With Reilly's exit, the column in the back of SI goes to ...

all of this hand-wringing about the back page column is beyond me.

it's just a fucking sports column - not nuclear physics.

lots of people can do it just fine. and just as well as reilly. he's a bright intelligent writer. lots of people are.

'godding up' writers doesn't work for me any more than 'godding up' jocks.

every sports columnist in america, for newspaper or website or magazine, is instantly replaceable. the. world. would. not. miss. a. beat.

 

Henry:
Spoken like a man who has no clue how hard it would be to do that job really well.

 

born, have you done it?

if not, how do you know?

 

What SI should do each week for 3 months is give a different regional sportswriter his/her shot to talk to the national audience. You never know whose voice might win over America.

 

The main problem with George Plimpton is, he's dead, and thus unlikely to point the way to the future, which is SI's real problem.
Overall, though, this issue of SI is actually worth reading, a rarity these days -- the Price story on the Rolle family, and the heart-defect piece, are vintage SI, the kind of stuff you don't see elsewhere.

 

Not a bad notion.

 

How is it that SI is getting left in the dust by ESPN, when SI has circulation that's more than 50 percent higher?

 

Anybody notice how they fixed King's teeth in his mug? In reality, the guy has some of the nastiest looking shredders this side of Sloth from "Goonies."

 

And the biggest jaw this side of Leno

 

Wow, fromdawn. What an unnecessarily cruel thing to post about someone. I'm sure you are absolutely beautiful.

 

1. Settle down. The guy has bad teeth. SI made it look like he has a perfect set of pearly whites. All I'm saying, albeit with emphasis, is that it's misrepresentative.

2. I'm gorgeous.

 

Thanks. I thought about it more last night when I tossed and turned unable to sleep. So damn wound up lately.

This could actually be a spawn-off thread to decide how SI hires its next BP man or woman.

Because SI respects all of us here ( ) what about if we'all here compile a list of writers from around the country. No, not the Bob Ryans and Woody Paiges and old codgers of that ilk, but men and women we've worked with, or come across during our travails, writers we think could fill that back page on a weekly basis.

Then SI can take list and start scouting out the names and work up a system in which writers try to wow America two weeks in a row each. It's one thing to pen a great column one week. But can you do it two weeks in a row? Eight weeks in a row? Now I'm not talking "reality sportswriting." But a serious scouting out of America's distinct sportswriting voices.

You don't necessarily have to write the person's name here. You can write the name of the paper, or the general part of the state in which they live and let SI scouts find them and invite them to write two columns.

SI could make this a 6-month project (3 months might be too short with all the fantastic scribes out there). So, each writer would get to write a column 2 weeks in a row, then the next person and so on, for 6 months. SI each week can tabulate votes, and there can be a tourney-like paring down of writers, till there's a Final 4 and a championship, during which the two finalists get to write columns for one month each. From there, we pick a winner.

Seems kind of kosher, right? All of us know writers of great capability. I'd like to think SI checks this site out; I reckon there are a few SI'ers here. For all we know, Yawn could be the publisher of SI

So let's do it. Let's find SI's next back-page columnist through a national search.

My three picks for candidates are:

1) A guy I worked with at my first job in LBC, who now writes in L.A. Tulane grad. Award winner. Sharp as a whip and down to Earth, though I haven't talked to him in a handful of years. His writing is simple yet elegant, in the way Alex Wolff can spin a story (Hi, Alex, how are those Frost Heaves?)

2) A guy in northern New England, in his mid-50s, diehard Yankees fan. He was the rival sports editor in our two-paper town, whom I always felt could carry a national audience with some of his pieces. He's a legend up there. Back when he ran around like a madman covering the local scene, there were few like him in America. And he really knows how to break it down to the very last compound.

3) A guy in southern Vermont, who was a colleague at two papers. Just a great guy. Like the other two I mentioned, sharp as a sword. Mets fan yet his favorite player, IIRC, was Thurman Munson. He got out of sports 4-5 years ago because he met a good woman, got married in one of those idyllic settings you read about in magazines (it was Dummerston but felt like a faraway paradise), had a sweet daughter and wanted regular hours in the newsroom instead of the grinding madness that comes with the sports shift. When he and I were on, we were on. He knows his sports like few others and, during my travels, I've known him to be one of the great explainers of things, which is what you need in a top-notch columnist.

So there you go. Who are your serious picks for this SI BackPage Write-Off? (And SI brass, if you take this notion with more than a grain of salt and want to know the names of our candidates, just PM us). This could spark interest into the magazine, and give rise to some of our country's unique voices and personalities.