Companies have embedded an ad every two paragraphs. Companies have given away their product for free. A lot of aircraft carriers have struggled to turn as the channels began to twist. Most of us in the media business have struggled to adapt to a world where what we read lives on a screen instead of on paper. I’m here because this is the best place for me to write stories and the best place for you to read them. But this is the part where I explain why that last assumption also was incorrect.īeginning today, you can read my stories in The Athletic. I’m forever grateful that the people there allowed me to breathe that rare air. The births of my children and the day I met my wife are the only moments that rank ahead of the first time I saw my name on an SI cover. Writing for SI is the sportswriter equivalent of going to the moon. Even if I didn’t get paid to write about it, I’d talk about it and think about it just as much.Īfter a few years, SI’s editors started putting my stories in the magazine. It’s a messy, confusing, infuriating, thrilling, beautiful spectacle that can bring us to our feet and bring us to tears - occasionally in the same moment. They plucked me from The Tampa Tribune in 2008 to cover college football recruiting for their website, and after nine months of that, they told me to just cover college football in general. It turns out Sports Illustrated does hire real people. Remember what your mom told you about assumptions?īefore my 20s ended, I had covered Tennessee and Florida as a beat writer - with a break in between to cover high schools and learn how to be a reporter. I assumed that If that fantasy ever somehow came true, I’d retire there. I assumed real people with state-school degrees didn’t make that masthead. I assumed I’d never work at a place like Sports Illustrated. I assumed I’d work for newspapers forever, I assumed I’d cover high school sports until I got the call-up to cover a college or pro beat sometime between the ages of 30 and 35. I’d learned I had a better chance of getting struck by lightning than of becoming a syndicated humor columnist, so I resolved to spend my entire career writing about sports. I would do the same.īy the time I graduated in 2000, I had a little firmer grasp on the business. After spending my freshman year at Florida as the worst walk-on offensive lineman in SEC history, I walked into the office of the Independent Florida Alligator and asked how I could cover sports. I was the only person at my high school who listed “syndicated humor columnist” as a career goal. “He gets paid pretty well for that.” At that moment, I declared that I, too, would someday get paid to tell stories. After spending several hours sitting in a recliner and belly-laughing at Lewis’s stories, I asked my mom a question: Does he get paid for this? “Yes,” she replied.
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