Rushin out at SI

So where is Rushin going? And was he fired or did he quit?

 

Read Rushin's final piece. Enjoyable read. Good job there, Rushin.

 

Who should take over, as in what writer, in or out of SI, should be the front columnist? I'd say Plaschke or Posnaski. Inside, Ballard would be good, as would Wertheim. Maybe Dr. Z can just print chapters from his memoirs.

 

They aren't replacing the column. The new front-of-the-book debuts this week.

 

I read somewhere that everyone's favorite ESPN blogger/writer might be taking over for Rushin. What are the chances of that happening?

 

link?

 

http://www.bostonsportsmedia.com/shots/

 

I saw the new format, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't add a new column. The new layout is for the Scorecard/Players section. They could easily cut a page of pics.

 

i saw the new format. oddly, there is an editor's note saying that at time, inc., they subscribe to the theory that 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' and it seems to me that they've done just that. at least with the leadoff essay.

i liked the recent trend of full page essays about a noteworthy topic -- the duke lacrosse one from a couple weeks ago comes to mind. trying to summarize the entire week in 10 inches is stupid.

 

I'm a little late on this, but that's ok. Rushin didn't wow me with every column, but I loved a lot of them, including this one below. It's one of my favorites. (I always thought, too, that the people here who mocked his wife's looks were the worst kind of cowards, but that's another issue, I guess.)

Most of us are natural cynics, both in life, and on SportsJournalists.com. And that's ok, I guess. I'm guilty of it too. But it's pretty important to dream big and take chances too. It's easy to forget, with so many people telling you that you can't work for SI, The New Yorker or Esquire, that some people actually do get that far, and they're rarely the people who give up when others tell them it's unrealistic. If I ever end up teaching -- and I think that I will, especially if that magazine gig never materializes -- this will be one of the things I hand out on the first day of class.

Sweet Dreams
Sports, unlike much of American life, often reward what seem like absurd aspirations

By Steve Rushin

In high school I sat in the basement and watched Minnesota Twins games on TV and wrote earnest stories about them on my mom's Royal typewriter. You had to strike the keys violently--as if trying, on a carnival midway, to ring a bell with a sledgehammer. The keys went bang! and the carriage-return bell went ping! and I dreamed, absurdly, of writing for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.

Bo Ryan became a basketball assistant at Wisconsin in 1976. He left Madison eight years later to be head coach at Wisconsin-Platteville, and 15 years after that he took over at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Last week Ryan--now a 53-year-old father of five--returned to Madison as coach of the flagship Badgers. He said of the job, "It's a dream."

Jay Wright was raised near Philadelphia on Villanova basketball games. His hero was a Villanova coach, he married a Villanova cheerleader, and he became a Villanova assistant before alighting at Hofstra, which he left on March 27 to become the new head coach at...Villanova. "If you're a Villanova fan and Rollie Massimino is your idol, what's better?" Wright said, invoking the name of the coach who led the Wildcats to the national championship in 1985. "You dream about walking on the sidelines."

Wright's top assistant for seven years at Hofstra was Tom Pecora, who grew up 20 minutes from the Hempstead, N.Y., campus, once washed dishes in the Hofstra alumni club and returned to that club last week when he was promoted to head coach of the Pride. "This," he said, "is my dream job."

These dreams may not sound like much to you, and I sometimes feel like Lily Tomlin, who said, "I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." More often, though, I recognize that herein lies the central beauty of sports: Lifelong dreams are fulfilled every day. Few fantasize about careers in waste management or systems analysis or double-entry bookkeeping, fulfilling as those jobs may turn out to be. But in sports, last week alone, women's Final Four participant Jackie Stiles of Southwest Missouri State said, "I'm living a dream," and men's Final Four participant Nate James of Duke said, "I'm living a dream," and quarterback Drew Henson said, after leaving Michigan to sign with the New York Yankees, that wearing pinstripes was his life's dream.

This week someone will realize his once-ridiculous ambition of getting green-blazered at Augusta while someone else will fulfill his absurd childhood fantasy by stepping to the plate in a major league game. We spend so much time cautioning kids not to dream of playing big league ball--"There are only 700 jobs"--that we often forget a salient point: There are 700 jobs, and they have to be filled by real people, most of whom are thankful that nobody crushed out their dreams like a spent Camel. Hope, a philosopher said, is the dream of the waking.

(cont.)

 

"Try some more," said another great thinker, Willie Wonka, while urging the brats who toured his chocolate factory to sample the lickable wallpaper. "The strawberries taste like strawberries! The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!"

"Snozzberries?!" replied Veruca Salt. "Whoever heard of a snozzberry?"

To which Wonka said only, "We are the music-makers. And we are the dreamers of dreams."

He was alluding to a 19th-century poet named Arthur O'Shaughnessy, who wrote:

We are the music-makers
And we are the dreamers of dreams
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams
World-losers and world-forsakers
On whom the pale moon gleams
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world forever, it seems.

The world belongs to those who see its possibilities. Dreaming is like believing in God or enrolling in the United frequent-flier program: It costs nothing, yet has potentially transcendent rewards. Why not dream? Yours can be audaciously gigantic: A teenage Ted Williams, after all, dreamed of people seeing him and saying, "There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived." (Now, remarkably, they do just that.)

Or your dream can be laughably humble: Seven years after I graduated from high school, the Twins won Game 7 of the World Series at the Metrodome, and I drove a rental car through downtown Minneapolis to my childhood home in the suburbs, where I wrote, in the basement, the story for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.

The dream fulfilled is every bit as fantastic as I once imagined it to be. The strawberries really do taste like strawberries. And the snozzberries taste like snozzberries.

-30-

 

That is fantastic. I remember that one. Rushin has so much transcendent writing in him, which is why people here, aside from the obvious sociopaths, get so grumpy when he mails them in. Everyone of us wishes they could've had his career path, and his talents.