I still remember the night I found out Belle had died. What Belle and I had shared hadn’t been a love affair, exactly—we were both too young and inexperienced for that. Things had never really gotten off the ground.
“You must just kiss me,” Belle would always say. “No warning. Just grab.”
“I’m asking first.”
She made a face. ”Oh please don’t. That ruins it.”
”But Belle, there’s a monitor right out in the hall.”
”I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
”Every time I leave to pee, she gives me the hairy eyeball,” I said. “Last time I leaned on your hair, you had to go out and explain everything was okay. If you scream, I might get kicked out of college.”
”I might scream,” Belle said.
We laughed and I brushed away the pile of magazines I’d brought on the bus and kissed her, in that narrow little room in Northampton.
I met Belle one evening the winter before in the common room of her college, my butt still sore from five hours on the Peter Pan from New Haven. Though Yale was co-ed, I had a college friend at Smith, and visited that smaller, prettier campus regularly. Belle and I hit it off immediately, and dated happily.
But then the spring semester ended, and I went off to New York for a job in real estate where I didn’t understand anything, and everything they asked me to do seemed slightly illegal. One sweltering Tuesday in July, I met Belle’s parents at Fraunces’ Tavern, a terrible awkward lunch made worse by the fact that my collar button had popped on the packed and sweaty 6 train. For ninety minutes, I made small talk, one wing up and one down.
Belle’s mother, a formidable woman I had been implored to impress, was not impressed. Belle’s father who (it had been explained) was the junior partner, patted me on the shoulder sympathetically as we parted. I was too young to know much, but I knew then that my goose was cooked.
And so we faded away, Belle and I, more a what-might-have-been than a couple. Yet I always remembered her so fondly, her porcelain skin and bright blue eyes and a nose which was a little too sharp and a little too long—which somehow suited her perfectly. Belle was tiny, and had a very nice way of hooking her arm through mine and pressing her little birdlike self up against me. How pleasant and sweet it was to be with her, to walk along the streets, listening to her stories of Brahmin girlhood, the peculiar joys and pains of being the granddaughter of Clark Clifford or great-grand-niece of Dean Acheson or whoever it was. I knew, just knew, that we’d be friends, because that’s the kind of person she was—a real person, in a land of preppy fakes.
So after all these years I still thought of her, probably once every six months, and upon thinking of her would imagine how nice it would be when we caught up, and would spend twenty minutes or so working the web. I could never find much trace of Belle—no surprise, she wasn’t really a public sort of person, and much too dignified for the internet. But I looked forward to hearing what had happened to her since we’d walked together on the streets of Northampton. I hoped life had treated her well.
It hadn’t. One night on the internet I learned that Belle had died, much too young, at 42 or something. Not cancer as I recall, but some even more horrible genetic acronym, something neurological, something that made me gasp and whisper a little prayer for my friend when I read it.
Still, the obit showed that Belle had married, as I knew she wanted to, and had had some kids, which was also important to her. “You don’t understand, Yalie—I want to be in the Junior League,” she’d told me laughing but serious. “I want babies, too, lots of ‘em. If that scares you, you’d better get lost!”
I had gotten lost, not intentionally, but lost just the same. And when I’d seen that obituary, and knew that our story was over, really over, I felt old, and everything around me made a little less sense.
• • •
It’s almost impossible to explain to someone who didn’t grow up with “legacy media” what the culture of words was like back before the internet. Many, many fewer people were published, but those who were, were professionals. Whether it was a local paper or an airport read or Newsweek, everyone you read had trained to do it, like veterinarians if not doctors, and made a living writing. What was being sold was not conflict, but certainty; ideas were presented, and you read them, and turned them over in your head. Maybe you talked with your friends about it. Maybe—rarely—you’d even write a letter to the editor. Things felt very stable. The events of the day were not an excuse for strangers to swear at you. Even conspiracy theories (of which there were plenty) felt like a harmless hobby. Few people wrote manifestos, and those who did mostly kept them to themselves. Not everyone wanted to be famous, have fans, be known. Most people, in fact, didn’t want that.
You read material carefully produced and curated by people who—even when you disagreed with them—seemed to be taking things very seriously. People who felt the weight of their authority and wanted to wear it well. It was a formal world, which meant that a little informality, a little cheekiness, went off like a bomb.
This made it very fun to write funny.
Believe it or not, magazines and newspapers used to engender reverence, a respect, the kind of thing now reserved for Donald Trump or Elon Musk. Sports Illustrated was one of those revered publications, for every good reason. At its best, it was beautiful, hilarious, striking, human. It had dignity.
We cannot know now whether Sports Illustrated will really die for good or, in the capitalist voodoo of our era, shamble around for decades as a commercial zombie. Surely whoever owns all that “IP” will repackage it for nostalgic Von’s shoppers like myself. Go ahead, do a special issue on the ‘85 Bears, I’ll buy it.
But whatever’s in store for Sports Illustrated, there’ll be no dignity in it.
When I was a kid, seven probably, my sports-loving Dad got me a subscription to Sports Illustrated. Would I even be a sports fan today if it weren’t for that magazine? Sports seemed to be better then, because there seemed to be so much less of it, and what there was, meant so much more—today, the “Miracle on Ice” would merit eight minutes max on the Scott Van Pelt Show, between Sixers-Celts highlights and something Billy Martin said when he was obviously schnockered.
SI in the late ’70s was glorious. Every issue had writers like Frank Deford and Roy Blount, Jr., and photographers like Neil Leifer and Walter Iooss. I still remember reading George Plimpton’s spoof from 1985, about a Mark Fidrych-like pitcher about to set the majors on fire. We were going through a tough period with each other, Dad and I, and that Sunday morning reading jokes aloud brought us closer for a few moments.
Sports Illustrated was truly a great magazine, and great magazines are magic. It’s not like Tumblr before they booted porn or X before Elon; a great magazine in the era of magazines helped create our American culture. Things happened, and then were digested, not like today where events are firehosed out, knocking everyone senseless and keeping them permanently off-balance. A great magazine makes sense of things, winnowing the chaotic surfeit of reality into something bite-sized and delicious. At the same time, by directing attention and giving context, SI could also make you recognize the true Olympians among us—Muhammad Ali; Walter Payton; Michael Jordan. These were not media creations, but singular figures brought to us by media. SI explained, and anointed, and out of the cacophony of that infinitely less cacophonous age, created a world one could understand.
In the ’70s and ’80s, consuming media was still defined as a pleasure, not yet an obsession—the difference between eating a delicious meal, and hooking yourself up to a morphine drip. One nourishes, the other is the heavy-lidded, mechanical satiation of addicts. Of course SI could not survive, because it was not designed to be a drug.
• • •
The month Belle exited my life—quietly, via an affectionate letter in her precise, eccentric, lovable handwriting—I trained down to New York to meet with Frank Deford. Mr. Deford had recently left Sports Illustrated, leveraging his god-like status into a new publication, The National. An ambitious, interesting project, The National planned to use the satellite printing technology pioneered by USA Today. But instead of delivering more blandness—a McPaper—The National planned to liberate and expand the sports section of every major newspaper in America, aiming to capture sports junkies jonesing to read more about their local teams.
I had read Mr. Deford religiously in SI, and I’m sure I told him so as he leaned back in his chair. I remembered his legs seemed impossibly long, as he rested his heels on his leather desk blotter. Mustachioed, handsome, brilliant in a dark pinstripe suit, he exuded old-publishing confidence. Whatever my line of guff was, it was sufficiently impressive to convince him to let The Yale Record do an April Fool’s parody of The National.
I’ll tell the story of that project some other time; suffice to say that The National, which was funded by the Mexican oil billionaire Carlos Slim, abruptly lost its funding in April 1991, just as our spoof appeared. I’ll never forget my call with Mr. Deford; he didn’t need to apologize, not when he had just suffered the greatest sucker-punch of his professional life. But he was gracious, affectionate even, and I’ve always remembered that. He was smart, and kind, and perceptive, and there seemed to be a strong sense of protectiveness, and justice.
In other words, just the kind of person you’d want to explain the world to you, to break it down and separate the kings from the cads. And now the money men had made it impossible for him to do that for anybody. As I recall, the price of oil had taken a dive, Slim had gotten some loans called in, and The National was literally collateral damage. The idea was as sound as ever, the audience still there waiting to be served. But then the capital had moved in an unpredictable way, and the businessmen weren’t slick enough to keep some plates from dropping. When culture is tethered to capital, your art depends not on artists, or even audience, but the skill of the businessmen controlling everything. If they stink, as businessmen seem to more and more, they will sacrifice all of Art to save their fortunes.
In that last call with Mr. Deford, I remember him saying something about how it was always a bad idea to get too close to the money-men. “At best they are a necessary evil,” he told me. “Remember that.”
As I search for money for my own magazine, The American Bystander, I do.
• • •
It’s 1:45 a.m. here, and I didn’t plan on writing any of this tonight, but what the hell. Goodbye Belle, and goodbye Sports Illustrated. You were dignified and beautiful both of you, and I meant to circle back but life intervened, and now you’re both gone. I know it’s not exactly rational to demand that the world remain the same simply for purposes of my nostalgia, but then again there are changes that one can definitively say are for the worse, and it’s not rational to approve of those either.
All I can say is, I’ll do my best to carry on in a world that makes less and less sense. I’ll remember SI, I’ll remember Frank Deford. And I’ll remember a pretty young heiress screaming into my mouth, and then laughing, laughing.
