Filing for Divorce
By David Damiani
I ended a 22-year relationship this week when I let my subscription to Sports Illustrated lapse. “Filing for divorce” is how I described it to friends, for it surely will be an unusual feeling not to have the magazine as part of my life each Thursday as it has been since I was six years old and enthusing over the commemorative Olympic stopwatch that came free with my subscription.
As my sports fanaticism developed, SI was there to nurture it along—and to feed my fascination with sportswriting and my urge to mimic my favorite writers’ styles. When I wasn’t reading the magazine to feed my obsessions with the major sports, I was writing mock sports sections and mini-magazines that bore its influence. My thirst for sports knowledge and insight led to short-lived relationships with a few other publications, like Football Digest, The Sporting News, and The National Sports Weekly. Only SI kept me (not that The National had much of a chance, since it bankrupted itself after approximately seven minutes). As its advertisements long have proudly proclaimed, SI offered insights I couldn’t find anywhere else.
There’s no doubt I will always keep many of my favorite SI issues and reread them from time to time, for their contents were memorable and valuable. I’ll hold onto the first issue I ever received, many of the ones that featured my favorite teams, and the justly legendary 25th anniversary swimsuit issue. And I’ll never tire of rereading some of the best sportswriting and human interest stories I have ever encountered, such as Gary Smith’s 1997 article on Washington State offensive linemen Ryan McShane and Jason McEndoo, which said more about in five pages about love and loyalty among friends in the midst of tragedy than most novels ever have.
So what caused the ardor to fade away? Much of it had to do with my increasing awareness that the sports media tended to toe a party line with which I disagree. SI wasn’t guilty of this as frequently as ESPN, The Sporting News, or many newspaper sports sections. Indeed, in offering occasional blurbs from Baseball Prospectus writers and book excerpts criticizing the baseball press from Michael Lewis, and in hiring some new young baseball writers who didn’t wholly embrace conventional wisdom, SI not only avoided the mindless repetition of falsifiable pablum but provided some alternative perspectives. I’ve also always found lead football writer Paul Zimmerman more insightful than most in his field, particularly when he defied inane wholesale putdowns of the AFC in its ’80s-’90s run of losing Super Bowls.
But far too often, especially in more recent times, SI did leap onto the tiresome train of repeated “insights” that dominated the rest of sports commentary. I have written at length in this space on SI’s tendency to run the same articles praising the same coaches and athletes–Tom Brady, Roger Clemens, Peyton Manning, Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick–whenever the occasion called for it, often more than once a year, as well as on its tendency to repeat the same observations on the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry several times a year. To me, the first sign that this problem had begun was a gratuitous offseason cover story kissing the feet of the ubiquitous Derek Jeter in roughly the same terms many media outlets had already run into the ground (“Good Field, Good Hit, Good Guy”). And when every feature on the Patriots’ Super Bowls and other key games devolved into virtually identical extended salutes to Brady, it seemed SI was far removed from what it had been in 1998, when Michael Silver’s exposure of the Broncos’ Super Bowl blocking schemes was news I had not read anywhere else despite devoutly following that team.
SI is still capable of insightful and unique articles–S.L. Price’s wonderful biographical piece on Ozzie Guillen earlier this year, for one–but it has wasted space not only on tabloid-style worship of celebrity players and coaches but also on sports scandals, often providing more smug and self-satisfied outrage than responsible reporting, and even more often condescendingly indicting fans in general for their supposed contribution to scandals. (Sometimes in spectacularly bizarre ways: basketball writer Jack McCallum once linked dot races on scoreboards, among other factors, to an alleged outbreak of violent and abusive behavior among fans.) Reading features like these, I started to see SI less as an exciting service to fans and more as a pulpit from which fans were condemned or patronized. And as the alternative media began to establish their beachhead online, I increasingly turned to the Internet for genuine insight.
And ultimately it was SI’s treatment of the alternative media that ended my relationship with the magazine. I had seen it as cheerfully coexisting with the online press—a weekly magazine, unable to report immediately on certain events, had to distinguish itself with human interest stories and (though increasingly less distinctive) in-depth reporting on major sports happenings. SI even ran a December ’05 feature recognizing and praising the best sports websites, and I was delighted to see some of my more obscure favorites mentioned.
But a piece castigating online sportswriting earlier this year from Chris Ballard, and an even harsher accompanying introduction from editor Terry McDonnell (both covered at length in this space), represented a shift in tone against the alternative media. It became clear that SI considered other sources threatening and contemptible, and considered fans unable to distinguish between quality reporting and claptrap without SI’s assistance. I found it offensive not only as an online sportswriter but as a fan who appreciates the diversity of insights and choices that the alternative media offer me. I know plenty of fans and bloggers felt the same way, and the story was much discussed online. But SI only printed one letter to the editor on the feature, a missive parroting the insults to online writers.
The article itself did not convince me to end my subscription; the refusal to present a different point of view, something SI frequently refuses to do when it wants the world to close ranks on an issue, did. It sealed the magazine’s fate in my eyes as an organization that cared not about empowering fans to think, write, and discuss sports but about winning enraptured, uncritical attention to everything it had to say. SI cast fans who adored it and drew inspiration from it for years as the magazine’s helpless dependents, who should never dare express themselves. To me, it was the ultimate betrayal–and grounds for a less than amicable divorce.
David Damiani is a CPA with Witt Mares, PLC, in Newport News, Virginia. He is the Friday sports columnist for The American Enterprise Online.
