This is an opinion column.

This must be how it feels when a hell-bent arsonist torches your childhood home.

Or a fool-hearty developer demolishes it to make room for… nothing.

A different on-the-fly response on that day 46 springs ago and I might have easily begun somewhere else. Somewhere other than Sports Illustrated. Maybe Time. Maybe Fortune. Or People. Even Money.

I was in New York, drained from interviews with each of them over two days at Time Inc., then the world’s largest magazine company and parent company for those magazines. Interviews—including one conducted by iconic TIME Editor Henry Grunwald—arranged by Fred Clark, the company’s affirmative action officer (the title, back then, didn’t cause the heads of fearful, insecure white people to explode).

As he put me in a sedan headed for Newark airport for my return to California, where I’d soon graduate from college, Clarke asked: “If you had your choice, which magazine would you work for?”

I’m not gonna sit here and lie, saying I pondered what was certainly a seismic question—my choice?—and provided a thoughtful response after weighing the plethora of plusses/minuses. I was 22, tired, and, well, I was 22.

“Sports Illustrated,” I blurted. It had been the last of my interviews.

Thus, it began. Not long thereafter I was hired as a reporter—a fact-checker, really—at the most venerable sports media brand in the nation. A magazine that subscribers eagerly retrieved from their mailbox each week. A magazine whose editors, writers, and photographers stood among the best in journalism.

In a realm dominated by what happened—Ws and Ls—SI was an unparalleled voice, asking why and who made it happen, packaged with unique, vivid photos from perspectives television had not yet discovered and images that still endure as indelible testimonials to sports’ most iconic moments and people.

Now, it’s dead. Or all but.

On Friday, the Arena Group, which managed the brand—the magazine and ancillary products—under a licensing agreement with Authentic Brands Group, laid off about 100 employees, almost its entire staff, after learning its license was revoked upon missing a $3.75 million payment to ABG.

The Arena Group had overseen the brand—the magazine and ancillary products—since 2019, under a licensing agreement with ABG, which bought SI for $110 million that same year. Yet like numerous once-major print brands—many of which are holding on like passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight after a door’s blown off—SI has flailed amid a turbulent media industry now driven by digitization. Once a healthy weekly, it’s now a wheezing monthly that has, at times, tripped over its own AI-generated feet.

The layoffs were a shocking kick in the gut, but not wholly unexpected. (Then again, maybe it’s me: Another former employer, The New York Times sports department is gone, too.)

That doesn’t make it hurt any less.

I worked at SI three separate times over the 25 years after I blurted the magazine’s name to Fred—as a reporter/writer-reporter (1978-81), as a senior editor (1989-1994), and finally as assistant managing editor (2000-2003). Those 11 aggregate years infused in me an appreciation for accuracy (if a mistake was found in a story you fact-checked, it went into your file, not the writer’s) and established a high bar for excellence.

They allowed me to work alongside some of the greatest writers, photographers, and editors of any era and in any genre, allowed me to create content that changed narratives around the intersection of race and sports, and engage with some pretty cool folks.

Folks who were champions and architects of change: Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King (who’s still changing games), Jim Brown, Shaquille O’Neal (who visited in my office as a high-schooler), Martina Navratilova (whom I helped study for her citizenship test), Bill Russell (who finally autographed the cover I cajoled him into posing for), Florence Griffith-Joyner, John McEnroe (a college schoolmate), Steffi Graf, Hank Aaron, Arthur Ashe, Red Auerbach, Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson (remind me to tell you the story of when we ran into each other on the men’s bathroom at Chicago Stadium), Tiger Woods (his dad once called and asked if I’d give his son some advice—not about golf)…okay, too many to fittingly articulate in this space.

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Oh, one more: Earvin (Magic) Johnson, with whom I co-authored an autobiography. That relationship helped secure perhaps the most significant scoop of my sports journalism career: I was one of only three members of the media he spoke with after the November 7, 1991, announcement that shocked us all—he was HIV positive. (Respected Los Angeles sports anchor, and former NFL defensive back Jim Hill and talk-show host Arsenio Hall were the others.)

Then we got down to business.

The issue containing the first-person interview landed in the mailboxes the following Tuesday. The cover simply read: “Magic”.

I was laid off by SI in December 2003, three years after returning to oversee production of branded television and radio specials and projects and digital content. (Remind me to tell you how another blurted response to a question might have propelled my career into an entirely different direction.)

That day, Time Inc., almost four years after the disastrous acquisition of parent company Time Warner by burgeoning (but full of financial holes) digital giant AOL, laid off more than 20 senior-level execs. It was the beginning of the monstrous impact of digitization on media that two decades later still reverberates.

It was, too, the beginning of the end for Time Inc., which went poof upon being sold to the Meredith Corporation in 2017 for $3 billion. Two years later, Authentic Brands Group LLC, a worldwide brand management enterprise that managed nary a publishing brand, plucked it from Meredith.

SI may rise from its still-smoldering ashes, from the debris of its slow destruction. Maybe even as a magazine, maybe under a different publisher (Bridge Media Networks, with whom the Arena Group says ut is “actively engaged in negotiations.”)

More likely, SI may reincarnate as something demonstratively different—like a cruise ship.

There’s already SI Sportsbook—the betting, not reading kind. And the first SI Resort opened last year in the Dominican Republic.

Were I a betting man, I’d wager SI’s annual swimsuit issue, which was shot at the report last year, might live on.

That reminds me, I also served on the mag’s swimsuit issue committee. Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.

I’m a member of the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary. My column appears on AL.com, as well as the Lede. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj