A eulogy for long-form sports journalism

In a nostalgic reflection on a storied career, sports journalist Bobby Ghosh recounts his most cherished assignment for Sports Illustrated – a lyrical piece on two unknown Indian talents signed by the Pittsburgh Pirates. As the iconic magazine faces layoffs and dwindling readership, Ghosh laments the decline of long-form sports journalism. In an era dominated by statistics and live broadcasts, he mourns the potential loss of inspiration and authenticity in storytelling, marking a possible end to a genre that once thrived within SI’s pages.

Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.

By Bobby Ghosh

For 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 story was so compelling, Terry McDonell, SI’s legendary editor, sent me down to the Pirates spring training camp in Bradenton, FL, to investigate.

There are many stories throughout my career that were fun to report, but this one stands out above all in my memory for the joy it was to write. McDonell had given me the editor’s ultimate gift, the license of length. This let me do justice to Singh and Patel, of course, but it also allowed me to channel the pleasure I had drawn from thousands of hours spent reading long-form sports journalism.

Great sports prose — especially by Brian Glanville on soccer and John Arlott on cricket — had inspired me to become a journalist, and the very idea that I was now writing for the world’s greatest sports publications almost made me giddy. After all, its pages had been adorned with the bylines of James Michener, Jack Kerouac, Don DeLillo, John Updike, John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.

And … Bobby Ghosh?! Even now, nearly 15 years on, I remember how the prospect made my fingers tremble on the keyboard. I remember, too, the flush of fulfillment I felt when McDonell called to say he’d enjoyed the piece and was going to give it more pages than he’d originally intended.

Sadly, the gratification I felt is no longer available to journalists coming into their own today. Sadder still, the inspiration that fired me may be denied generations to come. The latest round of layoffs at SI is raising fears that the great magazine is near the end of its 70-year run. It has already been reduced from a weekly to a fortnightly to a monthly. Its current owner, Arena Group, was recently accused of using artificial intelligence to generate stories. (The company first fingered a third-party content provider, then took down the stories that were alleged to be AI-generated.)

AI needs no inspiration and feels no excitement. It also lacks authenticity, which may explain why, after the charge that no human fingers trembling on keyboards had produced many of its stories, Arena Group fired the magazine’s CEO.

But nobody is kidding themselves that SI will go back to commissioning great writers (or even the likes of me) to produce lyrical long-form sports journalism. If the magazine is in its final innings, then the genre of journalism birthed in its pages is not far behind.

There is, to be sure, some good sports writing out there still. The Guardian’s stable of soccer and cricket commentators is exceptional. I’m occasionally arrested by a nice turn of phrase in The Athletic, which now produces sports content for the New York Times.

But read that last sentence again, and ponder the phrase “sports content.” That tells you all about how we consume sports journalism now: match reports, statistics, podcasts, live TV, postgame chat shows. Essays are few and far between, and if they’re sometimes long, they are rarely lyrical.

It is easy enough to blame the decline of the sports magazine — or all magazines, even — on the exodus of advertisers to other media, especially the online kind. Those who have owned and run the magazine also have much to answer for. Time Inc., my former employer and the magazine behemoth that launched SI in 1954, blundered 30 years later when it waved off a chance to buy a small cable channel called ESPN. In years to come, ESPN Magazine would become a formidable challenger to SI. Under subsequent owners, Meredith Corp and Arena Group, SI drifted further and further from its long-form roots even as its roster of brilliant writers and editors was repeatedly pared back. Tellingly, the magazine is no longer a must-read for all sportswriters.

But at the end of the day, if sports fans won’t read long-form stories, editors won’t commission them. And fewer writers will have the luxury I enjoy, of looking back with pleasure at an opportunity to go long on a sports story.

Read also:

Visited 420 times, 3 visit(s) today

A eulogy for long-form sports journalism as Sports Illustrated reaches decline – Bobby Ghosh

Cyril Ramaphosa: The Audio Biography