Of all the editions of The Sporting News published through nearly 140 years, even more so than my debut in its pages or those in which I had a cover story, the one that made the most lasting impression for me was the final issue in June 1974.
I folded that one under my arm and left my family’s home about 7 a.m. on the Fourth of July and began my 1.5-mile walk toward the Youghiogheny Country Club. There, I would sit with the other young men and wait to be anointed by the persistently cranky caddymaster, Carl, to carry the golf bag of a member through an 18-hold round. At least, that’s what my dad thought.
I had another plan, and SN was the soul of it. I'd been a subscriber for two years by then, so I knew it would work.
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I walked well into the woods behind a neighbor’s house, far from where anyone could see me from their backyard, and found a comfortable spot. I sat down on a large rock and began to read SN.
I don’t believe I literally started at the cover and read it to the very back, but I know I read every single column, feature article, MLB box score and minor league batting average. SN was the perfect companion for this ruse. There was something fresh to digest on every page.
When I could judge by the sun overhead it was somewhat near noon, I returned home and informed my dad I’d not been assigned a loop that day. It happened a lot, because I was short and weak and not terribly motivated, so he had no reason to doubt my story. I’d made it home in time to ride along with my parents to watch my brother pitch in his Little League all-star game.
The perfect plan.
Yes, The Sporting News has been making my life better for a long time.
Today marks my 25th anniversary as a full-time employee of SN. If you add in the time I was a regular freelancer writing weekly college basketball columns, I’ve been with the publication for just short of 30 years. We are the oldest national sports publication in America, by nearly 70 years. When SN was launched, this country was only two decades removed from the end of the Civil War. In that year, 1886, “Huckleberry Finn” was published, the Washington Monument was dedicated and Grover Cleveland – not be to be confused with Grover Cleveland Alexander, who would become a big deal in our pages years later – began his first term as U.S. President.
By the time I began subscribing to SN more than 50 years ago, it had become well established as the “Bible of Baseball”. Every week’s issues during the season contained the big-league box scores from the previous week, as well as stat leaders from every established minor league. But SN was so much more than that to me.
There was a collection of established, often legendary sportswriters from across the nation whose columns appeared weekly: Joe Falls of Detroit, Dick Young of New York, Bob Addie of Washington, Furman Bisher of Atlanta and a young Art Spander of San Francisco. There was an ABA column by Woody Paige of Denver. There were others on the NBA and NHL.
I got to meet several of these writers upon entering the business a decade later. I got to become friends with Mr. Spander, who continues to write regularly at his personal website.
Reading all of their articles and those of others published regularly helped me to identify styles I admired and even a few whose work did not appeal to me. They helped me to imagine myself as a sports journalist, which I knew would be my profession from the time I was in fourth grade and bought my first book: “Greatest Pro Quarterbacks”, by Maury Allen of the New York Post.
I’m not sure I ever imagined that profession would carry me to this publication I treasured as a youth, let alone to three decades under its prestigious brand.
So much has changed since my first years as a subscriber, and even since I joined the team. What had been a newsprint publication was published as a glossy magazine not long after my first column appeared. During my first decade writing for SN, I’d occasionally encounter people who would tell me, upon learning of my employer, “I liked it when they used to have all the box scores.”
The only logical response: “Oh, so you liked it better when I didn’t work there?”
As was the case with our print edition, The Sporting News was at the forefront of online journalism. We had an early arrangement with AOL, when it was the standard of the dial-up world. When we introduced our website in 1997, it won a prestigious National Magazine Award.
And that is where you find all of our content now. The print edition has been gone since 2012, but SportingNews.com has supplanted the magazine as the home for all of our content, and unlike many of our competitors, everything remains free.
My work began appearing with SN not long before the company adopted the slogan, “See A Different Game”, which came to define the nature of our work and which perfectly fit the type of work I wanted to do. I’ve always been more interested in learning – and attempting to explain -- why a team wins or loses or how they prepare to compete than in the players’ favorite foods or hobbies.
The writers who once were models for how to do the job well became colleagues who set standards I worked to approach: the great Dave Kindred, David Steele, Matt Hayes, Lisa Olson, Ken Rosenthal and scores of others, including current senior writers Bill Bender and Steph Noh. The editors I’ve worked with, from Tom Dienhart at the very start to Bill Trocchi now, with so many brilliant talents in between – consistently have challenged me to make my work better.
We will celebrate our 140th birthday as a publication in March. “Founders Day”, we call it around the Charlotte headquarters. A friend who has me on his radio program each week, Indiana’s Jim Coyle, likes to point out we are the oldest sports publication in America – “And DeCourcy has been there from the very start.”
Though I may look that old, it’s not quite true. But to be there for more than 20 percent of such an amazing history is an honor and a privilege. To have The Sporting News be the place I call my second home for exactly a quarter-century is something that 14-year-old kid in the woods never could have imagined, even though he knew he’d one day be writing about sports for a living, even though he was a dreamer.
MORE FROM MIKE DECOURCY:
- Making the case for LeBron James as the NBA's GOAT
- What basketball really means to the state of Indiana
- Fifty years after his last title, John Wooden still influences the game