Frank's Place: A lament on the decline of Sports Illustrated

Recently, casually lifting a Sports Illustrated out of a magazine rack in a physician's waiting room, I nearly had a heart attack. Fortunately, it was my cardiologist's office.

I don't know how long it had been since I last held a copy of the magazine I'd grown up adoring, but this one was frighteningly emaciated, a slight and insubstantial version of its once-robust self. Even the frail old men surrounding me seemed healthier.

Time - both the passing years and the magazine's parent company - clearly had not been kind to SI. The issues I eagerly consumed as a boy used to have a tangible heft. They were as physically imposing as their content was mentally stimulating.

Before ESPN, the Internet, Twitter, and Deadspin complicated the world, if you wanted to be informed about and entertained by sports, Sports Illustrated was a must-read. And for those of us who liked sports and writing, it was weekly manna from heaven.

Dan Jenkins; Frank Deford; William Nack; and, later, Daily News alumnus Gary Smith were among the masters who wrote for this magazine that won critical acclaim as well as financial success.

It was Grantland before Grantland, a printed, literate forerunner of SportsCenter, without the catchphrases and annoying anchors.

The consistently spectacular photography managed to be both enlightening and artistic. If an obscure athlete made it to SI's cover, he or she quickly became a household name.

Its circulation was enormous, its coverage of major sports all-encompassing, its look at the quirkier ones eye-opening, its end-of-book stories compelling, its advertising endless. So many eyeballs scanned its pages that companies fought for the privilege of spending as much as $500,000 for a full-page ad.

Those who didn't subscribe bought it at newsstands, borrowed it from friends, or read it in libraries and doctors' offices. It set the agenda. It identified sports' heroes and villains. It added depth to what until then had simply been fun and games.

It was the bible for our boyhood. Youngsters everywhere plastered SI covers all over their bedroom walls, saved every issue, had them autographed. In an age when televised sports were still relatively rare, it was our surest connection to that world.

Though my parents' budget never allowed for a lengthy subscription, I read it weekly nonetheless, usually at Schrager's Drug Store. An employee there later told me he hated cleaning up the mess of pored-over magazines I left behind.

But my real immersion came as a Temple journalism student in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A commuter with frequent free time between classes, I retreated regularly to the magazine archives on Paley Library's third floor. There, over four years, alone with my dreams, I read every issue of Sports Illustrated, neatly bound in leather volumes.

It was surprising to learn that in its early years, SI catered to aristocratic publisher Henry Luce's crowd. The magazine was filled with stories about sailing, polo, sports-car racing, safaris, and dog shows, interspersed with coverage of baseball and a little golf and college football.

Then there were the covers: On the premier issue in 1954, my first baseball idol, Milwaukee's Eddie Mathews, was framed beautifully by an illuminated County Stadium; in that wonderful/terrible summer of 1964, Johnny Callison made the magazine's front; Muhammad Ali, before his fight with Henry Cooper, was photographed in front of London's Big Ben.

The stories I read expanded the tiny little world I'd inhabited: the wonderful, troubling, and influential 1968 series by Jack Olsen, "The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story"; the bizarre, two-part 1965 lament by Sixers superstar Wilt Chamberlain, "My Life in a Bush League"; and each April, Jenkins' stories from the Masters, which brought Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Augusta National to life.

The ads were as revealing as the stories and photos. These come-ons for cars and suits and kitchen appliances offered a glimpse at American innocence that, in the tumultuous times I was reading them, was fast disappearing.

Until that binge, I thought I understood sports and sportswriting. What SI taught me was how little I actually knew about both. Sports wasn't the toy department. It was filled with the same pain and glory as the rest of life.

Sports Illustrated still claims a circulation of three million and a large Internet following. But that shrunken periodical told another story. A business blogger on a Fox Sports website predicted that the print edition's days were numbered.

"Eventually the magazine will die, it's just a matter of time," Clay Travis wrote. "Maybe that happens in a decade, maybe it happens in fifteen years, but sooner - and I'm betting on sooner - or later it won't make sense to still publish a print-edition of SI."

It's inevitable. The world moves on, and sentiment can't stop it. But when the print SI is gone something will have been lost: the way some words and photos seemed created for a page; that delicious anxiety you felt opening a mailbox to see whether the week's issue had arrived; the tactile sensations of thumbing through a fresh, beautifully produced magazine.

And so, before this incredibly shrinking magazine evaporates like a puddle in the sun of new technology, its readers past and present ought to take a moment to appreciate all the great journalism, writing, and photography it brought us.

Today's SI might be thin and flimsy, but when it's gone, the hearts of those who loved it will be heavy.