Sports Illustrated (Reggie Bush cover)

Oh come on, you're not that stupid. You can't figure out from the paragraph that he's referring to runny-nosed kids in bitterly cold weather? Maybe you should read it again and pay attention to something other than how many parentheses he uses. Perhaps you'll be able to decipher it then.

In any case, this is getting tiresome, so I'm done. Feel free to get the last word with some wiseass comment. Perhaps you could call me Richard again. That cracks me up every time.

 

Wow! Am I the only one that actually likes SI?

I haven't read the Jurevicious article yet, but I thought the T.O. piece was good. There was one comment that complained the Jurevicious article mentioned he was signed away from the Seahawks. That might be common knowledge, but you have to mention it. It's a fine line, but you have to write an article like that directed at Jurevicious fans and still make it a piece worthy of reading by someone who has never heard of the guy.

As for SI doing fantasy football, I think they have been forced into that. Fantasy football is so huge that a section like that is going to interest just about every football fan. When you've got major daily papers hiring fantasy sports writers, it doesn't surprise me to see SI moving into that a little bit.

There are two complaints I have about SI, though:

1) You hit the middle of the magazine before you get into the feature articles, because of all the Beat, Pop Culture Grid, etc. I think some of that stuff is interesting, but I'd rather read more features.

2) I think Reilly writing one column a week is a waste of his talent. Some of the best features SI has ever had have been written by Reilly, and I used to love reading everything he wrote, no matter the subject. As much as I like him, his column sometimes is unreadable to me.

Overall, I think the magazine is very high quality. I like the style of their writers, and I'm glad they don't write like they work for AP.

 

Damn, this is a bad week for reading comprehension here.

Again: No. One. Is. Saying. They. Should. Can. It. Be. Any. Clearer?

The comment about signing him away from the Seahawks was aimed more at mentioning that was his most recent Super Bowl team. That was just last year; I don't think people forgot.

And I played a lot of football in the cold dusk, and I don't remember the snot crackling.

 

The strawman is a stone cold lock on this site for bumblers who want to cover up their fallacies. Why don't you roll some of that shit up and just smoke it instead. You might as well.

As for AP (the strawman here), it often deserves to be abused and with prejudice, but people like Litke could write circles around most of SI's staff. AP doesn't bring out the pastels because there's no need.

Point stands: Jurevicius was and is a wet dream for writers looking to pad clip files (and win awards), and the stories have been written as such.

 

I enjoyed the Jurevicius story. The writer took a chance and I thought it worked. It was fast paced and fun. And Golf Plus is tremendous week in and week out, though the "major preview" magazines are a bit too formulaic. I could do without the astrology section in them.

If you think every golf reporter is out there fellating Tiger, Dye, you must not read too much. The TV people, yes. Print? Not so much. Sure, there are some stories, but not the percentage that you think there are.

 

If that story was fast-paced, I'd hate to see a slow-paced one. It was filled with extraneous bullshit, and then broadway joe just stopped writing because he was at his word limit.

I still thought there were parts of the story that were good, but I'm about to get it out again and shred every tiny detail just to counter the lame straw-man arguments that are thrown out.

As far as Golf Plus, I didn't even want that to start with. It was simply substituted for something else that I wanted only marginally.

On the fellatio of Tiger: For nearly three years, I had to watch every Tiger story closely because a headline writer would fuck up a fact about the story. All the fuck-ups were in Tiger's favor.

"Lick balls, headline writer. Headline writer, lick balls."

 

I wasn't really into dissecting the Jurevicius piece, but my initial thoughts when I read it were: "Hey, this was a little different. It wasn't the same old paint-by-numbers Joe J. has overcome the adversity of losing his child, blah, blah, blah story." It was overwritten at times, yes, but I respected the fact that Hoffer took a chance with doing something different, even if I didn't care a bit about the subject matter. And I could really give a flip about Joe J.

 

Fantastic thread.

 

I was going through some old shit last week and came across a stack of Sports Illustrateds from when I was a kid. Probably from 1982-85. I'm going to try and post one of the articles next week so people like broadway joe can see how much more efficient the writing used to be. No gadgets, no splooge, good eating.

 

I finally got around to reading the Jurevicius story and I thought it was a good story, and well written. And, no, I'm not Richard Hoffer. I like reading about guys that aren't Alex Rodriguez, Tiger Woods, Peyton Manning or LeBron James. All I really knew about Jurevicius was the story about his son, and I'm glad the story wasn't about that. It was a different angle on the guy.

On Hoffer saying last year was "probably" his best: In terms of TDs, it certainly was, but in 2001, Jurevicius had a career high 706 yards on 51 catches, in two fewer games than last year. You could argue he had a better 2001, so I have no problem with saying it probably was his best year.

On the snot-crackling dusk: One of Rick Reilly's rules of writing is "if you've ever read it, don't write it." Snot-crackling dusk was a creative - and better - way to say, "It was cold enough to freeze the snot in your nose." Maybe not everyone gets it, but if you write to make EVERYONE understand, you'll lose more readers than you'll gain.

I've been reading SI for more than 20 years, and I think they've always good writing. We can compare what it was like in 1985 to what it is now, but the fact is, sports writing has changed in the past 20 years, thanks to ESPN. I don't think it makes it any worse, it just makes it different. Sometimes writers go a little overboard, but I'd rather read "snot-crackling dusk" than, "It was cold enough to freeze the snot in your nose." Some people don't like the different styles, but SI always has and I'm guessing always will have top-notch writers. I loved reading SI in 1985, and I love reading it now because they've got very good writers.

 

At last, a counterpoint with some sensible stuff.

The thing you mention about Reilly, though, is exactly the problem I have with the magazine. There's too much trying to pull the sword from the stone and too little of just plain writing.

Hopefully LJB can find one of those older stories so we have a basis for comparison.

 

My dad got me a subscription to SI in the summer of 1972.

I let it run out this year, and I don't miss it.