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I was dressing for a friend’s wedding, unknowingly headed toward my own divorce.
It was a Saturday morning in June of 2001. I was knotting my tie as I readied to attend the wedding of a Sports Illustrated colleague, Steve Cannella, in Mystic, Conn. Dozens of co-workers and friends, a mostly overlapping Venn diagram, would attend the service, just another in a series of events, formal and informal, in which we frequently convened to celebrate our camaraderie and good fortune. We merry men…
At precisely 10 a.m., the phone (not yet subordinated as a “landline”) rang. The caller was Bill Colson, SI’s managing editor. With brevity and empathy, he informed me that I was being laid off. And sheepishly added: “Enjoy the wedding.”
Fast-forward to this Friday morning, news broke that SI was being gutted—some employees immediately laid off, the rest in 90 days—in effect pulling the plug on a journalistic enterprise six months shy of its 70th birthday. The current staff, including Cannella, who has risen to occupy the Editor-in-Chief role, now finds itself in toto in the same position I did that day. As so many former SI staffers have.
Unemployed, sure. But also adrift. The victims of identity theft. For anyone who spent a significant number of years at the magazine, particularly their formative ones, it is only natural to ask: Who am I without SI?
Today, however, for the first khbrknews since 1954, fans of sports or journalism, or both, must ask: Who are we without SI?
Certainly, sports in America pre-dated the magazine’s launch on Aug. 16, 1954. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings finished 57-0 (still the only undefeated team in the history of professional baseball) and never even merited a commemorative issue. However, as sports metastasized over the past seven decades from a popular diversion to a ceaseless intrusion upon American life—this past Christmas Day saw an unholy amount of both NBA and NFL action—SI’s self-appointed mandate was to both talk…
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