Roy S. Johnson: I came to lament the demise of Sports Illustrated and learned it still lives

This is an opinion column.

I was going to a funeral, so I thought. Maybe a wake, since the deceased was declared terminal, if not dead, months ago now. Back in January. So, I thought.

Either way, the event was going to be festive—a commemoration of a life well lived. A life that impacted generations. A life that honored champions, challenged scoundrels, and exposed mendacity. A life of eloquence and insight. A life of visual and literary greatness.

A life that impacted everyone in that room, and many more.

A life launched 70 years ago. With the birth of Sports Illustrated.

I wasn’t yet born when the first issue — August 16, 1954 — was pressed. The all-color cover featured Eddie Matthews of the Milwaukee Braves swinging at a pitch against the New York Giants set against the grandstands of Milwaukee County Stadium. Wes Westrum was the Giants’ catcher; Augie Donatelli was the umpire. (Yes, I have a copy.)

It was a majestic, though relatively muted debut that didn’t fully signal what the SI cover would become: among the most anticipated and coveted spaces in all of journalism — the most anticipated space in the fledgling realm of sports journalism.

SI’s cover was anticipated by sports fans everywhere. Every week, dads and their sons—and in time, yes, their daughters, too—raced to the mailbox to see if their favorite athlete or team graced the paper facade.

And coveted by athletes, coaches, and teams in an era long before digital platforms allowed them to build their own promotional stage.

I’ve this shared before: SI launched my professional journalistic career, played an immeasurable role in my growth (on press row and beyond), and positioned me for experiences and relationships beyond anything this Black kid from Tulsa who aspired to be a Perry Mason could have imagined.

The magazine hired me right out of college. (I majored in political science and minored in communications, though at the time, in the mid-1970s, I saw no future in an industry all but void of Blacks on television, radio, or writing for newspapers beyond the Black press.) I started at SI as a reporter, a fact-checker, and worked there during three separate stints before being laid off in 2003 as an Assistant Managing Editor. It was among the first of a tsunami of layoffs that still roil the media industry.

In January, I opined on the layoff of more than 100 SI staffers by the Arena Group, which lost its license to publish the magazine when it missed a $3.75 million payment to the Authentic Brands Group, which bought SI for $110 million in 2019. While there remained a handful of employees, the mag’s prospects seemed grim. Thought I remained hopeful: “SI may rise from its still-smoldering ashes, from the debris of its slow destruction,” I wrote. “Maybe even as a magazine, maybe under a different publisher.”

The setting was an expectedly stately shore club in Rye, New York, about 20 miles north of Manhattan, nestled on the northern beaches of the Long Island Sound. More than 150 SI “alums” gathered there in the hours just before sunset, some traveling from homes nearby, others from coasts and far corners. They represented generations whose careers began as far back as the 1960s. Most were my co-workers at some juncture, a few were not.

We were all nonetheless journalistically kindred, threads woven into the fabric of something that meant more to each of us than could express.

You might, if you are a sports fan of a certain age, recognize the names of some of those in the room. You may know Neil Leifer, who shot a preponderance of famous sports photos embedded in your mind’s eye, and more than 170 covers. He was there. You may know Armen Keteyian, who began his career at SI before becoming a network television journalist, documentarian, and author of 13 non-fiction books, including six New York Times best sellers. He was in the room. You may, too, know Jeff Pearlman, author of nine NYT best sellers, one of which “Showtime,” was optioned into an HBO Original series. He was there.

As were a plethora of talented storytellers — authors, filmmakers, documentarians, journalists, photographers.

You won’t likely recognize the names of many who were there. Men and women who poured into, nurtured, shaped (and sometimes aggravated) so many of us. Who supported so many of us. I traveled the miles specifically to see a few of them. To especially see Sandy Padwe, my first SI editor and still mentor. The now-Senior Lecturer at Columbia Journalism School is 85 years old. He smiled, hugged, and laughed a lot, and almost shed a tear or two.

My heart lifted at seeing Peter Carry, Navy vet and Princeton magna cum laude grad who started at SI in 1964 and rose to long serve as one of its Executive Editors, perhaps its consummate shaper of stories. And global appreciator of wine.

As you might guess, there was lots of grey in the room, even among those who were once young’uns at the mag.

The reunion was hosted by Mark Mulvoy, the no-filter, Boston-bred former Managing Editor (that was the title of what is now the Editor-in-Chief). He was my boss during my middle tenure at the mag. He persuaded me to step from writing into management, hiring me as a Senior Editor overseeing the magazine’s coverage of college basketball, tennis, and later pro basketball. His 12-year ME tenure may have been the most consequential in SI’s history—for more reasons than I’m willing to share here. (Wait for the book.)

At one point in the evening, the crowd was corralled (no easy feat) and Mulvoy took the mic. He honored the legacy that brought us all together then introduced Stephen Cannella “to talk about the present and future of SI.”

Huh?, I thought.

Somehow, I’d missed the March news that SI’s publishing rights were acquired by Minute Media, an all-digital company that also publishes The Players’ Tribune, FanSided, and 90min. “They’ve been very supportive during the transition from the old place to this place,” Stephen told me. “A transition that should have taken six to nine months, they got done in three weeks.”

SI leapt from the casket. Call it SI 2.0. Or better, SI 3.0.

For mailbox codgers, SI will produce a monthly print product, a glossy mag we hope will live up to the legacy constructed by so many in that room.

If it doesn’t, we’ll be alright. It’s more vital that SI endures. That honors the room that gathered to celebrate its 70 years on the shores of Long Island Sounds.

By that measure, Stephen said SI is poised and positioned to prosper.

“Obviously, a lot of what we do is a lot of video audiences,” he said. “Between SI.com as a national site, our network of team and about 160 local sites, when you add all that up — it’s gonna sound like sound bite — but compared to the glory days, more people interact with Sports Illustrated than ever.”

A few days later, a former SI colleague, someone who was also in the room that day sent me a text: “It’s funny,” they wrote, “the people I felt closest to that day left me feeling like the years working together had significance.”

For us in that room, undoubtedly. And, perhaps, for even more generations.