Dear Mr. Squires:
A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in which you were quoted as saying "print is dead." And I have been in pain ever since.
I don't want to debate your basic premise. I do that enough already to make myself persona non grata among some of my more technologically literate friends and colleagues, as well as with strangers. I can be a pest on the issue.
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No, I want to ask you a huge favor. But I will save that for later.
If print is dead, does that mean I will no longer receive Sports Illustrated each week in my mailbox? That I will no longer feel that excitement, that anticipation, that hunger I have fed for years and years with the wonderful writing and reporting and visual images that have appeared in the pages of your magazine? Will I no longer know whom the magazine has jinxed with the latest cover picture?
Please, say it isn't so. And don't tell me I will be able to get it online. It simply won't be the same.
When I was a young assistant sports editor of the Atlanta Journal in the late fifties, I supplemented my weekly salary of, I think, $115 by stringing for SI on Southeastern Conference football and basketball. It kept me in grits. I even had the opportunity to write a bylined piece on the elderly African American man who trained and kept President Eisenhower's hunting dogs.
After that, SI treated me to my first trip ever to New York to interview for a job as a college football writer under Tex Maule, a guy I had long read and admired. I was offered the post, but eventually said no because my dream always had been to be a newspaper editor and going to SI, I decided, would sidetrack that dream.
A few weeks later, I was told I could no longer string for the magazine. I swallowed my anger and kept on reading SI.
Where else could you find William Faulkner on the Kentucky Derby? Or read Herbert Warren Wind, the magnificent golf writer? Or Hemingway or Frost or Steinbeck on sports?
Who captured horse racing or boxing any better than William Nack? Or has a history with pro football like Dr. Z (Paul Zimmerman), even though his weekly NFL picks aren't much better than mine? Or what about Frank Deford and his wonderful pieces on George Halas and Bobby Knight and Dick Butkus and many others?
And who writes sports, or anything for that matter, better than Gary Smith, who has taken us on a magical literary ride time after time, stripping away the exteriors of sports people such as Ali and Mike Tyson and John Chaney and Mark McGuire and letting us see what's inside?
And I have a soft spot for S.L. Price, who worked with us in Sacramento when he was just a youngster, and Rick Reilly, Peter King, Tim Layden, and a number of others. And also for the occasional piece by John Schulian.
I even forgive you some of the juvenile journalism you have added to the front of your book as an answer, I assume, to ESPN The Magazine. Or that when you Google Sports Illustrated the first six pages or so are filled with stories about the swimsuit issue. Not some of the truly ground breaking investigative stories you have published, but your bikinis.
I realize that things change and that we have to embrace change. Sports are not what they were when I was a kid, pulling desperately for Johnny Lujack and Notre Dame to beat Army, even though Felix (Doc) Blanchard, West Point's Mr. Inside, graduated from what would later be my high school; or crying when I woke up one morning and learned that Sugar Ray Robinson had lost to Randy Turpin; or when just a handful of college bowl games really were glamorous and there was no BCS and teams would come to my hometown, Bay St. Louis, Miss., to practice before playing in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans.
Many of the changes since those days have added greatly to the luster, the appeal and the growth of sports. And they were too long overdue, especially the end of the ugly and terribly hurtful discrimination against African Americans and other athletes of color. And add the emergence of women's sports.
But many other changes have not helped. The introduction of drugs and steroids into the games is one. The bitter strikes and the lack of loyalty on both sides of the aisle is another. The money, for salaries, for stadiums, for ticket prices and food and drinks, for autographs, for you name it, is still another. And you can add the obscene and violent fans who ruin it for everyone else, and the police blotter material on sports pages today.
I know, I am an old guy who grew up in a different generation and probably recall some things through a rose-colored memory lens. Which brings me to the favor I want to ask of you.
I don't know how long I will be around, but if print is dead, as you have predicted, and Sports Illustrated has to use another delivery platform while I am still capable of reading, would you please print at least one copy of the magazine each week and mail it to me. You have my address.
If you are wrong and print isn't dead, I promise I won't gloat. I will just keep on reading some of my favorite journalists and journalism in SI. Some old habits should never be discarded. And some things should never change.
Thanks for listening.
A faithful reader,
Gregory Favre
