I’m generally against nostalgia, since I think it’s obvious charms can insidiously blot out our ability to live in the moment. But I’ll confess to being overwhelmed with sadness upon learning a few minutes ago that Sports Illustrated has essentially been swept into the dustbin of history. As I’ve discussed on this here site several times, my SI subscription made me fall in love with writing as a young’un, and I still recall the weekly thrill of scanning the table of contents in search of a yarn that would teach me something new about the world. The last feature in every issue was always a big swing, of the sort that doesn’t get commissioned any more—a profile of someone who’d touched the darkness during a roller-coaster life, or a snapshot from a corner of America quite unlike my own. Curled up in the corner of my bedroom on a Thursday evening, mere hours after the magazine’s arrival, I’d picture myself out in the field with a tape recorder and a notebook, doing my best to understand the full dimensions of another human for whom sports were everything.
I could’ve chosen a zillion covers to headline this elegaic post, but I had no choice but to pick the one above—the lead-in to a story about a college basketball star who found out the hard way that cocaine isn’t the jovial friend it first appears to be. I know I’ll labor my whole life and never come up with a first line as effective as, “I was standing in the Rose Garden, wired on cocaine.”
Check out my archive of SI appreciations here. And hope with me that the stories from the magazine’s golden age don’t vanish entirely from The Tubes.
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