My Time At Sports Illustrated And How Their Fall Helped Lead To My Own

A lot of us old guys in the sports media business have been writing somber, eulogistic pieces of late about a magazine of our youth - Sports Illustrated. Normally, I don’t indulge in much “the good old days” type of thing, but for certain generations of sports fans who also liked to read about sports, this magazine was a staple of our lives. For me, it arrived in the mailbox every Friday, and by Friday night, my smudgy fingerprints were all over most every page (except when they wrote about stuff like sailing and horse racing).

So, not only was the news last week that Sports Illustrated might be laying off its entire staff after its owner gave up on it a sad moment in contemporary sports media, it was another closing of a door to some of our youth. But, for me, memories of Sports Illustrated have been sad for 11 years now, because of my own history with the entity when I was an adult.

From 2011-13, I wrote articles under the banner of Sports Illustrated. It was as a freelance writer, and mostly for just the website.

Normally, I don’t mention too many names in the business and how it relates to my own career, but I’ll mention a couple here and apologies if it seems a bit humble-braggy, but I’m just trying to tell a story. In 2011, the great Jim Kelly passed away. He was the longtime hockey writer at the Buffalo News, and later freelanced for SI as a regular hockey writer, mostly, too, for the website.

Jim was a great writer and reporter, and a terrific guy. I will never forget when, during the 1996 Stanley Cup Finals between the Avalanche and Panthers, he came up to me and complimented me on a “lead” of a game story from the series, on an off-day at McNichols Sports Arena. Jim was already hockey writing royalty, a member of the Hockey Hall of Fame. It gave me a tremendous boost personally, and he became a friend in the ensuing years.

When Jim passed, I got a call from Michael Farber, the lead hockey writer for Sports Illustrated. For me, Farber is the greatest hockey writer of all time. His stories were, for me anyway, little Michelangelos, only with words.

Mike asked if I might be interested in replacing Jim Kelly as a regular SI freelancer. While this would be in addition to my regular full-time job with the Denver Post, my answer was “hell yes I would.” He said he would recommend me to the top editor, Paul Fichtenbaum, and to “try and act surprised when you get the offer from him.”

Sure enough, Fichtenbaum contacted me a few days later and said something like “anybody Michael Farber recommends for hockey is good enough for me” and welcomed me to the SI stable of writers. No, I wouldn’t be a full-time staff writer with SI, but Fichtenbaum said some promising things that I might be at some point. When on an Avs road trip through New York in 2012, I was invited by my supervising editor, a brilliant guy named John Rolfe, to tour the famed SI offices in the Time-Life Building right across the street from Radio City Music Hall.

I met Fichtenbaum and another editor named Mark Beech, and a couple of writers in the office that day including Kostya Kennedy. Fichtenbaum patted me on the shoulder and said I was “an SI guy now” and hinted at a future of full-time employment.

Me? A staff writer for Sports Illustrated? The magazine I read every single week for 41 years or so to that point? Excuse my French here, but “no fucking way.” It was a thing just too big to comprehend, something impossible to believe could happen to a small-town kid from New Hampshire.

In the meantime, I was given weekly assignments by Rolfe for the SI website, and would write dozens of feature stories. The extra money was terrific. I won’t say the amounts, but it was always well into the four figures per month. But, and I know you won’t believe this, the money didn’t matter to me. This was my chance, my real chance, to show my stuff as a writer for a national audience.

I’d written before for publications such as The Sporting News, ESPN The Magazine, Hockey Digest, The Hockey News and many others. But this was Sports Fucking Illustrated.

I poured every ounce of my ability into every one of those SI features. I don’t have too many framed articles from my career, but the first one I ever did for SI’s website is in a frame. Here it is:

As you can see, it was a feature on Anze Kopitar, in the middle of the 2011-12 NHL season. I think I had a week or so to do the story, and here’s the first thing I learned when I said it was “Adrian Dater, from Sports Illustrated” on the line to a team PR person: doors opened quick.

Despite the Kings being in the middle of their season, the Kings got him right on the phone for me. How about this one for the power of SI: In the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals between Boston and Vancouver, they wanted a feature on Boston’s Patrice Bergeron to run in their print commemorative issue, but here’s the thing: the series wasn’t even over yet. This was a story that might never run! But, if the Bruins won the series, they had to be ready to hit the stands quickly with a commemorative issue and my Bergeron story would be included. If the Canucks won the series, it would never run but I’d get a “kill fee.”

So, the Bruins, to my amazement, actually got Bergeron on the phone for me between games of the seven-game series. Normally, that kind of thing would never happen for a reporter, not even the local beat writers. But for Sports Illustrated? Doors opened quick.

Not only did the Bruins come back from a 3-2 deficit to win the Cup, but Bergeron was the Game 7 hero, scoring the game-winning goal and two overall in a 4-0 victory. I had to file the feature before Game 6, I remember. I covered Game 6 for SI in the TD Garden, and watched on TV as they won Game 7.

Sure enough, a week or so later, the SI Bruins commemorative issue came out, with my Bergeron feature right there in print.

Along the way, I wrote a lot of other stories I was proud of, including this well-read one about how much hockey players used to smoke back in the day (link here, but for some reason the first paragraph is not included. The story includes an anecdote about Joe Sakic rooming with Guy Lafleur in Quebec, and how the Flower would smoke in the bathroom).

I wrote a big story about who the real Tim Horton was, though the link of it seems to be lost to history. I wrote a story that got a lot of attention, about how cell phones were starting to hurt team chemistry in sports. Link here. I wrote a story about what it was like inside the negotiating room the night the NHL lockout of 2013 ended. Link here.

(The night the lockout ended, Jan. 6, 2013, I broke the news first on Twitter in the wee hours, on behalf of the Denver Post, after getting the information from two sources. This was on a night when I filled in for our regular Nuggets writer, who they said was “too overworked right now, and could I fill in”, and I did so. But when I got home from the Nuggets game, I worked my NHL sources on the phone all night and got the damn scoop, from my recliner in Thornton at about 3 a.m. And you know what my reward from the Denver Post was for breaking that national news story? Nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Not one “hey, great job, thanks for getting us national recognition tonight after pulling double duty AND on the morning of your birthday, to boot” or anything from our sports editor, Scott Monserud, or anyone else from the Denver Post’s alleged “higher-ups”). In those years in the Post sports department, unfortunately, it wasn’t about the quality of your work that got you ahead the most. It was about how politically correct you were and how much ass you kissed.

Ah, 2013. Not only is that the year I became very unhappy and very disillusioned at the Denver Post for some reasons as described above, that’s the year when the SI dreams crashed and burned. After more than two years of regular work and good notices all around from the editors, the modern-day, ugly realities of the sports media business, particularly newspapers and magazines, started to really hit hard. That meant cutbacks. That meant the end of many full-time staffers’ jobs. That meant the end of the SI freelancing career of Adrian Dater.

Some of my bosses at SI took buyouts at that time. The new people’s mandate seemed to just be “slash, slash, slash.” I remember getting a call from SI’s Mallory Rubin, now the editor of The Ringer, telling me that, well, sorry, but SI can no longer pay for your services.

It’s not a coincidence that I became very depressed after that, and that manifested itself into some bad behavior that would be costly on many fronts. I was not only depressed but had a lot of anger in me. The 2013 lockout thing with the Post really upset me. Still does. How could everything go from so great in my career to what I felt was awful, in so short a time? I began to drink a lot to try and dull the pain. I started taking too many prescription drugs to just sleep the time away, or just numb myself. I became kind of a nasty person to be around and just didn’t care about taking good care of myself. I became impulsive with angry thoughts, impulsive in general. Drugs and alcohol don’t help that.

My rock bottom in all this - and this is something I’ve never shared to this point - culminated in me living in a Thornton halfway house/crisis center for several days in 2015. It was as awful as you think it might be. I couldn’t have a belt or any shoelaces (suicide/hanging tools), had to be woken up a couple times at night for “vitals” to be taken. No phone, no TV, no radio, three bad meals a day. Only one phone call allowed per day. Just like being in prison. It was awful, not at all helpful to me personally as it turned out. I will always remember walking home from there, a walk of about four miles, at about 3 a.m. in mud and slush and just thinking ‘how did it get like this?’

I survived that, thank God. I’ve gone on to many happy career moments since 2013, including a two-year stint as the full-time national NHL writer/columnist for Bleacher Report, from 2015-17, a good couple of years at BSN Denver (now The DNVR) and a very successful launch of my own Avs site I ran and partially owned. I was able to make a living still, just working for myself. That became immensely satisfying to me personally, and I still have that feeling of pride every day now at Substack.

So, while I don’t dwell too much on what could have been for me at Sports Illustrated, last week’s news about the publication brought out a feeling again of sadness.

But, at least I got a shot there and worked with some brilliant people, wrote some good stuff and got my calls returned quickly for a couple years. And for that, I’ll be forever grateful.