The long fadeaway

You don't have to love the times you live in to acknowledge their home truths. Or even to acknowledge the home truth of all the home truths.

Which is: Stuff happens.

Electricity put gaslight out of business which put whale oil out of business. The Model T turned the horse-and-buggy into a quaint anachronism. We've got sliced bread now, and everything after has been the greatest thing since.

And so I don't particularly mourn the days when (yes, children) ink-stained wretches were actually ink-stained wretches. Newspaper grunts used to write their stories on typewriters. We ripped copy from the old clackety-clacking AP ticker. There was something we called the mojo wire -- a machine with a roller that you fed copy into page-by-page -- that magically transmitted a four-page story in, I don't know, 15 minutes or so.

It was the wonder of the age.

Now, of course, all of that is a drawing on the cave wall. Technology has swallowed it whole. It  has killed the daily newspaper, or all but, in community after community. We will all be poorer for it, and our businesses and elected officials more free to duck public scrutiny. But again: Stuff happens.
  
Like, say, the demise of Sports Illustrated. Or at least its eclipse.

Half the staff got laid off yesterday, on account of SI has decided to replace them with Maven, a service that offshores the work of staff writers and the like. In other words, it's a service for contract work. And that sucks. It does.

Here's the thing, though: Sports Illustrated hasn't been Sports Illustrated for a long while anyway.

The most dismaying aspect of yesterday's news, for instance, was that for those of us of a certain age, the names of those affected rang no bells. Scrolling through a list of tweets from staff writers who were let go, I recognized almost none of them. And that's primarily because I no longer subscribe to SI, nor even read it much.

This was not the way it was when I was growing up, mind you. SI was appointment reading then, a cavalcade of glittering bylines that influenced an entire generation -- my generation -- of sports journalists.

We all wanted to be Dan Jenkins, to write and live life with his flair and swagger. We wanted to craft the sort of literature Frank Deford did. Later on, we envied Gary Smith his ability to unspool a narrative that could punch you in the gut, and to write with the polish and style of a Jeff MacGregor.

As a kid who early on decided sportswriting was my thing -- those of us can, do, and those of us can't, write about it; that whole thing -- I was no more immune to SI's influence than anyone. I papered the walls of my bedroom with SI covers. I devoured everything Jenkins or Deford of Curry Kirkpatrick wrote. As a young sportswriter, my work was shamelessly derivative of all the SI heavyweights; my evolved style still contains faint whispers of all of them.

But again, and yet again: Stuff happens.

And so half the staff of SI is gone today.

And I recognize very few of their names.

Sign of the times. Hateful though they are.