How come national sportswriting is now all predictions and comparisons?

I did like the story, I had more problems with the headline of predicting the Master's, which I didn't find a 1-2-3 prediction in the story for the 2015 Master's. I also didn't mind the feature format about his upbringing, taking a boat to the tourney, etc. Tired of the Woods comparisons, perhaps that's me. SI doesn't need to do a Woods or Jordan comparison on every golf and hoop story, IMO. If you're good enough, you can write something else. If you're not good enough, then you can't. But so many comparisons and predictions, it's getting old ... for me.

I liked the Michelle Wie story a lot, very well done.

 

hmm.

Reporting is hard and requires sources and access; bloviating and horn-honking is cheap and anybody can do it.

 

It seems like a resting home for veteran newspaper columnists, and the bland work of Leitch.
Last time I visited, there was an overlong piece on Super Bowl hype.
Fresh stuff in 2014.

 

SI has perhaps a tougher challenge facing it than just about any major player from the previous era of media. Their old model was entirely built on looking backward, giving you stories in literary way, and frankly, just the name "Sports Illustrated" carried enough cache that people wanted to read the magazine's "take" on things even if they were 8 days old. (I know I did as a kid.) Now they're tasked with the delicate, maybe impossible juggling act of transitioning into a new model without ruining the brand that made them so powerful for 50 years. And part of that juggling act is appealing to the people who get SI delivered to their living rooms and might be more willing to read a British Open wrap-up days after it happened, and also appealing to people walking through airports who are choosing between 200 magazines on the newstand and might look at Rory and think "Eh, that kinda interesting, but I already watched all four rounds of the Open."

As for the Tiger stuff, I think you'd be shocked and probably appalled at how much Tiger moves the needle in terms of interest, and no other golfer comes close. So you're faced with a conundrum. If most of your readers are interested in a story about Rory, but they're interested in part because of what it means historically for how he compares to the greatest golfer of this era, then what do you do? Not mention Tiger out of spite? Because there are two hundred readers out there who say "I'm so sick of Tiger" and 200,000 who say "That Rory is good, but he's no Tiger." You try to find the happy medium. The truth is, even if you're not one of those people, a lot of people want to read about Tiger. Just like a lot of people like to talk about LeBron. And Johnny Manziel. The tail might wag the dog sometimes, but probably less than you think.

How does a magazine survive when its parent company has just put it in a dingy and cut the rope and nudged it toward the open sea? By rowing like hell and hoping the course you're plotting (even as it changes day to day) is the right one. But they certainly don't survive by refusing to row and wishing they were still the biggest boat on the ocean, deftly moving through calm waters.

 

Well said, DD. And if you really want to see the effect it had on another stalwart, just look at the Sporting News, which had been around since 1886 in print form. They could not make their (somewhat similar) model work anymore and had to go digital only. Glad to see SI trying to plug along and adapt. And they still put out good stories.

As for Tiger moving the needle in a big way, it is no coincidence that the golf industry is going in the tank without him to push product like he did in the past. He hasn't been "Tiger" in several years, and golf as a whole is seeing the effect.

 

Good answer, less snarky than the first one assuming -- don't make assumptions -- I didn't read the story.

 

It's tough to write features about an event when you're published 72 hours after the event, granted. But to hang one's hat on McIlroy at the Masters is just foolish. To take one obvious example of what's wrong with it, suppose Woods wins the PGA? McIlroy would then no way be the biggest story going into the Masters. He probably won't be anyway because there will have been months of tournament golf before the Masters and stuff happens.
PS: This is an observation on golf, not journalism, really. It used to be that the question before the Masters was "will this be the year Jack (then Tiger) wins the Grand Slam? Now the career Grand Slam is being talked up. It's a huge accomplishment, but it's hardly the grabber a real Slam would be.

 

The 2015 Masters prediction, played big on the cover, was supposed to be unusual and a little edgy. It's not like SI was lacking self-awareness like you seem to think, and obliviously predicting an event nine months in advance.

Also, people have been bitching about excessive Tiger coverage since April, 1997. Fucker has won 14 majors. If people don't understand why he's interesting, I don't know what to say.

 

Not for nothing but the last time the sporting press anointed Rory -- 2012, after 4 wins, another major -- he went into the shitter and didn't win any of the 16 events he played in 2013, and finished a cozy 49th for the season. So now he's won a 3rd major before a certain age, making him rare, and the sporting press has pulled out its anointing pen again.

But the '15 Masters hype is necessary, I suppose, because golf is in serious decline, if you can buy into Gumbel's report last week on Real Sports.

So, it's never too early to spin the machine. All hail King Rory (again).

 

Link to that Gumbel report:

http://www.back9network.com/article/real-sports-explores-golfs-future-with-games-brightest/

 

Well, we have to do something in all that down time created by ignoring the gun violence in Chicago.

 

In a sport starved for new stars, he has won three of the four majors, two in blowouts and the third in essentially a walk, as well.

He's 25.

Do you recommend that the golf press, and the sporting press at large, ignore him?