SI, with a sigh

 It's been gone for awhile now, truthfully, like the wallpaper from my child's bedroom. The wallpaper consisted of Sports Illustrated covers, a bunch of them, torn free and Scotch-taped in place. Like the magazine itself, they have long since vanished.

And so climb aboard the geezer train with me, boys and girls, and let me tell you what it was like when we all wanted to drink young scotch and write like Dan Jenkins, or be as suave and skilled at crafting long-form narratives as Frank Deford, or be as hip and quick with a line as Curry Kirkpatrick.

These were your rock stars if you were a kid with no discernible skills besides hammering nails crooked and putting words together on paper, which was basically me back in the day. Jenkins and Deford and Kirkpatrick -- and later Rick Reilly and Steve Rushin and Gary Smith -- were proof positive that putting words together was something to be admired, and to get paid for. It meant I might not wind up digging ditches for a living after all, as my fretful mother always seemed to think.

I never made it to SI, and the pay was never anything to write home about. But I got to write about sports for a living, and it was every bit the blast it seemed to be for those giants whose work came in the mail every week.

I write all this not as an obit for SI, which all the obits flooding the Great Interwhosis-sphere in the last 24 hours seem to imply is finally cold on a slab. That was the basic reaction, or overreaction, to the news that the vandals who own what remains of SI are apparently about to lay off the entire staff in a licensing dispute with the vandals who run SI. Thus all the RIPs and eulogies and doesn't-he-look-like-himself mooning over the dear about-to-be-departed.

Not me. I'm writing this not because of what happened yesterday, but because of what began to happen almost 30 years ago.

That's when SI, our SI, really vanished, as I said at the top. It became a casualty of  both corporate greed and technology, and the impatience bred by both.

Great journalism -- the sort of superb reporting, writing and photography that made SI so iconic -- demands a certain investment of time, on the part of both those who create it and those who consume it. Those who create it were more than willing to invest that time; increasingly, those who consume it and those who bankroll it were not.

The bankrollers, outsiders without a lick of insight into their investment, were only looking for a fast buck. And the consumers, conditioned more and more by the internet to quick reads and quick hits and one-click shopping, were only looking to feed their dwindling attention spans.

The world changed, surprise, surprise. And SI didn't change with it, or at least didn't change quickly enough. And the boys and girls holding the purse strings didn't care as long as the balance sheet came out right, because quality doesn't matter when you don't understand the business and the value it places on quality.

Want to know who runs the show now at SI?

Something called Authentic Brands owns the licensing. Another something called Arena Group runs the magazine. Sound like media people to you?

Me, either. Therein lies the problem.

And therein lies SI -- its time as past as all those magazine covers, papering a smitten young man's bedroom.