Sports Biblio Digest, 6.16.19: Does Sports Illustrated Have An Heir Apparent?
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The NBA’s New Global Champions; St. Louis Shakes Off the Blues; A Golf Philosopher’s New Muse; New Baseball Books; Virat Kohli; Muffet McGraw; Chernobyl’s Abandoned Soccer Stadium; Remembering Pat Bowlen and Le Anne Schreiber
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I come here not to bury Sports Illustrated, but to praise it. Well, also to mourn another foreboding twist in what appears to be an inevitable fate.
Meredith’s recent sale of the 65-year-old magazine—now down to just 24 issues a year—for around $110 million to Authentic Brands seems like a small amount.
It’s also disheartening to read that the new ownership sees branding its iconic name and selected products as the real value in the acquisitions. From the Variety story linked above:
“‘Sports Illustrated is not just a magazine. It’s really a platform and it really stands for something that is hard – when you’re building brands – to get: It has authenticity. It has authority. It has respect, says Jamie Salter, founder, chairman and CEO of Authentic Brands."
I’m also not here to rip Authentic Brands, since its business is, well, brands, and taking a chance on a declining brand comes with substantial risks. For those of us who couldn’t wait to check our mailboxes every week for the magazine—with its lush photography and fluid game reports, features and investigations—Sports Illustrated faded some time ago, reduced to non-weekly status and a maddening web presence.
If you go back far enough, the SI Vault is the real value, something of enormous historic importance that needs to be preserved regardless of what happens to the magazine.
The products of consequence, aside from the swimsuit issue (I wish I could find my long lost sneakerphone), are the books of photography and reportage. But what’s the immediate future of those essential activities for SI under Authentic Brands?
That’s a bit unclear for the moment, and observers who come from a new-fangled branding environment are crowing that content is king. But there’s so much less of it these days, and I wonder if under 40s, even some under 50, even recognize SI as a brand or a magazine. ESPN, struggling to reach/keep the younger demo, announced recently it’s shutting down its magazine in September after 21 years, going out with one final “Body Issue” bang.
That was a title I could never understand, designed to capture an elusive, then-Gen X audience with more eye-catching graphics than those looking for substantive journalism.
The ESPN brand, like Sports Illustrated, still features many excellent journalists, but it’s also under pressure to reach and satisfy new sets of eyeballs across a growing variety of platforms.
For a good while, when it was still purloining the best sportswriters from the best newspapers, ESPN looked like it would dominate every aspect of sports media, even with a lacking magazine brand.
The longform online writing remains strong (see an example below about the recently departed Alliance of American Football), as does basic beat writing in the most in-demand sports.
Sports Illustrated still contains the bylines of Tom Verducci, Jon Wertheim, Tim Layden and S.L. Price. Simply put, they are treaures. Some media analysts see the recent sale as a means for SI to compete in video sweepstakes with ESPN. SI boss Chris Stone, who’s been with the magazine since 1992, sounds optimistic.
But whither the journalism? I wish I could feel better.
When Meredith put SI up for sale last year, Michael MacCambridge, author of a 1997 history of the magazine, openly worried about its fate. Although subscription numbers of 2.75 million aren’t anything to sniff at, MacCambridge fretted that “the problem, in recent years, is that there aren’t enough people who care about it.”
Can anything take its place?
Certainly not in a print format, but after plenty of high-profile hirings and ambitious expansions over the last couple years, The Athletic has quietly been steadying its ship, taking on many ESPN, SI and newspaper refugees.
A subscription-only site, it’s clean and beautifully designed, with no ads, pop-ups, automatic videos or other intrusions to the reading experience. It’s one of the few sites I don’t mind reading on my mobile phone and there’s substantive, entertaining work on almost every topic.
More recently, The Athletic is moving into Britain, luring away quality writers much in the same way it has in the U.S. and Canada, initially to cover the English Premier League.
It’s great to have millions of dollars of Silicon Valley investment money to build up, and every time I call up a story, I root even more for its success.
But how patient will those investors be? How long is this runway? What happens if their patience, and their dollars, dwindle?
The short history of online media already has plenty of wreckage piled up from bodacious startups that didn’t pan out, that didn’t have proper or patient investment, or anything in the way of a sustainable business model.
The formative years of Sports Illustrated, which was geared in the late 50s and early 60s more toward the upscale East Coast “sportsman,” were not exactly auspicious. A decade or more of heavy losses mounted under the unflappable, legendary editor Andre Laguerre before it became the magazine we grew up reading.
It wasn’t until it emphasized more popular spectator sports fare, especially with the hiring of Dan Jenkins and other Texas hotshots to cover such things as college football, that the suits at Time-Life were reassured they had a profitable brand.
That brand is what Authentic Brands has bought into, but what it purchased took time and perseverance and all kinds of smart experimentation that is in short supply in the digital age.
There’s lots of money, of course, and investors have a right to get a proper return. But not seeing much else on the horizon, and unsure what ground The Athletic really stands upon, isn’t terribly reassuring for the moment.
A Few Good Reads
Here’s something that came as a surprise: Michael Murphy, author of the acclaimed book “Golf in the Kingdom,” had never seen Tiger Woods play in person. That changed at the U.S. Open that concludes today at Pebble Beach, as golf’s philosopher king met face-to-face with his newest muse: “I feel like a farm boy taking his first trip to the big city,”
The Toronto Raptors won the first NBA title by a team outside of the U.S. (they’re the only one now, since the Grizzlies decamped Vancouver for Memphis). With a polyglot roster and front office staff, and an Indian-born superfan in Nav Bhatia, the Raptors are being hailed as the league’s true global team, although most of the franchises below the border have had an international flair for years;
Perhaps the unlikeliest storyline in Toronto is coach Nick Nurse, with his down-home humility and farmboy roots and a journeyman coaching resume at the small-college, European and D-League levels. In an age of incessant staffing cuts, a small newspaper from Nurse's Iowa hometown assigned one of its two staff reporters to cover Nurse as his first season in the NBA reached an amazing climax;
The St. Louis Blues have won their first Stanley Cup after more than 50 years as a franchise, and the public celebrations on Saturday weren’t deterred by rain. What’s always been a strong baseball town but chastened more recently by the departure of the Rams back to Los Angeles came together in force as the club rallied from having the worst record in the NHL in January to winning the whole thing under interim coach Craig Berube;
The hit HBO miniseries about Chernobyl has prompted a deeper look into the effects of the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster. At Atlas Obscura, the abandoned soccer stadium at Pripyat, the reactor workers’ city, is offered as a haunting reminder of the loss of community, in perhaps the truest sense of the phrase;
Muffet McGraw, Notre Dame women’s basketball coach, caused a stir in March by asserting she’d never hire another male assistant, as part of a larger push for women’s equality far beyond the court. Every year she assigns her players to read a selected book, and last year it was “We Should All Be Feminists,” by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, not long before the Irish won the NCAA title;
A popular baseball card exhibit, “Play Ball,” has returned to the Detroit Institute of Art and continues through Sept. 15 to honor the 35th anniversary of the Tigers’ last World Series championship season. The exhibit also features a complete collection of more than 500 T206 cards from a nearby collector, as well as other memorabilia;
Virat Kohli, captain of India’s Cricket World Cup team and regarded as one of the best players in the world, in many ways reflects the realities and the aspirations of many in his country. On Sunday, he will lead India against archrival Pakistan. At Tortoise Media, a new “slow-form” journalism membership platform, noted cricket writer Gideon Haigh goes long on the figure considered the embodiment of India’s new golden age. Much of Kohli’s appeal, Haigh asserts, comes from Indians working in boring jobs and living boring lives in a modernizing society:
“Only a select few will ever be able to rise above its hubbub, intensified by India’s ethnic, religious and linguistic differences. Kohli, then, suits these times also: a kind of everywhere figure, raised in Delhi, based in Mumbai, representing Bangalore, materialistic some days, spiritual others, brash occasionally, suave often, exciting always.”
The Alliance of American Football folded even sooner than expected, after only a few months, riddled with greed, operational disasters and inflated expectations. The die was likely cast before the first game;
At Oxford American, a magazine of Southern culture, award-winning Arkansas poet and former quarterback Eli Cranor composed “Heart,” as his father lay dying in a hospital bed, a rumination about fathers and sons. A passage:
“At thirty-one, I am now fully aware of all that he’s given me:
the receding hairline,
the poor circulation,
the wide feet,
the furry legs
and arms
and chest
and back.
I worry, selfishly, because I know he has also given me
his heart.”
More from and about Cranor at his website with some selected writings, including a 2018 piece for the Courier-Times in Russellville, Ark., about how football might stop the next school shooting.
Baseball Book News
A review of “They Played the Game,” by baseball author Norman Macht, concludes that the oral history of 47 former big leaguers is in a similar vein to Lawrence Ritter’s classic “The Glory of Their Times.” Among those interviewed by Macht, who just turned 90, are six Hall of Famers: Richie Ashburn, Travis Jackson, George “High Pockets” Kelly, Ted Lyons, Hal Newhouser and Ted Williams;
From the Beyond the Box Score baseball blog, a look at the newly published “The MVP Machine” by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik that embraces the authors’ sophisticated use of data but whose downside, according to Luis Torres, is reflected by the Houston Astros, who “have turned into a cutthroat organization with a bad reputation for dehumanizing the game and being unpleasant to work for;”
Amazin’ Mets alum Ron Swoboda has penned his memoir of the miracle season of 1969, “Here’s the Catch,” with his famous right-field swipe on the cover. He talks to the Amazin’ Avenue podcast;
The final volume of Tony Castro’s Mickey Mantle trilogy, “Mantle: The Best There Ever Was,” gets an early review at Publishers’ Weekly;
In David Cone’s new memoir, “Full Count: The Education of a Pitcher,” he admits to his vulnerable side following his 1999 perfect game for the Yankees against the Expos, and reveals other colorful off-the-field episodes.
Passings
Pat Bowlen, 75, became the majority owner of the Denver Broncos in 1984 and the team won three Super Bowls after that, averaging 10 wins a season or more during his 35-year reign. He was inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame earlier this year, but his death from Alzheimer’s leaves an unclear line of succession. His widow suffers from the same disease, and his seven children are believed to be getting an equal share of the team. A public memorial service is Tuesday at Broncos Stadium at Mile High.
Le Anne Schreiber, 73, was a very reluctant first female sports editor of a major American daily newspaper when she agreed to steer The New York Times sports section in 1978. Part of the deal was that she would do it for two years and no more. When her time was up, she was ready to move on, serving as deputy editor of the Times book review.
Schreiber eventually moved to upstate New York, penned two memoirs about family members battling cancer (her own death was from lung cancer), and never looked back from her landmark appointment:
“I was, depending on one’s view, the bitch, the saint, the amazon, the token, the recipient of awards and death threats and, ultimately, the ingrate, for insisting upon my pre-agreed release after two excruciating years.”
A former editor at Billie Jean King’s womenSports magazine, Schreiber took on one more two-year sports assignment in her career, as ESPN’s ombuds(wo)man from 2007-2009.
More on Schreiber’s ESPN work here. Retired Times sports columnist George Vecsey tweeted his final full-time piece from 2011 after Schreiber's death, with the observation that her “literate and compassionate qualities drew me back to sports.”
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This is Digest issue No. 170, published June 16, 2019.
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