The Accidental Life

by Terry McDonell

  The two teenage girls behind the visitors dugout at Shea Stadium are looking for Mr. Wright. The taller girl—the one in the red sweater vest, shiny black capris and a Bubblicious-colored necktie—looks as if she maxed out a thrift-shop gift card. Her shorter friend, who’s sporting mismatched leggings and a jean jacket worn inside out, seems merely to have dressed herself in the dark.

  The teens survey the playing field, where, an hour before the first pitch, New York Mets third baseman David Wright is taking infield practice. Mostly, they survey Wright. Their eyes—dreamy, worshipful—glow like cherries in a glass of buttermilk.

  Not funny was Mike Silver on an injury in the NFL:

  Carson Palmer will never forget that long ride home, his iced-up knee not so much in pain but numb, like the rest of him. He was lying on his side, sprawled across the backseat of his Chevy Tahoe, staring out an open window as his wife, Shaelyn, pulled away from the downtown stadium and up Third Street. The stadium lights were sparkling (exploding is the way he remembers them) as the crowd noise rose and fell, and he could see vendors in the parking lots still hawking jerseys with his number 9 on them. The sensations were as immediate as the twin pops he felt in his left knee upon releasing his first and only pass of the day, a glorious 66-yard completion that momentarily filled the south Ohio sky with unlimited promise.

  And then there was L. Jon Wertheim in a profile of a tennis star on what can happen when athletes retire:

  Well, it sounded good in theory, anyway. There she was, retired at 22 years old, with tens of millions of euros in the bank. She would ski at St. Moritz by day and go out with the boys at night. She would ride horses at her estate in Switzerland and maybe take up golf at her other residence, outside Tampa. She’d nourish her mind by auditing some courses. Apart from minor television appearances and sponsor obligations, she would wake up most mornings free to do whatever she pleased.

  But Martina Hingis quickly realized that life in repose isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, like so many retirees from Palm Beach to Palm Springs, she had to confront the reality that work is often less about what we do than about who we are. And in its absence, our identities can get lost.

  Week after week, the writers came through like that for the magazine. Few of them, however, were interested in SI.com, some insisting on extra money to write for it. Time (intentional pun) was not on their side and neither was I. SI needed to bring the magazine and the website into sync. As obvious as this was, it was not particularly welcomed on either side of that divide. Many of the writers ridiculed and faced off against their new Web editors, who mocked them back in what I characterized at editorial management meetings as a passive-aggressive civil war. Sometimes when I was asked about the transition, I told a Time Inc. joke:

  Q. How many staffers does it take to change a light bulb at Time Inc.?

  A. Twenty-five. One to screw in the new bulb, and twenty-four to stand around talking about how great the old bulb used to be.

  There were exceptions, of course—Tom Verducci for one, and especially Peter King. Peter was so smart and prolific, so well-sourced top to bottom in the NFL, that SI built a digital vertical around him. His Web column “Monday Morning Quarterback” started as a favor for an editor he liked who had been sent into a kind of grim exile as editor of the new SI.com. It grew quickly to reach an audience of more than three million, and advertisers were fighting over digital sponsorships and positions next to his print column. He was gaining in popularity on SI’s star columnist Rick Reilly, and his compensation was catching up, too. Then, in the darkest week of SI’s cost cutting, Peter made a special trip into the office to tell me he wanted to give back a big chunk of his new salary if it would save a job or two down the food chain.

  That was the thing about SI: all the talent its culture nurtured in spite of itself could turn reciprocal. I write this with the full understanding that such sentimental cluelessness by the former editor will be pointed to as evidence of ongoing and pervasive newsweekly fuckedupedness.

  −ENDIT−

  Reilly (1,296)

  RICK REILLY DID SO MANY THINGS so effortlessly and with such swagger that he had seven National Sportswriter of the Year plaques by the time I got to SI and owned the magazine’s back page with his “Life of Reilly.” He got around like a cocky teenager and could talk to anybody. Week to week, Reilly was hilarious or heartbreaking, and he pulled more letters than all the other writers combined. He also wrote books and screenplays and had a Miller Lite commercial with the SI swimsuit model Rebecca Romijn, but that was on the side and he made more money in salary alone than any writer across all of Time Inc. My problem was that his contract was up for renewal when I arrived, and Walsh had failed to mention that ESPN would be coming after him, and after Gary Smith, too.

  Gary wasn’t interested but Reilly rolled out some jokes about SI’s “salary cap” and made no secret of his willingness to listen to overtures. As he told BusinessWeek, “Am I interested? Yeah, I’m as wide open as a 7-Eleven.” I told the same reporter, “If Rick Reilly were a restaurant, I’d eat there every day.”

  The first time Reilly came to see me, I framed the publicity photo from his most recent book and hung it behind my desk, thinking I’d point it out as a joke at the end of our meeting. When he walked in, I got up and respectfully suggested that we sit in the large chairs around the coffee table, but he waved me back and sat across from me, with a direct view of his photo. Perfect.

  “You mind?” he said, putting his feet up on my desk.

  “Not at all,” I said, and waited. It took him maybe a minute.

  “Smart-assed,” he said, with an edge on it, but he was smiling. It felt to me like we might get to be friends.

  “I’m desperate,” I said.

  “Then I guess I can’t leave if you can…”

  “I’ll match the ESPN money.”

  Reilly signed a five-year contract that blew up the SI edit budget, and proceeded to prove he was worth it. He got better and better as what the press was now calling “the first million-dollar sportswriter.” He filed every week and banked evergreens for weeks he took off. He wrote features too, and was Sportswriter of the Year four out of the next five years. Advertisers loved Reilly and the inside back cover, opposite his column, was the most expensive real estate in the magazine.

  When Reilly e-mailed me, he usually started with “Dear Boss,” then went on to whatever was on his mind. His column ideas ranged from being a ball boy at the U.S. Open to NCAA screwups to jocks doing TV Viagra ads to a legless football player. He was always good, but he was never easy. Sometimes he wanted graphics in his column instead of his photo (which drove the art department nuts); sometimes he wanted a new photo (ditto the photo department). He called me out, as he should have, when I complained that I was under pressure from SI’s ad sales executives to soften his attack on big tobacco. We never became friends exactly but sometimes we talked about our lives, our children and the divorces we were going through.

  “Maybe we’re better at our jobs than at our lives,” he said once, not an original idea but it stayed with me as a kind of offering. He was talking about perspective and, I think, why he could write so beautifully about not just elite athletes and their teammates but about what sports meant to ordinary people and their families—where sports fit into the world. Reilly always found those stories.

  In May 2006, he wrote a column about malaria as a leading cause of death among children in Africa. He called it “Nothing but Nets” and asked readers to send ten dollars each to a charity he was starting on the fly to ship over antimalarial bed nets instead of the predictable sports equipment. He ended the column with this:

  A few years back, we took the family to Tanzania, which is ravaged by malaria now. We visited a school and played soccer with the kids. Must’ve been 50 on each team, running and laughing. A taped-up wad of newspapers was the ball and two rocks were the goal. Most fun I ever had getting whupped. When we got home, we sent some balls and nets
.

  I kick myself now for that. How many of those kids are dead because we sent the wrong nets?

  He had the right angle (sports), a compelling voice (his) and the right platform (SI). “Nothing but Nets” pulled in $1 million in the first week, and he built it into a foundation that as of 2015 had raised more than $52 million. Most important, he had the idea, one that no one could believe came from a sports columnist.

  —

  WHEN REILLY’S CONTRACT was up again, John Walsh was back with more money and Reilly was soon headed to ESPN, leaving behind more than 850 SI bylines. The press reported $17 million over five years. Reilly wouldn’t confirm a number, saying only that it was “ridonkulous” money.

  I had tried to keep him, of course, and had negotiated with his agent for weeks, checking back and forth with my boss John Huey and increasingly outraging Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, who, in turn, had to check with her boss at the top of Time Warner. When it was over I realized Reilly had wanted to be on television all along. I didn’t know how much ESPN was paying, even though I had obviously bid it up. It occurred to me that Reilly might even thank me for that. We would both see the humor, especially since I had told him in the beginning that Walsh was trying to “money-whip” him into the ESPN barn. Publicly, I told the New York Times, “He’s a great talent and I will miss him personally.”

  His last SI column was a graceful good-bye, but instead of praising him, I wrote in my “Editor’s Letter” about the magazine’s tradition of fine writing and tried to spin it forward. Reilly was gone and we needed to move on with writers who would rotate through the back page column, which would be called “Point After,” as it had been before he took it over. I didn’t even mention his name. When I heard from him the following week, there was no “Dear Boss.”

  He wrote me a searing e-mail, starting with So let me get this straight. He felt I’d publicly ignored his twenty-two years at SI, the last ten holding down the best-read page in sports journalism. He was right, and I felt worse as I read how he’d loved SI and had had great editors there, except one; and how grateful he was for everything he got to see and to write about, thanks to some incredibly good bosses, except one. It felt worse than a bad report card. He ended the e-mail with screw you sideways. I showed it to no one.

  —

  YEARS LATER, after Reilly had written his last column for ESPN, I crossed paths with him on the street in my West Village neighborhood in New York. He was with his pretty wife, Cynthia, and they were looking for a place to have dinner. I tried to help and it wasn’t awkward at all. He even called me “boss” again. That was funny and we both laughed. Watching him walk away, I realized that of all the journalists I’d worked with, Reilly was probably the only one who’d never really had a boss.

  −ENDIT−

  Swimsuit (2,650)

  ONE EARLY SPRING NIGHT in Greenwich Village, bright moonlight caught Anne V as she walked out on a windy terrace. She seemed to glow in a skimpy T-shirt and short skirt, her refined features and sleek body flawless and aloof. She was on what would be an unprecedented ten-year run of appearances in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, nearly matching my years at the magazine. So I knew her a little, not just in the slight way I knew the many models who came and went, and I had seen hundreds of photos of her. Many of my colleagues at the magazine thought of her as the quintessential swimsuit model, except that she had freckles if you looked closely, and her breasts might have been a little larger. She was Walter Iooss’s favorite and he had shot more Swimsuit Issue covers than anyone. But she had not yet made the cover.

  “I’m Russian,” she said, when asked that night on the terrace if she was cold. Her last name was Vyalitsyna and her parents were doctors in Gorky, where she was born. “Some of the shoots are a lot colder than this,” she continued, after a sip of wine. “And I have a lot less on.”

  A few guests at the party approached her and made small talk. A lot of the models complained about how the small talk always stayed small, that no one ever bothered to figure out anything interesting to say to them. But Anne V was almost always friendly, even though, if you looked around when you were talking to her, you could see people, both men and women, watching her. She was used to being stared at. It was her job, after all.

  —

  A COUPLE YEARS EARLIER, on Morning Joe to promote a new book, Sports Illustrated: The Covers, I was asked how the magazine could honor women skiers and soccer players and tennis stars on the cover for their accomplishments and then objectify women by slapping a topless model on the next week. Good question, and also one of those talk-show gotchas meant to underline the issue consciousness and journalistic integrity of the hosts. I smiled and said that editing SI sometimes required having to keep two conflicting ideas in my head at the same time, which got me off the hook, and we moved on to trivia about which athlete had the most SI covers (Michael Jordan, with fifty).

  The Swimsuit Issue was never what you bragged about as the editor of SI, but you never apologized for it, either. And that question came all the time, its dutifulness overrun by the obvious. “Swimsuit,” as everyone at Time Inc. called it (just “Swim” at the magazine), not only outlasted the historical moment that birthed it but grew like a beautiful mutant baby to earn Time Inc. more than $1 billion since its first appearance. That was in 1964, when managing editor André Laguerre was looking for a cover that would make the magazine noticeable during the winter months, when football had ended and baseball had yet to begin (basketball didn’t matter then). So why not a pretty girl, on a beach somewhere?

  The first Swimsuit Issue cover model was twenty-two-year-old Babette Beatty, looking healthy, happy and unobjectified in a modest two-piece. Inside were five pages of primitive swimsuit photographs in a larger package about diving and snorkeling in the Caribbean, “Fun in the Sun on Cozumel.” Babette was the model of the moment (born in Berlin, raised in Rio, living in Manhattan) and SI confirmed that she liked hanging out with Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, as well as athletes. Cool.

  Also cool, it turned out, was the first Swimsuit Issue editor, Jule Campbell, who from the beginning pushed for the models’ names to be on their photos, especially on the cover, thereby turning many of them into celebrities and establishing SI as a runway to supermodel status. This, in turn, allowed her to keep the day rates for her models low ($125) because appearing in the magazine had such significant career upside.

  The key to Swimsuit as a business was holding down costs without letting it show. The day rate now is only $450, although the models get several thousand on top of that for appearances and parties and media interviews—all of which are relentless during the launch. Equally important discount deals are made for hotels and travel. One of many astounding stats collected by SI marketing research over my years was that when the Swimsuit Issue first visited Chile in 2004, tourism rose 34 percent there. (Think about that and imagine yourself as the head of marketing for a global hotel chain.) Another stat that cracked up everyone at the magazine was that when the model on the cover was from the United States, the S&P 500 for that year outperformed years with a non-American cover model. The Swimsuit Issue as Economic Indicator. This is actually true, according to CNBC.

  The Swimsuit business was so good when I arrived at SI in 2002 that I hardly thought about it, except to tell my new colleagues that I wanted to inject a little more culture and humor to go along with the models in exotic locales. The Swimsuit editors, Diane Smith and MJ Day, killed themselves producing shoots in far-flung locations, even though the research always came back that readers wanted tighter pictures, the hell with landscapes. I said we should go for exotic landscapes anyway.

  The Swimsuit editors smiled.

  Plus, I’d get the hilarious writer Carl Hiaasen, whose new comic novel Basket Case was then just out, to contribute something.

  Maybe they rolled their eyes.

  What the Swimsuit editors knew was that “the marketplace” wanted the models naked, and their only real alternative as e
ditors was to produce beautiful, almost-naked pictures. Art, maybe.

  —

  I LOVED THAT CARL HIAASEN PIECE. Entitled “Tart of Darkness,” it had a tagline noting, “A demented photographer has hijacked SI’s hottest cover ever. Getting it back requires a harrowing—and hilarious—journey deep into the heart of Swimsuit.” It pulled some nice press but scored way low in reader surveys—which were getting more and more specific, telling me that freckles on a model were bad for sales, and definitely no sand on her butt. I was learning. And the number of naked or at least topless and what are called “side-boob” shots was rising.

  It occurred to me that we might be going too far for some of our readers. I remembered getting my first subscription to SI from my grandfather when I was ten. I thought about this and came up with some defensive language. No leering. Swimsuit did not leer. I told media reporters that most of our imitators had a panting quality and that SI Swimsuit did not pant. Thus it remained a celebration of athletic bodies and good health. It reflected the athleticism and sexiness of the culture. SI’s models were modern, natural women. You could see their freckles (if not their tattoos). I didn’t say that almost all the models had ink somewhere—Carolyn Murphy had a Japanese koi (representing samurai stoicism) wrapping around the top of her right thigh all the way to the small of her back—and that the guys in the imaging department spent hours getting rid of all the tats after the images were chosen. It was also sometimes slightly uncomfortable looking at Swimsuit pages on my screen with the women who handled the magazine’s pagination, another indication that maybe we were pushing some limits.