Ode to Sports Illustrated

10/5/2019

With a dollop of guilt, I read about the plague of layoffs at Sports Illustrated.

After all, I dropped my subscription shortly after retiring as a sports columnist at the Times, nearly eight years ago. I no longer needed to keep up with most of the sports; I needed time to read other things. So it’s hard to level blame at the decline of a giant that meant so much to generations of fans and readers.

It’s a sign of the times. I have seen very good newspapers decline or disappear. No sense going over the list. Apparently, the economy does not support the printed word you can hold in your hand and read without having advertisements and other diversions slither into your vision.

Thank goodness the NYT and Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and others keep up the staffs and budgets and the standards to keep track of the scoundrels in our midst.

But Sports Illustrated – once a plush weekly with talent and swagger plus the budget to back them up – has now been sold to something called a digital platform company.

As a young newspaper reporter, I appreciated the writing style -- and space -- that went far beyond the daily accounts in the papers. Stars like Dan Jenkins and Robert Creamer in the early years, Neil Leifer with his camera, always in position, and then young stars like Frank Deford and Gary Smith. It took time to read their articles. These were no tweets, no muscle-twitch fire-the-bum impulses from the Blogosophere.

If I had to pick one article that stood for all the expertise and talent (and space, and money) of Sports Illustrated, I would choose the ode to Secretariat written by my friend Bill (William in his byline) Nack, upon the putting down of the great champion in October of 1989. (As it happened, I had petted Secretariat on his swayed back in May, had felt the earth tremble when he moved. )

Bill loved the big red horse, loved the Bluegrass milieu, and he cried when he got the phone call he had been dreading. Later, Bill went through the self-torture of writing he felt every time, only worse this time. But SI had space, and patience, and when Nack was done, there was the article, the masterpiece.

But Nack was not alone. Like a Secretariat of magazines, Sports Illustrated raced through more decades of stories and stars: Tim Layden with his versatility, Steve Rushin with his columns, Michael Farber on hockey, Tom Verducci with baseball, Grant Wahl treating soccer seriously, Doctor Z -- Paul Zimmernan - with pro football. So many more I could, should, mention.

(Plus, I should note, before SI, there was the great Sport Magazine, RIP, edited for over a decade by my friend Al Silverman, who passed recently. Sport was doing long-form articles long before SI did.)

Then the model began to show its age. Advertisements declined. Attention span declined. People were slinging opinions over the Web. Instant gratification. I’m old. I don’t know 99 percent of what goes on out there in the Web. I get the New Yorker in print form every week, and peruse it ceremoniously, and The New York Times arrives in my driveway every morning, plus its magnificent website, and if I want to find out what my Mets did in the past 24 hours I consult Newsday (paid) or the New York Post (on line.)
Plus hard-covered books, all over our house, plus magazine articles friends send me. More than enough to read. Hence, my tremor of guilt about the imperilment of Sports Illustrated.

Then I read about good people, whom I knew when they were youngsters just breaking in, like Chris Stone, the editor-in-chief, who just got fired by the “digital platform,” whatever that is.

Bill Nack cried over Secretariat. I just shake my head and write this piece…and put it out there…on line.

Thanks, Sports Illustrated, for all the great articles over the years.
* * *
Bill Nack's masterpiece on the death of Secretariat, standing in for all the glorious long pieces in SI:
https://www.si.com/longform/belmont/index.html

NYT article on the talent massacre at SI:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/business/media/sports-illustrated-layoffs.html?searchResultPosition=1

A list of great writers at SI:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sports_Illustrated_writers

The time I petted Secretariat, courtesy of a friend:
https://www.georgevecsey.com/home/category/horse%20racing

john mcdermott link

10/5/2019 12:20:23 pm

I was fortunate very early in my career as a photographer to latch on with Sports Illustrated, probably because they didn't really have anyone who knew much about soccer, let alone how to shoot it, and they gave me a chance because of that. I was lucky, which was indeed fortunate, because I wasn't really all that good a photographer then. They were good to me, generous even, and I grew, shooting all kinds of stories for them from the mid-70's to the mid-90's. I got to work with great writers I admired, people like Kenny Moore, Ron Fimrite, Clive Gammon and Frank Deford. I was published in the company of some legendary photographers, names like Ioos, Kluetmeier, Leifer, Zimmerman and others, I shot the NASL, Pelé's last game at Giants Stadium, a twelve-page picture essay on rugby(imagine anyone doing that today!), bonus pieces(as the long-form pieces in the back of the book were called) on Matt Biondi, Dwight Clark and Renaldo Nehemiah, the US National Team preparing for the 1990 World Cup, Chris Webber ending his college career and one of my absolute favorite assignments of all time, a bonus piece on America's top female shot putter, a wonderful woman named Maren Seidler. Looking back now I realize what a luxury it was to work for SI. Wherever you showed up as "the photographer from SI" doors opened and things happened. You were (almost)always treated as a VIP. Eventually I drifted more and more toward Newsweek, for a number of good reasons, and worked only occasionally for SI. But SI was, and always will be, a high point of my career and I was enormously proud to work for "the magazine". So to see what's happened is heartbreaking. But this didn't just happen all of a sudden. It's been a long, slow, ugly decline, with a lot of damage and heartbreak along the way as good people struggled to keep standards high and the ideal alive. I think now though we can say that SI, the real Sports Illustrated, not the "brand" used to sell tchotchkes and swimsuit calendars, is well and truly dead. RIP, SI...XXX

George Vecsey

10/5/2019 01:34:04 pm

Ciao, John, thank you for mentioning some other giants in photography. You saw SI more closely than I did, obviously, and know what a classy operation it was. You have your own gig going on in Europe now. Love your photos from Napoli (the Maradona image everywhere). Fortunately, the NYT and other great outlets with a web site are going ever more heavily into visual. Those NYT special sections feature photos by long-time friends of mine...and yours.
Keep clicking away (if your equipment actually "clicks" anymore.) Even I can take photos with my iPhone. A presto, GV

Roy Edelsack

10/5/2019 03:14:06 pm

Sports in the 1950s and 1960s was in black-and-white. We watched on our black-and white TVs. Even the newsreels were in black-and-white. For my generation (born 1948) Sports Illustrated was our first view of sports in color and it looked magnificent! The deep color of the NFL uniforms. The brown of Ali's gloves. The green grass of Wimbledon. A complete revelation.

Mad Magazine did a great parody of the rivalry between Sports Illustrated and Sport Magazine. In their telling it was "Sports Sophisticated" versus "Slam Bang Action Sports!" My Dad's take on Sport Magazine was that it had found the secret of sports journalism: write about baseball all-year round. This is no longer true.

George Vecsey

10/5/2019 10:07:24 pm

Hi, Roy: As always, Mad Magazine was onto something...in witty fashion. I grew up with that in junior high school.
Your dad had a good point and so do you about how baseball has been surrounded by other sports.
I'm not sure about the relative place of Sport Magazine, however. I just gave a talk at a memorial for my friend Al Silverman, the late editor of Sport from 1961 through 1972. Before Al, Sport already had a number of serious writers like Arnold Hano (still with us). I remember an epic article by Jack Sher, visiting the Musial home in Dec. of 1948 and encountering the death of Musial's dad...but how gracious the family, and Cardinal players and officials were to help Sher get his article. I used it in my Musial bio.
When I was writing free-lance pieces for Sport in the 60s,Al Silverman (and a colleague Steve Gelman) assigned me to interview Bill Russell, Curt Flood, Frank Robinson and John Mackey -- and got to present them as serious African-American athletes looking to have a major impact on their sports. I wrote about young Peggy Fleming before her 1968 gold medal. I think Sport was already socially aware about issues....and that often in its early decade Sports Illustrated showed the color and excitement of the events but in a very accepting tone. Things got more serious down the line, and so did SI. But Sport was a socially conscious magazine, which suited me perfectly. (I worked for Newsday for most of the 60's and "we" felt we were a more socially aware sports section than the NYT (Bob Lipsyte was ahead of his time, to be sure.) SI has done great work for many decades. Now? Who knows? GV

bruce

10/6/2019 10:38:17 am

george,

i started out with a subscription to sport magazine in 1960 as a 10 year old.

i felt a bit like a grown up reading it.

first magazine i read regularly. it made me realize they were different from newspapers.

then about 50 years ago i subscribed to SI. enjoyed the hell out of the writing for years before drifting away under the weight of reading so much i had to cut something.

also subcribed to newsweek. a friend's father got time so i used to read that, but always preferred newsweek.

pete axthelm was a favourite.

bruce

George Vecsey

10/6/2019 07:03:40 pm

Bruce: Hard to blame other forces when one intentionally cuts a subscription. We have met the enemy...and it is us (Pogo.)
Pete Axthelm was immensely talented, and a great guy. He passed way too young. "Ax."
GV

bruce

10/6/2019 07:54:11 pm

george,

true enough.

part of it was that while I still followed sports, I wasn't as fanatical as I used to be so didn't feel the need.

haven't read any weekly mags for a long, long time.

as for political sports, we have more choices up here in the great white north.

you have two in the usa so the choice is simpler.

we have three major political parties nationally plus the greens seem ready to have a few elected. the bloc Quebecois which is only in Quebec and wants to separate from Canada.

an extreme right party, by our standards, is participating in its first election.

have to think a bit more about voting for a party which might mean you're actually helping a third party.

.veered off topic but there it is.

bruce

Ed Martin

10/7/2019 10:37:31 am

Ah SI, with Time, my first subscriptions, as an alleged grownup, (grad. Student.)

I remember being in Tuscaloosa watching Bear Bryant walking on the Black Warrior River, and marveling that SI actually had a real, live reporter there, Frank Deford, I think, covering Alabama! Do I recall “Beaver Falls, Joe” on a cover, or was that later?

Here’s one, GV, you are probably to young to recall. In the “candy store” I used to buy pulp novels about baseball. Stories like “old guy on last legs,” called on, in desperation, who wins the clutch game, Pennant, Series, and then his arm falls off, figuratively. Or his counterpart comes off the bench to hit the game winning hit.

The other available topic was cowboys, but a kid from Long Island, even one who worked in a stable, wasn’t hot for cowboys.

Ed Martin

10/7/2019 03:44:32 pm

Footnote: Here’s one by John Underwood

CONFIDENT BUT TAKING NOTHING FOR GRANTED, BEAR BRYANT'S CRIMSON TIDE WORKED MONDAY TO SATURDAY FOR THE WIN OVER GEORGIA TECH THAT MADE IT SECOND ONLY TO NOTRE DAME. HERE IS ALABAMA'S WEEK
BY JOHN UNDERWOOD
MONDAY

The week had begun with two rumors for a Tuscaloosan to rub together, neither of them having to do directly with the business at hand: 1) that Alabama already has accepted an invitation to play in the Orange Bowl, 2) that Paul Bryant will retire when the season ends. The latter is a rumor recurrent. It persists in hurdling the facts that Bryant is only 51 years old and loves his work almost as much as Alabamans love him. Mary Harmon Bryant, the coach's wife, a pretty, perceptive woman who shows a lovely set of white teeth for rumor mongers and other people who speak unkindly of her "Papa," believes inalterably that a rumor of that ilk "just naturally gets started at recruitin' time by those old Aubuhn people."

bruce

10/7/2019 03:58:50 pm

very good

Alan Rubin link

10/9/2019 03:40:17 pm

From the beginning, I had subscribed to both Sport and SI until starting college in 1953.

It is nice to know that many of the photos that I had enjoyed was taken by John McD.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Ode to Sports Illustrated

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