Forum: Requiem for a lost heavyweight: Sports Illustrated

By Cory Armstrong-Hoss / Herald Forum

We gather here today to honor an icon of the 20th and early 21st centuries, an institution we thought was timeless. It was thoughtful and complex. It was dedicated to doing something well, and had high expectations of us.

Sports Illustrated doesn’t know it’s dead. But we know.

SI died last May, when it failed to send out a print edition for the first time in its 70 years of operating. Its long goodbye officially began seven years ago, when it was acquired by Authentic Brands Group, which dismantled it for parts, laid off its serious journalists over time and replaced them with low-cost college grads and AI. The new owners, not from the world of letters, traded on SI’s reputation to hunt for online ad revenue with clickbait headlines and hollow articles, one-dimensional composites of what other sportswriters wrote; sportswriters and photographers who actually attended the playoff games, tournaments, World Cups and Olympics, the way SI used to.

We have three speakers today. First to the podium, welcome Jeff Pearlman, former baseball writer for Sport Illustrated:

“SI was the land of legends. Deford and Jenkins and Hoffer and Rushin. Of the greatest sports writers of the past century. But this is what we’ve done with the continued corporatization of media. These companies don’t care about content. At all. It’s entirely clicks and ads and ads and clicks.

“I’m not particularly sad, because the Sports Illustrated I loved and worked for 52 issues a year, 5,000-word pieces, a devotion to craftsmanship, detail, heart and love … is long gone. It just is. This isn’t Sports Illustrated. It’s some bulls*** company picking off the last pieces of rotted fat from the carcass of something that was truly great.”

Thank you for that image, Jeff.

Now for my homily, about remembering.

My father reminds me that we got Sports Illustrated at home for probably 50 years. My parents were readers — newspaper and magazine people, who raised three readers of their own — and our coffee table growing up often held their holy trinity: Time, National Geographic and Sports Illustrated.

I remember the SI covers: the 1991 Dream Team of MJ, Magic and Larry; Tiger’s first Masters; Brandi Chastain sliding on the turf after the 1999 Women’s World Cup final; Venus, LeBron, Sampras, Tyson. The eyebrow-raising “Bag It, Michael,” with a photo of Jordan whiffing at a baseball pitch, during spring training of 1994 when he was trying out for the White Sox. I remember that Jordan would never again sit for an interview with SI.

I remember the swimsuit issue that arrived on a Thursday in the cold of February, and held the attention of thousands of adolescent boys across the country. Collectively, we all somehow mustered the interest to read each page, despite its brazen lack of real sports content.

I remember the cheesy promos for renewed subscriptions: SI sports bags, commemorative sweatshirts, fleece blankets, and of course, the coveted football phone.

I remember the format: Stat graphics near the front, quick updates and short pieces, one or two long-form articles, with Rick Reilly or another columnist’s one-page take at the end. That mix made its way into my bones. As the editor of a couple newsletters for my job, any reader can see SI’s influence, writ small each month.

A boss once told me that she thought my writing was too long, that most people wouldn’t read it. She is probably right, but I remember getting lost in those 5,000 word features on small town Kansas basketball, the true impact of Title IX, the steroid era of baseball, or the real Bobby Knight. During the time before Twitter, then X, athletes had inter-mediators, translators between them and us. Good sportswriters were our meaning-makers of a world we wanted to belong to.

Our final speaker is my Dad, probably the biggest meaning-maker in my world. Please welcome him to the podium.

“At least once a month, there was an article that was just terrific. The writers and their work were exceptional. The research and writing were consistently to the very highest standards, and they were as far as I remember consistently fair. They tried to show various sides of people and places and sports and events, and let the facts take the stories along, not their biases or agenda.

“The result was what I thought the country was about: reasonable and fair. Smart, level-headed, and in accord with the general vision of being “good” and “right.” There were exceptions, of course, and the times were different, but the articles and columns and all of it put together meant something about character, integrity and civility in spite of differences.

That was how I always felt about my weekly SI. Grateful for its professionalism and its part in dragging the culture along toward “better.” A long education in how to be the country we thought we were.

Look at us, and look at SI, now.

Cory Armstrong-Hoss lives in Everett with his wife and three kids. His kids have played a number of different sports. He’s a lifelong athlete, and he’s served as a coach, ref, and youth sports administrator. Find him at substack.com/@atahossforwords