The week I started working at Sports Illustrated, in April 1984, the issue on newsstands featured a glowering Georgetown power forward named Michael Graham dunking on two flat-footed Houston Cougars in the NCAA championship, won by the Hoyas. Filing the gamer that night was Curry Kirkpatrick, a gonzo genius whose pyrotechnical run-on sentences left one winded and smiling. But the story that stuck with me from that issue was shorter and angrier. Frank Deford needed only 587 words to eviscerate Robert Irsay, the then-owner of the Baltimore Colts, who’d hired 15 Mayflower trucks the previous week and moved the team to Indianapolis.
“It’s really quite amazing,” Deford wrote. “A man who could screw up professional football in Baltimore would foul the water at Lourdes or flatten the beer in Munich.”
When it comes to that kind of cartoon villainy, the late Irsay had nothing on the soulless executives running the Authentic Brands Group and the Arena Group, the organizations most responsible for hollowing out Sports Illustrated, a once-grand publication.
SI, my employer from 1984 to 2017, now stands accused of publishing AI-generated product reviews under the bylines and thumbnail biographies of nonexistent writers. The “author” of an article reviewing volleyballs, Drew Ortiz, “doesn’t seem to exist,” Futurism found: “He has no social media presence and no publishing history.” Futurism also quoted a source at SI who said that Ortiz wasn’t the only fake writer on the site.
In a statement posted on social media, SI said the Futurism article was “not accurate,” explaining that the product reviews were provided by a third-party company, AdVon Commerce, which had assured the magazine that, although the writers might have used “pen names” to “protect author privacy,” the content in question was created by humans.
Yes, the writers were fake and their bios fiction, in other words—but that’s where AdVon drew the line! The words beneath those made-up names were typed by real people who came up with this description of the Yanyodo volleyball, which has “a smooth surface, making it easy to touch and hit, so those with sensitive arms can use it without feeling too much pain on each hit.”
The Arena Group, Authentic Brand Group, and AdVon Commerce were asked to comment for this story, and did not respond. SI alumni I know reacted with incredulity, anger, sadness. We know and respect many of the journalists toiling at what remains of the magazine. They’re still doing excellent work. There are just fewer of them, and they’re being asked to do more, and do it faster.
Whether Sports Illustrated hosted text generated by a computer or by a 20-something assigned to churn out 30 bland reviews in a single day, the conclusion is the same: The higher-ups don’t care about quality. They haven’t for a long time.
That assessment was shared with me by a former SI staffer, who requested anonymity to preserve professional relationships. The Arena Group management, he told me, doesn’t value journalism; what it does value is “the power of the brand” as something it can attach to “shower curtains, brain pills, a sports book in Ann Arbor, some restaurant in Canada.”
“If it wasn’t so sad, it would be funny,” S. L. Price, another former SI writer whose award-winning long-form stories appeared in the magazine from 1994 to 2020, told me. “Because it’s so shoddily done.”
He was referring to those vapid sentences about volleyballs, but also, in a more general sense, to the serial humiliations endured by our alma mater since 2019, when the Meredith Corporation sold SI to Authentic Brands Group (the manager of Juicy Couture, Nautica, and elements of the Elvis Presley estate), which in turn sold SI publishing rights to an editorial start-up called the Maven, now the Arena Group.
The name doesn’t really matter. All of these companies have followed the same strategy: “leveraging” the SI brand and wringing maximum cash from it, even as they actively undermine the journalism that built that reputation.
Futurism’s findings were arguably the inevitable result of the bloodletting that took place at SI in October 2019, when the Maven’s new management purged about 40 percent of the staff. Then as now, Sports Illustrated found itself in headlines, and not in a good way: “Mass Layoffs, Chaos at ‘Sports Illustrated’ Spark Journalists’ Rebellion” (NPR, October 3, 2019). “Crueler and Dumber by the Day: On ‘Sports Illustrated’ and a Dark Media Landscape” (The Ringer, October 3, 2019). “Sports Illustrated’s Use of AI Infuriates a Staff Already in Turmoil” (The Washington Post, November 28, 2023).
After taking over SI, the Maven replaced seasoned staff writers with stringers hired to cover specific teams. In one notorious instance, the company hired a reporter to cover the Cincinnati Bengals whom it later discovered was a 17-year-old high-school student in Newburgh, New York.
I remember getting a call from Price back in 2017, a few days after I’d been laid off by SI. I told him that I was doing fine, that I was grateful for my 33-plus years at the magazine and looking forward to this chance to reinvent myself.
It turned out that I was bad at reinventing myself. I needed 22 months to secure another full-time writing gig—I’m now in my fifth year at The Press Democrat, in Sonoma County, California. My journey to that posting is another story.
Though alarmed at the time by the state of print journalism, which was contracting all around us, Price and I agreed in 2017 that anger was pointless—“like being a passenger on the Titanic who was angry at the water,” as he put it.
But our stoicism was pierced by this latest, AI-related abomination now attached to a once-great magazine. I know it gets old, hearing Boomers like me repeat it, but SI was Valhalla not just for sportswriters but for writers, period. Through the decades, the magazine’s editors persuaded such authors as William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Hunter Thompson to contribute stories. I wasn’t quite a year out of college when I first arrived at SI’s 20th-floor offices in the Time & Life Building, across the Avenue of the Americas from Radio City Music Hall. As an English major at Colgate, I’d spent four years with my nose in various Norton anthologies. It didn’t seem like that much of a drop-off from the names in those texts to the senior writers on SI’s masthead.
I know we’re not supposed to get angry at “the water”—the current sorry, scary state of journalism in America. But the truth is that I’m outraged and heartbroken by what’s become of Sports Illustrated, the aging titan whose precipitous fall can be measured in the distance between Frank Deford and Drew Ortiz.