And so many others. I also looked to see what the long form piece in the back of the issue was about and who had written it. Frank Deford? S.L. Price? Gary Smith? Or a writer I didn't know as well?
I loved reading "Faces in the Crowd" and marveling at the achievements, often obscure, of high school and small college athletes at schools I had never heard of. I loved reading Steve Rushin's clever, pithy short pieces. Rick Reilly's closing column often irritated me but I read it religiously, too. The in-season short pieces on pro or college football, pro or college basketball, and baseball were a must read, too.
Sometime in junior high school, I started papering a wall of my bedroom with Sports Illustrated covers. That continued, I think, until I had one entire wall covered and it stayed that way through high school.
In my junior and senior years in the nascent days of Brentwood High School, I skipped study hall and went to the school library, where I read old issues of Sports Illustrated in the bound volumes from the library's stacks. Thumbing through back issues of SI for an hour was a kind of heaven for me as a 16 and 17 year old boy who loved sports and good sportswriting. It was all there in old issues of Sports Illustrated.
In September of 1984, I left for college in Knoxville intent on majoring in journalism and becoming a sportswriter and someday writing for Sports Illustrated. For a variety of reasons, I changed my major after my freshman year, a decision I've pondered over the years. I guess it was the right decision considering the current state of print journalism and the fact that at age 57, my interests range far and wide beyond sports. Still, I wonder what might have been.
In college and law school, too, I subscribed to Sports Illustrated or, rather, my mom gifted me a subscription. It felt a little bit like home every week when my issue of SI arrived in the mailbox in Knoxville, whether I was living in the dorm, the fraternity house, an apartment, or later, the house on Kenilworth Lane during my last two years of law school.
In fact, for many years - really, until Alzheimer's disease irrevocably changed her life and our lives, too - my mom gifted me a subscription to Sports Illustrated every year for Christmas. Sure, I was an adult by then, but it meant something to her - and to me - for her to fill out the gift card, wrap it, and place it with my other gifts on Christmas Day. I can still see her stylish handwriting on the gift card with an explanation point at the end announcing she had subscribed to SI, for me, for another year.
Over the years, my conversations with my mom continued about who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated in a given week or a particular article in that week's issue. Our love of sports was still a touchstone of our relationship as it evolved and I became an adult, got married, and had children. On a smaller scale, though, Sports Illustrated was always there and a love of the magazine and what it stood for was something my mom and I shared for what I thought would be forever.
Life happens, of course, and as an adult, you realize that nothing lasts forever. Part of growing older I think, is realizing that there is no forever.
My mom's memory began to fade and our conversations about an article in a particular week's issue of Sports Illustrated slowed to a trickle, then ceased altogether. Alzheimer's disease is a terrible monster for many reasons, but one of the worst things about it is that it robs its victims of the things they really, truly love. It hurts my heart even now when I remember sitting with my mom after we moved her to assisted living and realizing she couldn't follow what was happening in a Vanderbilt basketball game we were watching on television.
When Time Warner sold Sports Illustrated to Authentic Brands Group in 2018, I knew the magazine would never be the same and it wasn't. In short order, the number of issues was reduced until Sports Illustrated became a monthly publication.
SI for Kids was a big hit with my boys, which was cool. As they got older, they thoroughly enjoyed reading Sports Illustrated when it arrived each month, too, much as I had at their age. JP and Joe didn't share my sadness and concern over a magazine that was quite obviously on life support, though, because they didn't know that a different, better version of SI had ever existed.
I think that's what makes me the saddest of all. I will never get to have the weekly conversations with my sons that I had with my mom about the best version of Sports Illustrated.
Truth be told, I stopped reading Sports Illustrated some time ago. It was too hard for me to read it, somehow, understanding that it was a shell of what it had once been. All, or almost all, of the best writers had left. In December 2023, no one was surprised to learn that SI.com had used artificial intelligence to ghostwrite more than once story on the website. That's how far things had fallen at Sports Illustrated.
I'll close quoting a passage from Ernest Hemingway's The Son Also Rises.
"How do you go bankrupt?" Bill asks.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
How did Sports Illustrated die? Gradually and then suddenly.
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