Goodbye SI Subscription...

I feel like I'm the last surviving subscriber. I don't have the same mailbox anticipation I did in 1972 when I got my first subscription from my older cousin (thank you Danice!!) but what 49 years later it looks like SI is going to be so bad that I'm no longer going to subscribe (https://deadspin.com/inside-themavens-plan-to-turn-sports-illustrated-into-a-1838756286). Man, I've loved SI so much over the years, Deford, Peter King, Dr. Z, Rick Telander, Rick Reilly, all the others I can't remember; plus the Iooos photos (no, not just the Cheryl Tiegs swimsuit photos) and other gamers. Please join me in giving SI one last goodbye.

 

As I mentioned in the journalism topic and other places, I'm trying to remember the last time I saw the physical magazine not in a doctor's office. All I see now are some of the special issues (out here, during the Warriors' run) and, of course, the swimsuit issue.

I had my susbscription on autorenew, but forgot to change it when I had to cancel that card and it lapsed sometime at the end of last decade. At that time, it seemed like half the magazine was "Scorecard," kind of a weak attempt to keep up with ESPN: The Magazine, but I liked reading Rushin and Reiley. Took me a few weeks of not getting it to realize I wasn't getting it and decided not to renew since I didn't miss it.

 

I was an ORIGINAL subscriber. That is, I was four, and my parents got the subscription in my name. I learned to read from that magazine. Lapsed subscription in around the mid-'90s because I could see it in the office. I heartily endorse physical violence against those responsible for what has happened to SI in the last few years, and fuck you if you don't like that.

 

I've advised a family member who renews my subscription as a Christmas present that they should no longer do so. And I'd be surprised if the print edition survives to the date that is on the label.
So many great memories of the mag. The DeFord piece on the toughest college football coach in America - an article that included the photography of a cousin of my future brother in law. The time I hit puberty and my brother and I shredded the swimsuit issue before our Dad go home from work - the pics were all over the walls of our room. Sidd Finch, the SL Price features, Gary Smith, and the Rushin article about the joy of writing about the Twins winning the World Series in the basement of his childhood home in Minnesota.....that is what will stick with me. Don't know how many SIs I've kept as keepsakes. When the local team making the cover actually MEANT something instead of just being a marketing ploy.
I feel bad for those writers who will no longer be able to use it as a measuring stick, something to emulate or aspire to.

 

I'm in a similar situation, my parents will renew as a birthday gift. Mine goes to Dec. 2020 and I have no faith it lasts that long

 

I had a subscription for many years from my parents.
Fiest year I got it, I was 13 or so. Swimsuit issue came out.
I come home from school, and my mother had spent some considerable time with some colored markers adding to the bathing suits to where they weren't nearly as skimpy. She actually did a very good job of it.
30 years later, we still laugh about that.

 

I can’t wait for the next round of subscriber numbers. Or Comscore metrics.

 

SI was one of those things I love(d) and wanted to pass that love on to my nephew. It was all about the writing and the photography. When he got older, he elected to get the swimsuit issue and would read my alternate copy. Weird to think at one time magazines were well enough off to print alternative issues.

He let SI fall away a few years ago and kept reading Outside (another magazine I started him reading when he was a kid.)

 

Not worth reposting here, but the first few 'contributor' posts at the new SI got roasted.

It took 65 years to build a reputation that will be erased in two.

 

Damn.
You're right.
But, damn.

 

Two years or two weeks?

 

Apparently the fucks who bought it looked at what happened to The Sporting News and decided that was a sound business model.