By Steve Woodward
We often react with surprise to news that a famous person from a bygone era has passed.
“Gee, I thought he’d died years ago.”
This was my reaction to the pending death of Sports Illustrated, the former gold standard of sports journalism powered by a roster of gifted writers, diligent researchers, world-class photographers and sage editors.
SI delivered context and depth in the aftermath of the riveting contests of the day. It also engaged in investigative journalism. More than 20 years ago the magazine essentially stopped baseball’s perilous downward spiral by exposing steroid abuse by its top players.
Reporter Tom Verducci produced “Totally Juiced” in May 2002, a bombshell anchored in the admissions of a declining player, Ken Caminiti of the Atlanta Braves.
A cold analysis of the demise of SI, along with numerous other formerly iconic magazines, is that the medium is obsolete, its business model is broken and sports fans of the social media age have no interest in reading “literature”. Today’s “journalists” are mindless masters of mere click bait. On steroids.
The parent company that fired more than 100 staffers last week claims SI is not going anywhere, that it’s merely transitioning into its next iteration. If that includes repeats of chubby swimsuit edition cover models, or Martha Stewart, don’t bother.
As a recovering sports journalist, memories of SI‘s always anticipated magazine covers, deft prose, and relationships I forged with some of its writers, do find me awash in nostalgia. But let’s face it, SI reigned supreme because it focused on sports and its glorious trivialities, on balls and strikes, on the quirky personalities of our idols, and on the drama of human athletic achievement.
It distilled into a tidy magazine all of the elements of sport that mattered to American culture in an age of innocence. Today, the culture is shattered and many uniquely American sports no longer matter (boxing, hockey, horse racing), or have been hijacked by the woke Left. The National Football League increasingly tolerates football games as platforms to denounce racism and inequality, even if that requires turning its back on the American flag.
When SI‘s Peter King was the dean of pro football writers, the NFL commissioner was not under a microscope addressing the league’s indifference toward systemic racism and concussion protocols. He was an entertainment czar, which is kind of the point of pro sports. Covering pro football used to be about stories of remarkable plays under pressure, the college draft, controversial penalties imposed by the refs, and occasional rules changes. Now? Taylor Swift. Polite tackling. The so-called black national anthem.
Through the decades, Sports Illustrated was an elegant messenger, conveying reverence accorded athletes and coaches of a forgotten era. Athletes were heroes, giants worthy of respect and awe. Ted Williams. Mickey Mantle. Johnny Unitas. Julius Erving. Arnold Palmer. Muhammad Ali. Willie Shoemaker.
And the coaches were well dressed, dignified field marshals. Lombardi. Wooten. Alston. Auerbach. Landry. Their players called them sir.
In a time when little was televised compared to now, SI brought the sports landscape to life by showcasing writers who often were as well known as their subject matters.
Hubert Warren Wind on golf. (A Cambridge English literature master’s degree scholar, and typical gentleman sports journalist of the day, credited with naming “Amen Corner” — holes 11-13 — at The Masters golf tournament). After Wind came the irreverent Texan, Dan Jenkins, who chronicled the mainstreaming of golf in the era of Palmer, Nicklaus and Player. There was William Nack on horse racing. Jack McCallum on the NBA. Ron Fimrite and Peter Gammons on baseball. Kenny Moore on track and field. Frank Deford on, well, everything.
An aspiring sports journalist, I viewed these guys as royalty. In later years, they became colleagues but never equals. By now many have died, as has their profession. Their legacies prevail but their craft is gone, as obsolete as a typewriter or a newsstand.
Jenkins knew all of golf’s luminaries but never lost his connection to his readers, tortured pursuers of the white ball. In one of his first renderings for SI, he wrote: “The devoted golfer is an anguished soul who has learned a lot about putting just the way an avalanche victim has learned a lot about snow.”
Nack, who became a friend as we prowled the backside of thoroughbred tracks such as Churchill Downs, was a particularly gifted writer best remembered as Secretariat’s biographer, back when horse racing still stirred the nation’s soul.
He was on hand for Secretariat’s final race in Toronto, of all places. “(Secretariat) had turned for home, appearing out of a dark drizzle at Woodbine … in the last race of his career, 12 in front and steam puffing from his nostrils as from a factory whistle, bounding like some mythical beast out of Greek lore.”
The media of the 21st century is not only largely uncurious and unserious but unburdened by responsibility and devoid of talent. It is maddening enough that activists have replaced journalists, seeking not to chronicle but corrupt, not to tell the story but to become the story, especially in the cultural and political realms. And it is saddening that the same betrayal of a noble craft has hijacked how Americans experience sports events and their central figures.
A recent front page headline in USA Today‘s Sports section, above a column by a lame excuse for a “writer”, blared, “NFL owners created league’s diversity woes. GMs of color shouldn’t have to fix them.” The wrist wringing piece of garbage laments team owners’ “long history of discrimination”.
The same columnist is a fierce defender of biological men and their right to compete in women’s sports. Yes, you read that correctly. Nancy Armor wrote the following and USA Today published it: “Don’t be fooled by the people who screech about ‘fairness’ to cloak their bigotry toward transgender girls and women, the transgender girls and women who have the audacity to want to play sports, in particular.”
There is good news. USA Today might as well be rebranded USA Yesterday. That’s when it was last relevant. Long ago and far away. In fact, you’re likely to find stacks of unread editions alongside cases of unopened cans of Bud Light.
R.I.P., Sports Illustrated. Journalism’s graveyard is running out of space, but there is still room for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, soon, USA Today.
