My heroes have mostly been sports journalists, many of whom lived in a magical land called Sports Illustrated. The spiritual home of literary excellence, compelling narratives and revelatory insight, SI was Frank Deford, Roy Blount Jr., Dan Jenkins, Kenny Moore, Gary Smith and plenty more—and I was among the millions who wanted to participate, on some level, in the fun those people were getting away with.
But goodbye to all that. SI’s slow death in the internet age last year was hastened by the equivalent to committing suicide, when the magazine was accused of using artificial-intelligence-generated stories, complete with fake bylines. That sullied SI’s reputation far more than the cheap grab for attention with its annual swimsuit edition, which never had any more to do with sports and sportswriting than old claims by Playboy faithful that they treasured that publication “for the articles.”
Anyway, with SI’s massive layoffs this month, Valhalla is being boarded up. The money-changers who now own the brand are shutting down a primary nurturing place for future knights of the keyboard—as baseball’s sardonic superstar Ted Williams called reporters so adept at covering the business of competitive duels.
I am reminded of Deford’s observation in his 2012 memoir, “Over Time,” in which he predicted that in a not-too-distance life “no one will appreciate what sportswriting was really like at its apogee. I fear all you’d know would be blogs and/or statistics—the pole dancing of sports journalism.”
For followers of athletic entertainment—which certainly will continue to proliferate—the current ruling beast, ESPN, surely will carry on, along with countless podcasts and squawk-radio outlets. But those don’t give you elaborate storytelling, the kind of crafted writing that made you feel you were at the game and had insight into the participants. As Deford wrote of sites like ESPN, “there’s no poetry in its soul”—none of the kind of enticing prose that moved Sports Illustrated editors to corral such literary giants as John Updike, Jack Kerouac and George Plimpton for the occasional freelance article.
It was another noted SI alum, Pulitzer Prize winner and “Friday Night Lights” author Buzz Bissinger, who recently zeroed in on the great contribution of Sports Illustrated’s murderers’ row of stylish scribes. They showed all of us aspiring wordsmiths, Bissinger wrote, “the difference between sportswriting, a mindless layering of cliché upon cliché, and writing about sports.”
Deford once said that “when people hear you’re a sportswriter, they assume you’re more interested in the first half of the word than the second.” For proof of how the emphasis in fact ought to be on the “writer” part, there was—there used to be—Sports Illustrated.
An early exposure to that point came during my time in the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Late in my senior year, when I was writing a sports column for the Columbia, Mo., city paper run by our J-School, I was summoned one spring day to fetch a widely-known author from the local airport for his appearance on campus.
That was George Plimpton who, at the time, was considered the most successful novelist to deal with the subject of sports. His “participatory journalism”—he wrote of acting in a Western movie, performing a comedy act at Caesars Palace, playing with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra—got the most attention when he wrote of pitching in a Big League exhibition game, sparring with a couple of boxing champions and, especially, training with the NFL’s Detroit Lions in pre-season camp. He first recounted that experience in a 1964 Sports Illustrated series that became his best-selling book (and later a movie), “Paper Lion.”
During our short drive to campus that day in 1969—Plimpton managed, uncomplaining, to fold his lanky 6-foot-4 body into my subcompact MGB—he said that he “would like to get across the idea that I wouldn’t have tried any of these things if I didn’t have a pencil with me at the time. I’m a writer, and I played on these teams to get closer to the people involved.”
Like the crowds of Sports Illustrated heroes I hoped to model, Plimpton perfected that difference between sportswriting and writing about sports. Sports was merely the backdrop for his intriguing yarns. It was typical Sports Illustrated fare. It was the journalism ideal—producing work that was deeply researched and well told.