A Eulogy for Long-Form Sports Journalism
If Sports Illustrated is in its final innings, so too is the genre of writing that it birthed and nurtured for 70 years.
We are gathered here to pay our respects.
Photographer: Frederic J. Brown/AFPFor a writer who made his bones on foreign policy, my most memorable assignments have been about the sports I love. In a previous job, I was able to write profiles of soccer stars Lionel Messi and Neymar, and cricket great Sachin Tendulkar. But my absolute favorite commission involved no famous players at all, and a sport I find hard to follow.
In the spring of 2009, I persuaded Sports Illustrated to let me write about two young men from rural India who had, after a series of fortunate events, been signed up by the Pittsburg Pirates. Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel were not even household names in their own villages, never mind the wider world. But their story1 was so compelling, Terry McDonell, SI’s legendary editor, sent me down to the Pirates spring training camp in Bradenton, FL, to investigate.