He was always pulling his friends together, reconnecting people he had introduced, spreading credit around. In The Night of the Gun, he had written, I now inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon. I especially liked “caper.” It made him appear lighter and less sentimental than he actually was. And I liked Ike more now, too.
When David died in 2015 of what turned out to be lung cancer, Simon & Schuster went back to press with The Night of the Gun. That was a Thursday night and it was ranked No. 53,570 on the Amazon best-sellers list. Twenty-four hours later, Amazon listed it as “temporarily out of stock”—and it had jumped to No. 7 on the overall list.
The tributes that came from what seemed like every possible direction reflected the crisscrossing of David’s eclectic reporting interests (media, culture, politics, technology), and all mentioned that he had been a junkie. But there was much more about his loyalty, his unselfishness as a reporter and what a steadfast mentor he had been to many. He was teaching by then at Boston University, which made complete sense because, as he would put it, aren’t reporters fundamentally teachers at heart, anyway? Educate yourself and then pass it on to as big an audience as you can find.
—
WHEN I TOLD DAVID I might write about him, we met for an early dinner in the West Village. He looked drained, thinner than I’d ever seen him, but he wasn’t acting tired. We talked about our children, and if either of us was ever really going to move to the country. His column that week was about the continuing importance of e-mail as a source of news, but he wasn’t interested in going over any of that except to crack a little wise about his personal digital hierarchy, which started with e-mail and then social media, with “the anarchy of the web” (as he had written) at the bottom.
I think I said something lame about news being news.
“Come on, man,” he scoffed. “It’s still just all about us.”
“Ha,” I said. He was mocking us sitting there about to dish wisdom over expensive pasta, poking at the self-importance of hacks who can’t help showing off even if, as David liked to say, they’ve been phoning it in from a great distance for a long, long time. He loved being a journalist but the journalism was more important and he knew that.
The next week, a photograph by Diane Arbus in the New York Review of Books stopped me. It looked just like David arriving in a suit and tie that night for our dinner, but it was of the Argentine magical realist Jorge Luis Borges. I couldn’t wait to show it to him.
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Shipwreck (513)
AS SHOCKINGLY LATE AS 2005, the Internet was viewed by most top editors as an avoidable backwater populated by losers they didn’t want to work with. Bloggers, whatever they were, drank Fanta with their sushi. There were no iPhones (ditto Twitter, Instagram, et al.). Editors carried BlackBerrys. YouTube was just coming together above a pizza parlor in San Mateo, wherever that was. Powerful editors lived in New York and worried more about getting a good table at Michael’s than how much traffic their new websites might be getting. The hammer had not yet come down.
That September the Magazine Publishers of America organized an event for advertisers at Lincoln Center. Drinks and heavy appetizers were followed by Jon Stewart, then ascendant on his Daily Show, interviewing four of the most successful editors in chief. The panel was called “Laughing Matters: Magazines Celebrate Humor,” and Stewart got after them all: Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter (“Why, if humor is so important, is that magazine—Spy—dead?”); Time’s Jim Kelly (“When will Time magazine find Jesus?”); Cosmopolitan’s Kate White (“It’s almost like ‘Hey, I’m putting out this advertising book and in the middle of it is a tip on giving a blow job.’ ”), Dave Zinczenko of Men’s Health (“Why is your magazine so gay?”).
The thousand or so people filling the Rose Theater howled. The media blogger for FishbowlNY, Rachel Sklar, a Daily Show fan with a clandestine tape recorder, had arrived early to get a front-row seat, and she went live with it. I’ll start with her quoting Stewart comparing print to television:
…says Jon: “I don’t consider the print media as relevant.” OUCH. Jon says it’s “kind of hard to get worked up” about anything in print. Take that, Gutenberg! Graydon disagrees, recalling how much has happened since Jim (Kelly) and he “started at Time 27 years ago this month” (cool media factoid!). Jon responds by saying that it’s all about TV: “the agenda is driven now by the 24-hour network.” Graydon says no way, “they are simply refractors of what appears in print.” Jon not-so-respectfully disagrees. “I didn’t say you don’t have your place,” he said. “It’s just at the children’s table.” Once again, OUCH….
Awkward silence. I mean, this was a pretty spirited debate with an informed audience and a (presumably) even more informed panel….Someone else asks Jon about the impact of the internet. He says that it doesn’t have the same sort of impact as TV. Okay, I am DEFINITELY disagreeing with him here. He senses this, because he says: “Here’s another thing: What the fuck do I know?” He says yes, the internet is important, but “all it is is a delivery system.” If he’s so all about the 24-hour news cycle and what is driving the discourse, he should not be discounting the web.
When, on its ten-year anniversary, Sklar uploaded her old blog post on Medium, reading it was like snorkeling over a ship that had wrecked on the hidden reefs of some long-ago trade route.
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Letters to the Editor (463)
THE CYNICAL VIEW IS THAT editors say they read every letter sent to their “Letters to the Editor” section but don’t because that would be an even bigger waste of time than writing one of those letters. This leads to a Groucho Marx punch line—the one about not wanting to join any club that would have you as a member.
How quaint they seem now anyway, even in fast-forward magazines like Wired and the Atlantic that still run “Letters to the Editor” pages in their print editions. The theory is that letters from readers amuse other readers, and at the same time corrections and mea culpas in print can satisfy people with serious bones to pick. So “Comments” in Wired and “The Conversation” in the Atlantic are there every month as long-trailing echoes of the ideas amplified relentlessly by their branded Internet chatter connecting people with similar mind-sets. All of it reminds me of the early days of Rolling Stone, where the eclectic copy chief Charlie Perry determined that most of the reader mail came from prison inmates. Or the letters written in purple crayon or the ones with primitive swords down the side…I’m talking about 95 percent of the mail—even to intellectual bastions like Harper’s. Lewis Lapham, who edited it for twenty-eight years, joked that 95 percent of his magazine’s letters to the editor were from “academic twits or commie pinkos.” But then he said: “I’m not joking.”
My approach was to read and answer any letter addressed specifically to me instead of “Editor.” If a reader had the enterprise to look me up on the masthead, I wrote back with something personal and sometimes, if the letter had made sense, I sent a book or T-shirt or whatever logoed trinkets we had run up to give to advertisers. At Sports Illustrated I also wrote letters back to children and to readers who were not well. It was a small thing to do when they seemed to care so much about the magazine.
Letters threatening legal action or demanding corrections went immediately to the lawyers, and I often wound up negotiating with them as they negotiated with whomever was coming after us. We seldom ran a correction, more likely just a letter from the discontented party, with a note at the bottom that said SI stood by the story. Occasionally I called people up and talked them down, although that never worked with any number of troubled athletes and their handlers—Barry Bonds, Tiger, Lance, A-Rod—who always wanted me to fire a reporter.
My first year at SI, 2002, the magazine received more than thirty-six thousand letters and employed a three-person Letters Department led by a senior editor to answer almost all of them. Tick-tock.
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SI (2,593)
WHEN I WAS OFFERED the managing editor job at Sports Illustrated, my first call was to John Walsh at ESPN. We had met in San Francisco after Jann Wenner had fired him as managing editor at Rolling Stone. Three years later, Walsh landed at the Washington Post and then bounced back into sports—he had been the sports editor at Newsday when Jann recruited him. His fingerprints were on everything happening in sports journalism, most obviously SportsCenter and ESPN’s website. Walsh watched everything, read everything and followed SI like the opportunistic anthropologist he had always been.
“They’ll eat you alive,” he said. “You have no idea…”
When his voice trailed off it occurred to me, as it often had over our friendship, that he was the perfect person to run SI—a troubling irony that we both laughed off. I reminded him that he had warned me about taking the Rolling Stone job too, and that had worked out.
“Jann was one thing,” he said. “SI is impacted.”
I figured he was just talking about the old newsweekly fuckedupedness that Pete Axthelm and so many other writers and editors had enjoyed feeding on like beer nuts.
—
THE WEEK BEFORE I BEGAN editing SI, I flew to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah to meet some wary soon-to-be colleagues—writers, most of them. There was good snow in the mountains, though none on the streets in Salt Lake City. I wasn’t nervous exactly but I overdressed, even wearing a tie to dinner the first night. The cover that week was a seventeen-year-old LeBron James with the headline “The Chosen One.” I was quietly critical of the choice. The American snowboarders were dominating in Salt Lake and they would have been my cover instead of just another basketball phenom. It seemed to me SI had fallen behind in its coverage of newer, less traditional sports and looked occasionally stodgy. So I was “all about change”—a posture I routinely assumed whenever I took a new job, long before we thought about digital anything.
The SI writers wanted to talk about less editing. I should concentrate on that, they said, adding that the editing culture in the New York office was toxically anti-writer. Writers were treated so shabbily that the predictable chasm between them and the editors was widening with increasing suspicion and distrust. Even the most stylish and nuanced writers were edited hard by a series of red, green and blue “pencils,” as they were called. Yeah, why didn’t I work on fixing that…
I said my first priority was to connect with all the great writers at SI, which would be hard because there were so many of them. Right on. I had never met writers so proud of where they worked and of the other writers on the masthead. I ventured that perhaps the contentiousness between writers and editors made for great work. Yeah, maybe, but…
Back in New York, I heard how difficult the writers could be. They were spoiled and lazy, those writers, and they lived where they wanted to and made more money than most of the editors. I should work on that…
It was all smoke. Arguments over whether SI was “a writer’s magazine” had raged since André “Heavy Water” Laguerre was editing it into a national institution in the ’60s. Writers said they worked harder just knowing Laguerre was going to read their copy. They also said he could be brutal. Maybe the dynamic between editors and writers had always been fraught, but good editors made writers better, and vice versa, perhaps not as human beings but certainly as journalists, and the magazine soared, relying as it did on high-end narrative journalism.
The classic SI piece, the “Bonus,” was designed by Laguerre to push the writers by giving them time to report and space to run long. You didn’t just cover the event, or even distill it with analysis; you blew it through as many filters as you could find, using sport as a prism to view a much wider world of experience and values—courage, loyalty and sacrifice within the context of race, gender and basic fairness—something one of my heroes, Frank Deford, was so good at.
—
NO ONE WAS BETTER at defining sports as a reflection of American culture than Deford, and I looked forward to working with him. He had missed his Princeton graduation ceremony in 1962 to start work as a researcher at SI, soon began writing, and was quickly accepted by Laguerre as “The Kid.” He marched through every important sports story (Frank was there) and personality (Frank knew them), pulling back the curtain on not just racial and sexual mores but also expense-account shenanigans and outrageous behavior at media saloons. Tall, with easy coordination, Deford looked as if he could play (as he did for stories in several sports), which helped him unlock camaraderie and friendship with athletes and coaches, especially during the bush league years of the early NBA. This was back when the media-starved league gave sportswriters courtside seats.
Having a good view of the action was one thing; turning it into a window on what games can mean (which Frank always did) was something else.
Those of us in the [grandstand] seats always want our athletes—the ones who are our age—to quit while they’re still on top. That way they won’t embarrass us. We then want our heroes to instantly disappear so that we can always remember them (and ourselves) as magnificent and forever green. For it is when our athletes start to go downhill that we are first forced to come to grips with the possibility of our own mortality.
Frank was tough too, and I taped this line of his on my computer: How little, really, we live up to the homilies we love to recite at sports banquets. He was so dominant and at the same time humble that he told me he found himself overwhelmed by accolades, so many lifetime achievement awards, that he felt “like Tom Sawyer going to his own funeral.”
Frank also said that when he was coming up as a writer he developed an unspecific dread of editors: What would they do to his copy next? It was not that he hated them exactly, but maybe he did. Shortly after I arrived at SI, Frank received a lifetime achievement award from Time Inc. Smiling wryly from the podium, he said that during the short time he himself was an editor, he couldn’t stand Frank Deford.
There it was, yet another variation on that old newsweekly fuckedupedness, but the writing at SI was so strong I sometimes built confidence just sitting at my desk looking at the masthead. Deford was still there as a special contributor, as well as senior writer Gary Smith, who had won more National Magazine Awards than any other writer ever and owned an almost mystical ventriloquism when it came to capturing the values of sport. Frank and Gary and the other writers made SI what it was, and the editors all knew that, no matter how much bitching got batted back and forth.
—
AS SATISFYING AS SI WRITERS were to edit, the subject matter, sports, could feel too big, too outsized and bloated, about to tip over into one endless Super Bowl halftime. Or it could seem small, tiny even, shrinking into its lowest denominator of narcissism, like A-Rod kissing himself in the mirror. But there was always a story of redemption somewhere, a story that made sports matter more than you thought it could.
To write for SI, you had to know the names and dates and numbers but also maybe even how to use abstract expressionism to explain baseball in a new way. Barry Bonds hitting his six hundredth home run: Like De Kooning before a drying canvas, Bonds took a step back and admired the majesty and magnitude of his work. Tom Verducci wrote that, and he was a star, too. SI had many stars and all of them pushed beyond the scores and clichés in numbing rotation on sports television.
It wasn’t that SI didn’t care about the scores, or that all its stories weren’t fundamentally about winning and losing. They were. The writers just found ways to give you more about the players—who they were and what their wins and losses meant. It was the kind of ambitious writing all editors want to edit, and I had read most of the SI writers for years. Here’s a classic Rick Hoffer lede on another slugger, written before I got to the magazine:
Mickey Mantle, with his death Sunday at 63, passes from these pages forever and becomes the property of anthropologists, people who can more properly put the calipers to celebrity, who can more accurately track the force of personality. We
can’t do it anymore, couldn’t really do it to begin with. He batted this, hit that. You can look it up. Hell, we do all the time. But there’s nothing in our library, in all those numbers, that explains how Mantle moves so smoothly from baseball history into national legend, a country’s touchstone, the lopsided grin on our society.
SI was ferocious, too, as a news gatherer and news breaker, not with simulated reporting and the “confirming” that always seemed to follow SI stories about performance-enhancing drugs and the corruption of amateurism, but with original reporting loaded with particled facts about what really happened. George Dohrmann was an ace at that and he could write, too.
[Ohio State football coach Jim] Tressel has often been described as senatorial, an adjective rarely applied to a football coach; in fact, one of his nicknames is the Senator. He has been lauded for his sincerity and his politeness, and people who admire his faith in God often mention the prayer-request box on the desk in his office at Ohio State.
…For more than a decade, Ohioans have viewed Tressel as a pillar of rectitude, and have disregarded or made excuses for the allegations and scandal that have quietly followed him throughout his career. His integrity was one of the great myths of college football. Like a disgraced politician who preaches probity but is caught in lies, the Senator was not the person he purported to be.
Hell, they could all write, those writers. When I was closing the May 29, 2006, issue, I e-mailed the business side, suggesting the feature ledes in the magazine that single week would show off the great writing and thus make an effective sales tool. That’s what differentiated SI from the rest of sports journalism. There were five features that week and I loved every lede. My memo began with “Try this with any other magazine…” My favorite was Franz Lidz’s at the top of a baseball profile:
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