When the news broke more than a month ago that Sports Illustrated was laying off most of its workforce, that the end of the publication was apparently on hand, I re-lived the moment someone told me in the late 1990s that my childhood favorite Red Skelton had passed away.

Thought he’d died like 20 years before.

In the late-January days after the SI punchout, eulogies followed that were heartfelt and expected. They all brought back memories of getting SI in the mail on Wednesdays or Thursdays, back when I had pimples. 

Joy. Rapture. Day and weekend made. 

But I buried Sports Illustrated 25 years ago. Was grateful for it, mourned it, and let it go. Was semi-surprised to find out last month it was still alive.

It’s like what our SportsTalk friend John James Marshall said about Fair Grounds Field, once the siren song of summertime around here. More than a year ago, after the most recent attempt to clean it up, lots of people started telling it goodbye. JJ, who spent more time at SPAR Stadium and Fair Grounds Field than probably any of us, had made his peace with the death of the place years ago. What you see now from Interstate 20 is just concrete and bat poop and a feral cat palace and a solid illustration of political foot dragging. It ain’t Fair Grounds Field; that was a beautiful place that died a long time.

So was Sports Illustrated.

And it’s nobody’s fault. Not really. It’s one of those time things. 

Once it got its footing after its founding in 1954 until the late 1980s, SI was one of the great financial successes in the world of publishing. Its covers were iconic in the culture. It billed itself as the authority — and it was. Sports Illustrated was the Cleveland Browns of the 1940s, the Yankees of the ’50s and the Celtics of the ’60s.

It happened because the most influential guy in publishing then, Time Inc. founder Henry Luce, believe in it, even though he wasn’t a big sports fan. He hired a European sophisticate named Andre Laguerre to be the managing editor. And besides the best photographers, Laguerre hired the three or four best writers in each sport, gave them an expense account, and told them to let ’er rip, tater chip.

“Oh, I thought he should’ve been president,” Dan Jenkins, the magazine’s most influential writer ever, said of Laguerre. The whole thing was a perfect place-time-people deal as Jenkins and a pile of other semi-irreverent writers pumped in fastball after fastball.

But money changed the dynamic between players-coaches and writers. Suddenly it was more opportune for a millionaire forward from the Bucks to spend time with Willow Bay instead of with a writer.

Cable TV happened. Then the internet.

And long before that, the tone of the magazine began changing. Jenkins moved on to Playboy and Golf Digest because the new editors thought they knew more about college football and professional golf than he did. SI became more political, and while a fan of 15 can argue with his 75-year-old grandfather about whether Carlton or Spahn was the best lefthander, they can’t have a fair fight about all the hot-button issues the magazine began weighing in on.

Too much work and not enough play. Sports and Some Non-Sports Cultural Stuff Illustrated. (Boooooo…)