Decision time

My third notice came in the mail just the other day.

Traditionally, I don't let my magazine subscriptions run out. Whenever I get a notice, I almost always renew the subscription immediately. I did this for Time magazine. I did it for Civil War Times. I still do it for Monitor, another Civil War publication.

I like getting magazines in the mail. It's like getting a little Christmas present whenever they arrive.

But I may not do it this time. So I'm in a quandary.

I mean, it is Sports Illustrated, after all.

The fact that I'm considering not renewing my subscription to SI is shocking, even to me. I've been a loyal subscriber to the magazine ever since I was a junior in high school. We're talking 1968 here. That's 55 years of uninterrupted loyalty.

Sports Illustrated was the first magazine I ever subscribed to. I'd get my latest copy, take it to school and read it cover to cover in study hall when I should have been, well, studying. Every week, I'd grab my latest SI and read the editorial, the table of contents, Faces in the Crowd, even the publication statement on the contents page. My subscription even had my name on the cover's address stamp. It was mine.

I read about baseball, football, golf and basketball, but also about sports I didn't really care about. Hockey. Soccer. Auto racing. Horse racing. I felt I was becoming well rounded, if not actually aware.

Because I was subscribing to SI in my formative years, I acquired an appreciation for scintillating, incisive and perceptive sports writing. I didn't know back in high school that I would end up a sports writer myself, but maybe, just maybe, I absorbed a little bit of style and panache from the likes of Frank Deford or Dan Jenkins or Curry Kirkpatrick or Robert Creamer or George Plimpton or Tom Verducci. Maybe it was osmosis. Or maybe it was a dream.

But somehow, I became a sports writer, covering not only baseball, football, golf and basketball, but also soccer, volleyball, bass fishing, Hawg Runs and auto racing. Maybe SI helped prepare me for this. 

In the last five years, though, SI has gone through a significant change. Like most print publications, it finds itself dealing with the Internet, as well as all the other information platforms, that have virtually erased print media from our very eyes. The once weekly magazine now shows up in my mailbox once a month. That's 12 issues per year.

My subscription doesn't even include the swimsuit issue any more. I don't know how that happened.

But I understand. Even I am distracted by other news sources to where SI is now mostly out of sight, out of mind. I hardly even read my SI anymore when it does arrive, and certainly not cover to cover.

So now my 55-year-old subscription hangs in the balance. I'm doing a lot of downsizing these days in an effort to whittle away of some of the clutter in my life, and Sports Illustrated might be a victim of that downsizing.

I'm wondering if I'll get a fourth notice?

But the times are always changing, and this might be one of those times.