The decline of Sports Illustrated has been well documented in recent months, highlighted by an announcement this month that the company would undergo mass layoffs after the publisher’s license was revoked.
While a lot of sports fans and media members spent the following days eulogizing the iconic sports magazine and brand, former SI sportswriter Rick Reilly says that the entity has already been gone for years.
Reilly is synonymous with the once-successful company, working at SI during their heyday between 1985 and 2007. His “Life of Reilly” column, which was featured on the back of SI magazines, was considered a must-read for most of that time.
You would expect that given Reilly’s storied tenure with the company, the decline of SI would be emotional for him. Buit Reilly recently told Bill Goodykoontz of The Arizona Republic that he is just happy with what he was able to do at SI.
“Just utter, utter happiness that it ever even happened,” said Reilly. “Let’s say you grew up in a house, and you had your best years in that house and you did your best work working out of that house, and then you left the house. And then you’d go back and drive by like, ‘Oh, they painted it purple, and they put up a horrible-looking fence, and there’s just ridiculous-looking sculpture in the yard. And they’ve let it go.’
“And then you stop going to see that house. And then you find out the house fell down. That’s kind of how I feel about SI. It hasn’t been the SI that I knew for years, you know. I mean, I left 16 years ago. It hasn’t been that great place for the last, I’d say five to seven years. It’s been just a shell of itself. So it’s not that emotional anymore.”
While SI was obviously a once-great resource for sports media writing, it’s become something else altogether since being sold off to Authentic Brands Group. Whether it was an AI scandal, ownership changes, or reports of financial instability, it has been pretty clear that SI has been on a collision course with disappointment for some time now.
