Sports Illustrated is dead and I'm not feeling so hot myself

   

     Whenever I try to convey the bounty that the Chicago Sun-Times offers its readers every weekend with the Sports Saturday wrapper, I say, "It's like Sports Illustrated." Meaning that it is packed with long, complex, interesting articles and dramatic photos. When I stumble across the rare sports story I want to cover, like an older couple hosting three rising hockey players, or a blind radio color commentator, I try to run it on a Saturday, because sports will both package it beautifully and give me room to tell a tale.
     Sports Illustrated was such high quality that you didn't even need to particularly appreciate professional athletics to enjoy it — I remember the raw envy I felt, as a writer, reading an in-depth SI piece on the enormous challenge of washing the laundry for the National Football League. What a great idea, perfectly executed.
    While I wrote my share of sports stories back in the day — golfing in Montego Bay with Arnold Palmer, sitting down to talk football with Tom Landry before a Dallas Cowboys game — I only wrote one piece for Sports Illustrated: a quirky take on how TV cowboy star Roy Rogers invented sports marketing and taught the NFL to license its logos. 

     I was proud of that notch on my belt, and would have loved to show it off, had anybody cared. But they absolutely did not. Not a soul. 

     Why would anyone? Magazines have pretty much washed away in the howling media wordstorm. Time, Life, Newsweek, once-mighty gold-plated brand names that formed the apex of the profession. Now tiny mockeries of their mighty pasts, recognized by a narrowing sliver of the consumer world, like the threadbare names of those defunct products revived in the Lillian Vernon catalogue: Lemon-Up. Prell. Necco Wafers. A familiar logo to slap on a pale imitation slightly resembling its former self.

     But I took comfort knowing SI was there, hanging on. Though battered by the same faltering economic model clubbing down all journalism — the Washington Post is also about to jettison a chunk of its reporters — it still existed.
     Until Friday, when Sports Illustrated fired its entire staff. About 80 journalists, over the side, into the icy chop that awaits the unemployed. From now on, it'll be a nostalgia act, an aggregator. A hook to bait with repackaged material jamming the racks at Walgreens. 
     The temptation is to mourn. But I'm tired of mourning. It's boring. I thought I'd like to talk about what happened, and called my friend, Rick Telander, the dean of American sports columnists, who wrote for Sports Illustrated for 25 years. He knew. He'd make sure that whatever I said at least carried a whiff of veracity.
     "I shouldn't say Sports Illustrated just died because it's already long dead, right?" I said, beginning the conversation. This is just the utter end, the ritual abusing of the corpse. 

     What happened? 

     "Fans know more than we do," said Rick. "And everybody's a photographer."
     Nothing to be done?
     "You're protesting the world," he said. "You're protesting modernity."
     Well, I'm not protesting anything. Just noticing it. I've long said, "Technology wins." No matter how much you liked human telephone operators, they're still gone.
     "To fight it is tilting at windmills," Rick continued. "To bitch about it too much is to bitch about getting old."
     Getting old does bite, particularly the part where ...  no. There's too much of that already. Rick isn't interested in shaking his fist at the young social media stars tramping all over our once exclusive lawn, and neither am I.
     "Time for journalists to figure this out, and stop worrying about the way it used to be," he said. "It's never going back, ever. Taylor Swift has 550 million followers. She has more power than all the newspapers in the United States."
     See, that's what journalists bring to the table. We see what's going on, and we say it. Even if we don't like it. Even if the truth is in no way optimistic — for us. Our houses are on fire; the least we can do is describe the flames, a final act of fealty to our fading vocation.
     "It's the end of what I've chosen as my profession," Rick said. "I never took a vow of irrelevance. That was never part of the deal. Nobody cares. Writing has become a commodity. Everyone can do it."
     I could argue that — actually, everyone can't do it. Obviously. What everyone can do is read, and watch videos, and the time once spent reading a revealing, in-depth profile of a player is now spent watching his girlfriend watch him. There is only so much time in a day.

     "Nobody under 30 reads a newspaper," said Rick. "Do you see them reading long magazine pieces? They get the stuff on Facebook. Go on their phone. Check out the news, go on TikTok and that's it. Who looks at the byline?"
     He said that there was a time when he knew the top sports columnist in every city in the country. He and Rick Morrissey were discussing this recently.
     "We used to know them all," he said. "We couldn't name a sports columnist in Detroit. I can't name a columnist in the entire United States. None."

     I told Rick that I do what I do, not for the benefit of whatever remnants of an audience might yet remain. But for myself. To satisfy my own curiosity, meet my own standards and, not incidentally, make a living.
     "I still care a lot," said Rick. "I never had a job I've been prouder of. Never dreamed I'd be blindsided like this. Didn't expect technology to make it irrelevant. The whole world is changing. I hate the feeling that the thing I chose to do is irrelevant. But it just is."
     I can't tell you if Telander is right, or I simply find myself in the same place and agree with him completely.  Sometimes it seems what I do is dig a hole in the morning, go to sleep, wake up to find it filled, then dig another one. Rinse. Repeat.
     "Every year we have a job is astounding," he said. "This is what I do. I'll do it until it's over."

     That's two of us then. Playing in an orchestra on an antique bandstand set on a cliff at the edge of the sea. Sawing away at our instruments while, every now and then, with increasing frequency, another chunk of cliff gives way, and a cello, or a couple of bassoons go whistling into the abyss. The symphony falters, the music grows thinner, fainter. But the tempo is resumed, until the next crash, a strangled cry and a pair of cymbals go clanging down the sheer rock face followed by a splash.

      If this all sounds depressing, it shouldn't. Some days fun is had, still, and a shimmer of significance forms far away, a mirage deforming the air for a moment before vanishing. The way I see it, not matter how big music streaming services get, there are still a few artisans left making violins. You don't need to sell them to everybody; you just need to sell them to a few customers whose ears can detect the difference between a tune played on a fine instrument and one buzzed out on a comb wrapped in wax paper. 

     When I went into writing, and was warned about how difficult this line of work was as a career, even then, I liked to quote Daniel Webster. Told that the legal profession was an impossibly crowded field, he replied, "There's always room at the top." I believe that still holds true as the journalistic world empties out. If this is the end, well, then, we will endeavor to shine brightly at the end, just as we did at our beginning.