Chris Summo

Sports Illustrated is dead. Again. BUT, you always online kids don't know. Hell, nobody under 35 knows... But dads & 80s/90s sports fans KNOW... There was nothing like rolling home from school on a Wednesday or Thursday and grabbing that sweet, fresh issue of Sports Illustrated out of the mailbox... Yeah, the physical mailbox. Tangible. In print & glorious. Who was on the cover? What was Rick Reilly's column about? Did Gary Smith write something? What's Ralph Wiley covering? Did Steve Rushin write from Greenland? What about Jackie Mac? Or Gammons? Or Pearlman? Do we know any of the Faces in the Crowd? I'm telling you... every SI mail day was an event. Titans wrote for the magazine. Legends were on the cover. New voices wrote new stories. If your favorite team or player had a feature it felt like you won something. You'd read the whole thing, always back to front, because of Reilly. You looked forward to the preseason rankings... to finding out who'd be on the cover after a championship or major... to the march madness breakdown... ...and getting the swimsuit issue in the middle of a cold, barren new england winter was a mini-holiday for young dudes. We had the commemorative issues, the goofy sweatshirt giveaways, the SI phone... We had it all. It mattered. The writing, the photos, the covers, the feel of it... It spoke to millions of us. It meant something. It was a weekly shared conversation for a generation of us. You could walk into any group of dudes in school, at the basketball court, at the mall, wherever... and just say, "you see SI this week?"... and you'd have a 30 minute conversation. And now it's gone. Again. How many times has it "died" now? Five? Six? Once was too many. The magazine deserved better. RIP again, SI. If you're nodding your head reading this, and you once read every Reilly column for a decade, then share this and follow me @Jon_Finkel. And subscribe to my Books & Biceps newsletter for updates on my Macho Man Randy Savage biography that you're gonna love.