In 1980, a U.S. senator approached the managing editor of a weekly magazine and said, “I’d trade jobs with you any day.” The magazine was Sports Illustrated and the anecdote speaks to the hallowed place it once held in American life.
But SI’s print edition has been in decline for several years – a sad fall from grace for what was once a towering presence in American life. And the announcement on Friday that much of the staff was being laid off is likely to be the final nail in its coffin.
Sports have traditionally been a refuge from the pressures of everyday life and reading about sports has been part of the escape. When people still read newspapers printed on paper, it was often said that Sports was the section to read first because you could find good news about human achievement. The rest of the newspaper, went the saw, was stuffed with bad news.
While that remains (mostly) true, sports writing has had to evolve as the media landscape has been transformed. News about sports was once the province of newspapers and a few magazines, with some coverage on radio and TV. The smartphone has given every sports fan instant access to virtually every statistic and highlight they could ever think of consuming.
That could not have been foreseen by Henry Luce’s Time Inc. when it launched Sports Illustrated in August 1954, to chronicle what it proclaimed was a “golden age” of sports. There was no Internet, no ESPN, and no TV in many households. That gave the magazine decades to provide a window on the sports world that couldn’t be found anywhere else.
Its bread and butter was football, basketball, and baseball – with healthy doses of golf, tennis, and boxing – but more obscure events were also covered: dog shows, water polo matches, the Soap Box Derby, and even the popularity of dominoes in San Francisco. (That article, like every other one mentioned in this article, can be accessed at si.com/vault.)
As its name would suggest, photos – of athletes and, yes, swimsuit models – were central to Sports Illustrated’s identity. But it was the magazine’s writers who truly illustrated the essence of sports. With the luxury of weekly deadlines (and, for some writers, the freedom to spend months reporting their stories), complemented by generous expense accounts that could be utilized to facilitate access to sources, SI captured events and personalities in ways that were unthinkable to their daily brethren.
Stories were typically infused with colorful language and there were often sly allusions to historical figures and pop-culture celebrities. Only the New Yorker, declared one writer in 1976, “has been as effective [as SI] in sponsoring good writing with a certain wry touch.”
Indeed, for much of its history, Sports Illustrated was a magazine for writers (as opposed to that other dreaded specimen: editors). And the best of them – such as Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, and Gary Smith – served up riveting, deeply-reported stories that could exceed 5,000 words and take your breath away. Literally. I vividly recall sitting in my college library in the spring of 1989, devouring a beautiful profile of John Wooden. Reading a passage about the death of Wooden’s wife left me with the sensation of being sucker-punched.
The extended access to key figures in the sports world and beyond often translated to eye-popping accounts. A personal favorite is Curry Kirkpatrick’s 1991 account of spending time with a peripatetic incumbent President, George H.W. Bush.
The formula worked. The magazine once had more than three million paying subscribers and attracted attention that would be unthinkable for a weekly magazine today. In 1966, Notre Dame students were so upset with how the football team was characterized in an article that they bought 1,200 copies of the issue and burned them on campus.
Rivals like Sport, Inside Sports, and The Sporting News nipped at SI’s heels, but none had its staying power. The author of a book about Sports Illustrated wrote that when the magazine was in its glory days, it “achieved that rare confluence of pop cultural success: being commercially successful, critically praised, and culturally significant.” Indeed, the magazine published pieces by a murderer’s row of literary luminaries: Faulkner, Frost, Halberstam, Hemingway, Kerouac, Michener, Plimpton, and Steinbeck, to name a few.
With that attention also came reverence. Gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated became an emblem of athletic stardom and, said some, a harbinger of poor performance. A few athletes have made dozens of appearances. Michael Jordan topped the list, with 50. The covers could be iconic. In November 1984, the recently re-elected President, Ronald Reagan, stood between Patrick Ewing and John Thompson from defending national basketball champion Georgetown. “There They Go Again” read the oh-so-clever headline.
But even those stars who were celebrated on the cover could get roughed up inside the magazine. In 1994, Mr. Jordan was so upset with the coverage of his ill-advised attempt to become a professional baseball player that he vowed never to speak to SI again – a vow he appears to have kept.
My own insight into SI’s excellence came a few years ago, when I spent months working on a profile of Olympic gold medal swimmer Katie Ledecky for a magazine called SwimSwam. I tried to capture the distinctive prose, revealing details, and gripping narrative that were SI’s hallmarks. I was quite proud of the final product – until reading SI’s profile of Ms. Ledecky a few months later. Written by master stylist S.L. Price, it was the literary equivalent of a John Lennon song. Mine, by comparison, read like John Denver.
For everything there’s been to cherish about SI, it has not been without its faults: politics often crept into the pages, which was annoying for those of us who prefer sports writing that sticks to . . . sports. And some of its covers were unintentionally comical, like the one predicting that football legend Jim Brown would be making a comeback at the age of 47 (he didn’t). But the magazine’s problems ran much deeper in recent years, which led to Time Inc. offloading it to Meredith Inc, which promptly sold it again – to owners with no history in news.
Whether SI was primarily a victim of management failures or market forces is a debate that will endure for years (alas, mostly among underpaid and overworked journalists). Whatever the answer, it’s clear that younger, attention-addled sports fans who get sports news delivered to their phones in real time probably won’t even notice SI falling off the journalism landscape.
For most of its 65+ years, SI more than met the lofty objective laid down in the magazine’s inaugural issue: to be “the accepted and essential weekly reporter of the Wonderful World of Sport.” Its presence enriched sports, the journalistic trade, and everyday life. For anyone who used to anxiously await SI’s arrival each week via what now seems like a delightfully antiquated distribution channel (printing press to postal service to mailbox), watching the magazine deteriorate has had the feel of witnessing the decline of a once-iconic athlete. But as SI itself once said when such an athlete was bidding farewell, “It’s Been Great!”
