Namath Weeps

Sports Illustrated is gone. It was inevitable. Sports information and opinion is a 24/7/365 endeavor now. There’s no way a weekly, even one with great writing, could survive in this current market.  I haven’t bought one in years. Decades actually. 

I find it especially sad because there were certain magazines that defined and marked the stages of my childhood and now they are all gone.  The Street and Smith Baseball Annual… The first real sign of Spring. My monthly issue of National Lampoon. That grocery bag filled with Playboys that I found in a dumpster, some of which are still stuck to the bottom of a mattress in a landfill off Staten Island.

Then there was SI.  

Sports Illustrated was more than my weekly immersion into the world of sports. It was my introduction to journalism. To developing an understanding of , “Why and how.” That there were other games, other people, people outside of the purview of the New York dailies.

Stories. The 1968 Olympics. Curt Flood. Ali-Frazier. 

Stories that deserved more than five hundred words and, since a picture is worth a thousand words, some of the best sports photography ever produced. Sometimes I would look at the covers for minutes on end before cracking open the magazine.  

Today we have so much information, are bombarded with so many images, that most of it loses meaning. 

We no longer get the pleasure that comes with waiting. Saving up for an album and then having to play it over and over because, even if you didn't like it at first, you were invested and, as it turns out, the fourth song on the flip side ends up being one of your favorites of all time. 

Sports Illustrated was like that. You spent a week with it and, after reading the "important" articles, it still sat there waiting for you to keep going. To read a small blurb about a kid in Indiana named Mattingly who was setting high school records or, to get a sense of what it was like to be a Kenyan long distance runner. 

Stories... 

Namath Weeps. And so do I.