Sports Illustrated layoffs underline the loss of great magazine writing in general
On Feb. 11, the Super Bowl was over. But not so very long ago, it would not have been over until Sports Illustrated said it was.
American sports fans waited at their mailboxes each week for an explanation of what they had seen with their own eyes. In today’s parlance, Sports Illustrated offered closure. It was the dessert, the amen after the hymn.
On Dec. 31, 1967, the temperature in Green Bay — before anyone had heard of wind chill or this “the temperature feels like” nonsense — was 13 below. From SI, we learned the Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith sliced a hole in his jersey so he could nestle his throwing hand next to his belly to keep it warm, and how the Green Bay Packers deked the great Dallas defense to score the winning play.
“The temperature probably will be 100° higher January 14 when Green Bay meets Oakland in Miami's Super Orange Bowl,” the magazine wrote. “But, thawing out in the dressing room, Bob Skoronski, the big tackle whose face was marked and bloody, expressed a sentiment held by most of his teammates. ‘This game,’ he said wearily, ‘was our mark of distinction.’ A distinction so painfully won on the tundra of Green Bay will not melt easily under the warm Florida sun.”
Sports Illustrated, as we knew it, is dead now, the victim of a country that values a private-equity bottom line over art.
Hedge fund executives will argue that business is business, and no one is buying magazines. This is like selling off all your rods and reels and then complaining that no one is buying fish.
People will pay for talent. When Ken Norton broke the jaw on Muhammad Ali in 1973, Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee speculated that his fighter must have been hit with his mouth open. “Always a logical assumption when it comes to Ali,” the magazine dryly noted.
Let’s see Artificial Intelligence write a line like that.
Sports Illustrated was not alone in the golden age of magazines. Grand writers like David Foster Wallace had this to say about cruise ships in Harper’s:
“I have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the ship's Guest Relations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the trapshooting will be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffet is. I now know the precise mixocological difference between a Slippery Nipple and a Fuzzy Navel. I have, in one week, been the object of over 1,500 professional smiles.”
Even seemingly blue-collar periodicals such as Car and Driver had brilliant writers who could make you care about cars even if you didn’t care about cars. Of the regrettably designed Chevrolet Monte Carlo, they acknowledged that it performed well enough but that “for every one person who drives it,10,000 have to look at it,” and no car’s performance could overcome that.
The late and masterful P.J. O'Rourke, whose sentences would go on so long you could do a load of laundry before they finished up, was so good you would read each paragraph two, maybe three times, not wanting the story to end.
His rollicking coast-to-coast tour-de-force in a Ferrari remains a classic: “To be in control of our destinies — and there is no more profound feeling of control over one's destiny that I have ever experienced than to drive a Ferrari down a public road at 130 miles an hour. Only God can make a tree, but only man can drive by one that fast.”
These were the writers who shaped young wannabe writers such as myself — the seed corn of accessible prose. Now, they’re either gone, laid off or have accepted a corporate buyout when no amount of talent is, to a hedge fund manager, worth the cost of health insurance.
When Sports Illustrated dismissed its staff, to me it marked the end of a great era. All great eras must pass and this one did too. Sports stories today are all about statistics, spreadsheets and gambling lines, and certainly those stories can be interesting too.
Maybe this is how fans of the French Impressionists felt when their art was replaced by cubism, postmodernism and whatever that blue-splotch-on-a-red-background is supposed to be. If we’re looking for silver linings, at least bad art helps us appreciate the good.
The beauty of the modern era is that we can sit with our tablets and call up the magazine stories of the great masters without having to blow dust from the bound periodicals section of the city library.
Lamenting his diminished social status because of it, Wallace wrote that he was the only kid in his class who would jump in a cab and shout to the driver, “To the library! And step on it!”
That is how to react to good writing, and also how to live.
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
If you missed the Super Bowl, no worries — I've got your livestream right here
That pricey new Apple gadget must be really amazing … for something
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Magazines are diminishing, and with them, great writing
