The simple joy of a sports magazine and what it is now
The last thing I want this Substack to become is a virtual shaking of the fist at the sky and a whine about why things are not the way they once were.
I try not to be that guy.
Things change, and in many ways things are a lot better than they were in the past.
They are not better in some ways and I don’t want to be the person that runs to the keyboard to let everyone know about “back in the day.”
I hope I’m pretty choosy. So when I saw that Sports Illustrated had been accused of generating fake profiles for “writers” as a way of surreptitiously publishing articles generated by artificial intelligence, I thought this might be a good use of the Quill.
I grew up in a rural part of Alabama outside the reach of cable television. So we found a way to afford one of those giant satellite dishes. We stuck it out behind our barn at the base of a soybean field so it could see the part of the sky it needed to see. This gave us access to all kinds of programming and that’s how I fell in love with the Boston Red Sox.
I was about 14 when we got the dish, and I still entertained silly thoughts of playing sports for a living. But it was about this time that I began to notice I had a writing gift.
A Chicago-based television show began to air not long after that called “The Sports Writers on TV”. This was groundbreaking for its time because there had always been a line between print journalists and television, so seeing a bunch of grizzled sports writers on television was new and interesting. I gobbled up every episode.
Most of the sports writers were Chicago veterans like Bill Jauss, Ben Bentley and Bill Gleason. Believe it or not, they actually talked sports the way it was meant to be discussed, in a matter of fact manner without crazy yelling and manufactured drama.
Most weeks, they let a young gun on the show named Rick Telander. He wrote big stories for the Chicago Sun-Times and provided an interesting perspective since he was about 25 years younger than the other panelists. I gravitated to him immediately.
There was something else about him that made me hang on his words: He wrote for Sports Illustrated.
The magazine carried the sports journalism banner for decades. With iconic covers, mesmerizing features, provocative columns and revealing investigative pieces, it had everything.
If you had any desire to write sports, your mountaintop was Sports Illustrated.
One day, on a whim, I found what appeared to be a workable address and wrote a letter to Rick Telander. I never really expected him to write back but a kid can hope. I told him I admired his work and wanted to be a sports writer. I asked him what he would tell a 15-year-old wanting to make a career in sports writing.
Weeks later I came home from a mid-week game of basketball with some friends. As I was making my way up the steps I can still remember my mother saying “Lance, you’re wanted on the phone. It’s Sports Illustrated.”
Of course I assumed that some salesperson was getting ready to tell me I could have my own football-shaped telephone if I renewed my subscription.
When I picked up the phone, Rick Telander was on the other end. It’s hard to describe what this meant to me, but imagine being 15 years old and wanting to be a chef one day and getting a phone call from Gordon Ramsay.
We talked for about 15 minutes. Rick had two pieces of advice. First, read as much as you can. Second, don’t be afraid to take an unconventional route. He said I didn’t have to major in journalism (or even go to college) to make it. He didn’t steer me away from college but told me not to be afraid to take a less-traveled way.
So this only grew my respect for Sports Illustrated . I read about the aspiring faces in the crowd, about the rise of Larry Holmes and the fall of Muhammad Ali. I read every single word ever written in that magazine about Larry Bird and I wanted to know what Rick Reilly thought about, well, anything.
And yes, I checked out the swimsuit issue.
So imagine how I feel today. Sports Illustrated is that suave uncle you used to see on holidays that had dashing looks and always seemed to have his act together. He had intestinal fortitude and never took an off step.
Then, over time, he began to wobble. He came to Thanksgiving one year and the guy you once revered started talking out of his head. He looked bedraggled. His intestinal fortitude had been replaced by self-serving rants.
As print magazines began to lose profitability, Sports Illustrated was one of several magazines sold about five years ago. Since then, staff and resources have been sliced. Although some respected journalists have been retained, the magazine is primarily in the business of generating clicks.
One way to generate clicks in a cost-efficient manner is to publish AI articles. This is almost 2024, so AI-generated content has been a part of journalism for many years now. Usually, however, entities disclose the use of AI-generated content.
Sports Illustrated has been accused of leading the reader to believe real people are grabbing a keyboard and knocking out content on their own, when it appears there is no actual person, or person-driven content in these instances.
From the original story published in Futurism:
According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that's because it's not just the authors' headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well.
"The content is absolutely AI-generated," the second source said, "no matter how much they say that it's not.”
Sports Illustrated denied the accusation, blaming a third-party contractor for content not directly associated with the publication.
The ethics of AI-generated content is a different post for a different time. This just reminded me of how much joy I used to get over the arrival of Sports Illustrated in the mail, and what it has become.