The well-traveled TERRY MCDONELL was elevated in October from Managing Editor of Sports Illustrated to the newly created position of SI Group Editor. A novelist (“California Bloodstock”) and television writer (“Miami Vice,” “China Beach”), McDonell has wide publishing experience, having served in various editorial and executive capacities for Outside, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Smart, Esquire, Sports Afield, Men’s Journal and Us before joining Sports Illustrated in ’02. McDonell spoke recently with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.
| Date & Place of Birth: 8-1-44 on a hospital ship in Norfolk, Virginia. |
| Education: B.A. Art, Univ. of California-Irvine, 1968 |
| Favorite vacation spot: I’ve spent a lot of time in the Bahamas and Europe. I like China now. That’s not quite the same kind of vacation, but I sure like traveling there. We’ve got “SI China,” a fortnightly now that’s going to go weekly in three months maybe. |
| Favorite music: I’ve been listening to the new LUCINDA WILLIAMS, “West,” to MOZART’s “Don Giovanni” and to WARREN ZEVON. |
| Favorite authors: All the Americans from the ’20s. You know, HEMINGWAY, FITZGERALD and on and on. And, of course, [JAMES] JOYCE. All the new journalists were huge for me. Sometimes I got to work with some of them: TOM WOLFE, HUNTER [S. THOMPSON], PETER MAAS. These guys were very special. It’s all about voice. You don’t see that quite so much anymore -- people experimenting with voice. |
| Last book read: My son gave me “All Day Permanent Red.” It’s the first battle scenes of Homer’s Iliad rewritten and reimagined by CHRISTOPHER LOGUE. It’s fantastic. And I’m reading “Return to Earth,” the new JIM HARRISON novel. I just got KURT ANDERSEN’s “Heyday.” I like to read fiction and poetry. |
| Favorite Movie: “The Third Man.” |
| Best sports movie: I can’t get enough “Bang the Drum Slowly.” I think about it and I start to tear up. I still remember the last line: “From now on, I rag nobody.” |
| Favorite quote: The St. Crispin’s Day soliloquy [“We happy few, we band of brothers”] from “Henry V.” |
| Favorite extravagances: Travel, the ice seats for the New York Rangers and other front-row seats at sporting events. |
| Pet peeves: None. I’m having a real good time here [at SI]. I wish the media reporting was a little bit stronger. |
| Basic business/management philosophy: Be open. Talk to everybody whenever they want to talk to you and try to empower them. And you’ve got to be able to be wrong. |
| Best decision: I’m really glad I took this job. I was not a sports guy. I was a magazine editor, and when I started talking to [Time Inc. editor in chief] JOHN HUEY, it was not clear that he was talking about Sports Illustrated. As we got to know each other and he learned a bit about my background, it came to him that it might be interesting to have me come to Sports Illustrated. |
| Most influential person: WILL HEARST. He’s a banker now but he used to be a newspaper and magazine editor. We did a lot of magazines together. |
| Regrets/second-guesses: None. I don’t think about it that way. I just try to move on. I love change. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been able to work at a lot of different kinds of magazines. |
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| SI Group Editor Terry McDonell |
Q: TOM BROKAW said, “It’s all storytelling, you know. That’s what journalism is all about.”
McDonell: Tom’s right. He and I have talked about that. It’s the most important thing. That’s the key to the long-form narrative non-fiction that Sports Illustrated has been celebrated for over the years.
Q: Do you have a favorite story?
McDonell: That’s a very hard question because every time I turn around, something comes up. I liked JOHN ED BRADLEY’s piece about playing football at LSU. It was moving to me, maybe because he and I are the same generation: what it was like to play college football and then what it was like to carry that forward with you. [GARY SMITH‘s] great piece on PAT TILLMAN was so moving. It got so deep and was an incredibly compelling and tragic story, and also a story of courage.
Q: G.K. CHESTERTON wrote, “Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.” I wonder how he would define sports journalism?
McDonell: We move very fast and we come hard. It’s all about explaining to people who care a lot about the games they play not only who won, but what it meant. It’s about a lot more than the scores. It’s storytelling again. It’s how we tell each other who we are by, you know, being together and being football fans and talking about it and then figuring out how we feel about it and the way it enforces our values and the fun it is. It’s very tribal.
Q: What don’t they teach you in journalism school that you need to know?
McDonell: I don’t have any idea. I studied Art and English.
Q: You were a print journalist first, where nothing much got in the way of the story. Is there a danger now of the main story being obscured by the details and the sideshows?
McDonell: I think packaging is a good thing if it simplifies and if it’s got some irony in it. Packaging can have its own voice. It’s a lot better than reading sentence after sentence that tells you what people’s batting averages are. It’s much easier to read a chart. And that goes for everything from, you know, the best sports bars east of the Mississippi to the play list of the swimsuit models. But that will never replace, you know, FRANK DEFORD on BILL RUSSELL.
Q: Is there a conflict of interest for print reporters who are also reporters for a television network? SETH DAVIS, for example, writes about college basketball for SI and appears on CBS during the NCAA tournament.
McDonell: No. I think that all boats rise. They are experts and they bring a higher awareness of Sports Illustrated’s expertise to the network audiences.
Q: I heard you referred to as a “Mr. Fix-It.” You helped revive Men’s Journal and helped launch Outside and relaunch Us. What was and is your challenge at Sports Illustrated?
McDonell: This place, when I walked into it, was extremely strong. It was a lucky break for me to get this job. Talent everywhere. The only thing that we weren’t doing, right at that moment, was thinking where we were going to be one year, three years, five years, vis-à-vis the digital resources that we obviously had. We had a Web site, but it was in Atlanta. So, the biggest challenge was to figure out a way to integrate the magazine and all its ferocious DNA into what we were doing at SI.com, and then on through whatever videos we do and where we’re going now with the deal we just made with NBC. There’s a lot happening.
Q: In 2003, you said, “We want a vital circulation. We’re not as young as we used to be.” How do you attract younger readers?
McDonell: I don’t know, but we’re doing it. I think our numbers are going that way. Sports Illustrated suffers because people who subscribed to it when they were 24 do not give up their subscriptions. That’s a good thing, except when you do all of the digit-head shakeouts of all that stuff and prove that you’re younger than your component or whatever. That used to get in the way a little bit because it would play older -- Sports Illustrated would play older -- when in fact it started dropping. It wasn’t because the older people were going away necessarily, but we were just gaining really fast, and I guess it was the 18-to-34 category, and our numbers reflect that. I think it’s been that way for two or three years.
Q: Frank Deford said that the only people who should want to attract young males are young females.
McDonell: I know. He’s right again. I don’t know. It’s really about the quality, the value of sport. That’s what is the most attractive thing about the thing that we have here.
Q: What’s next on the digital horizon?
McDonell: I can’t tell you.
Q: You can’t tell me because you don’t know, or because it’s a secret?
McDonell: It’s a secret. We’ve got something coming.
Q: To what do you attribute your success?
McDonell: What I do is extremely collaborative. You know, I think that, and I don’t mean to sound like a complete softy about this, but I’ve always been surrounded by really interesting, strong talent, and that’s what’s always lifted me. Because when that stuff starts moving around, you’re bouncing ideas, pretty soon you hit a critical mass. You get to a cruising speed where you feel really good and then things just get better and better, and that’s all about the talent of the people you work with.
Q: What’s the next big thing in the integration of sports and entertainment?
McDonell: I think it’s all about what’s going to be online, what the digital future is and how that stuff plays out for the fans. Our bet is that My SI is exactly what they want. They will be able to have on their screens everything that they want about their particular teams: everything from constantly refreshing photos of the last game or the workouts or whatever all the way through injury reports. But most importantly, the most interesting things written anywhere about their teams sort of served up to you whether you’re a 49ers fan and there’s something in the Contra Costa Times that you wouldn’t necessarily know about. We’ll put it up there for you and rank it in terms of the credibility of where it comes from and an editor’s choice, but also in terms of the traffic it gets.
Q: Is there a sports business story or angle that you will continue to watch closely over the next few months?
McDonell: I think it’s a business story. So many different elements within the sports business sociology are hungry. They’re hungry for new partners. They’re hungry for new ways to do business. They’re hungry for success. And I think there’s a movement in there.
Q: Where is the imagination in sports today?
McDonell: It’s everywhere. Everything from the way athletes imagine themselves and who they are, which is often amusing but always interesting. And the way they think about themselves as celebrities. Some of that is pretty high-flying stuff. I’m being kind of cynical now. But I think all the way across the way sports are being played and coached is more imaginative and more risk-taking and just faster and more conceptual than it’s ever been.
Q. What’s been the best new idea in sports?
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| McDonell Believes MY SI Is Best New Idea In Sports |
McDonell: I think it’s My SI because I think that’s the thing that will really play well for people who care about traditional sports as fans. I think that it’s not a single idea; it’s like a net of ideas that come together in a kind of ... not a plan quite yet, but the globalization of sports is the big thing right now. I think about it all the time.
Q: What in sports would you not miss if it were eliminated?
McDonell: I like just about everything, except maybe bowling. I’m not a good bowler. It’s not hockey. I’ve become a hockey fan since I got this job.
Q: What is your earliest sports memory?
McDonell: I remember being a little boy in my grandfather’s house and being shown an old-fashioned diagram of a Minnesota-Notre Dame football game that my father, as a child, had diagrammed. You know, showing the ball moved from the 10 [yard line] to the 20, to the 23, ... and I remember trying to do that while listening to a football game on the radio, trying to have the same experience that my father had had many years before. My father was killed. He was a pilot. So, this was a big thing, being given this [diagram] as a little boy and being told that maybe I could do this too. I think I was about 4.
Q: DAVID HALBERSTAM said, “More than ever, there’s an instantaneous world of communications that waits for nothing, least of all a fact-check. So, I think the pressure on serious journalists is greater than ever.” Would you agree?
McDonell: Yeah, but it’s always been there. You know, you have to be right. If you’re not, you have to get another job because you’ll lose it.
Q: What advice would you give to aspiring journalists?
McDonell: I think journalists should read more. I’m kind of surprised sometimes that the background is not as dense as I always imagined it to be. I think everybody should have read [MICHAEL HERR’s] “Dispatches,” right? That kind of stuff, because it can really supercharge you in terms of the way you think about your craft. And you’ve got to be relentless. And I think it’s really good to start stuff, like your own magazines and things like that.
Q: What are you recommending these days?
McDonell: I got a really interesting book called “Ernest Hemingway on Writing.” I’ve given about 100 of those away. I find that if you’re stuck on a story, you can just read around in there and find something that jump-starts you. So, it’s useful. I’m not sure what the magic is, but it seems to work for everybody that I give it to.
