Rick Reilly on the demise of Sports Illustrated: 'It's just been a shell of itself'

If Sports Illustrated, the once-great magazine that defined high-quality sportswriting, isn’t on its deathbed, it’s at least been moved to hospice care.

That happened in mid-January with the announcement of the already struggling magazine’s license to publish revoked and massive layoffs. What’s next is anyone’s guess, but it certainly won’t be a return to SI's heyday. This is, anyone who had a subscription to the magazine will tell you (mine started in fourth grade), the home of great writers like Dan Jenkins, Frank Deford and Rick Reilly.

Now, it hasn’t been home to any of them for a while, and it’s been turned by greedy corporate owners into an AI embarrassment and click-bait farm (though a few good writers, like Pat Forde, remain).

Former SI writer Rick Reilly lives part time in Sedona

Reilly lives part time in Sedona, long since gone from the magazine but still remembered. So who better to ask about the decline and fall of the SI empire? What emotions must he be feeling? Anger? Sadness? Frustration? Some combination?

“Just utter, utter happiness that it ever even happened,” Reilly said.

That, too.

Reilly, who is a member of the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Hall of Fame and was voted the national sportswriter of the year by the National Sports Media Association 11 times, has watched from afar as the once-proud magazine fell into disrepair. Thus, he isn’t as moved as perhaps you might think.

“It’s kind of like, 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,” he said. “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.”

Reilly started at Sports Illustrated in 1985.

“I remember when I first got there, Deford told me, ‘Look, they don’t care what you spend,'" Reilly said. "'They don’t care what you do. Just write the best thing that’s ever been written on that. That’s the goal, to write the best thing that’s ever been written on that subject. And if you have to hire a crazed, ex-Vietnam (veteran) pilot to get you through a snowstorm in Antarctica to get to the crazy miner who has the story you need, then you’ve got to do it. And they’re not going to take any excuses.’

“Remember, that was the first day I was there.”

Letting go: Sports Illustrated to undergo massive layoffs after licensing agreement is revoked

One issue of Sports Illustrated boosted Reilly's confidence

Reilly’s writing is nothing if not confident, but it wasn’t always that way.

“It was incredible luxury, but incredible pressure. I remember I was so sure I was out of my league — I think I was 26 years old when I got there — I started getting ulcers. I was drinking 20 cups of coffee a day and taking 20 aspirin, and I finally just had to start trusting my instincts.”

He remembers when that happened — a confluence of events that finally convinced him he belonged.

“It was ’86,” Reilly said. “I remember I did a 10-page feature on my hero, (sportswriter) Jim Murray. He just really opened up, and he was such a cool guy. In that issue it ran as a 10-page bonus, with amazing photos, and it was the same week I covered the Masters (golf tournament), and Jack Nicklaus came from five (strokes) back with nine (holes) to play, at 46 years old and stunned the world with that big ugly putter and couldn’t even see the ball that well, and won.

“I really nailed it, for once. In one issue I had those two pieces, which I still can remember — it was just like, ‘OK, maybe they’re not going to fire me.’”

If that sounds like hyperbole, you’ve never written a story for an audience to read.

“That’s how you feel when you’re there,” Reilly said. “You’re like, I can’t write like Frank Deford. But after a while you realize, now I can just write like myself, and that’s different and good. Let’s just do that.”

It worked out OK for him.

Reilly eventually wrote the back-page column for Sports Illustrated, the first writer to do so. It was prime real estate, of the sort that doesn’t exist anymore. He left the magazine in 2007 and started at ESPN the Magazine in 2008, then moved to the network in 2010 before retiring from ESPN in 2014. He’s written several books, the screenplay for the movie “Leatherheads,” appeared in a Miller Lite commercial and gouged Donald Trump’s penchant for cheating at golf in “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.”

How Rick Reilly wound up in Sedona

Reilly and his wife split time between a home in Sedona and a home in California. They also travel to Italy and Asia. “We do a lot of goofing off, to tell the truth,” he said.

They bought a home in Sedona after vacationing there.

"The rocks started talking to us," he said. "We’re like, ‘We could actually live here.’ … You know how you look online. We saw a house that just screamed ‘us,’ we looked it and bought it. We only looked at one house. It’s the greatest deal for the Realtor, ever.”

Holding on: Sports Illustrated may be on life support, but let me tell you about its wonderful life

'There'll never be anything like SI'

For all that, it seems certain that Reilly is best known for his time at Sports Illustrated and will be most remembered for it. He signed on to something that feels increasingly like the end of not just an era but an entire industry.

"There'll never be anything like SI, where you just savored every picture, or the writing just jumped off the page and squirted orange juice in your eye," he said. "And where you just read it cover to cover some weeks."

At least, Reilly figures, he was a part of it when it mattered.

“Somebody started a magazine, a sports magazine — there’d never been a good one in America — and hired that many really talented people, and let those people go anywhere in the world and write whatever they could and interview whoever they could and spend as much as they could just to put out the best possible magazine, and I think they pulled it off,” he said.

“I think it's the best magazine has ever come along in America, and I don't think the likes of it will ever happen again. But I'm so delighted that it did for, what, 70 years.”

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Rick Reilly says Sports Illustrated's demise is 'not that emotional'