Jack McCallum - Sports Illustrated Book of the Apocalypse: Two Decades of Sports Absurdity

Just before I took over the editing of Sports Illustrateds Scorecard section in 1993, I saw a television ad in which David Carradine, who starred in the 1970s TV series, Kung Fu, was hawking a tai chi workout video. The series had been about a Shaolin monk, Kwai Chang Caine, who traveled through the Old West, weaponless of course, searching for his half-brother and reaching into his martial arts bag of tricks to dispatch a couple dozen bad guys on every episode. You know, the kind of thing that happened all the time back then. The series, ridiculous yet irresistible, made a cult hero out of Carradine, and it seemed both sad and amusing that, many years and many pounds later, this guy who was born in Hollywood into a well-known acting family was making an Eastern-oriented workout video. Then again, themed workout videos seemed funny themselves twenty years ago.

It wasnt a major story, or even a minor one, but my charge from SI editor Mark Mulvoy had been to make Scorecard a little more fun, and this seemed perfect. Scorecard had always beenand to an extent remainsthe conscience of the magazine, serious in its meditations, the parochial-school nun rapping your fingers with a ruler. I remember talking to the late Jim Valvano in the mid-1980s about how he attacks his weekly Sports Illustrated. Im careful to read that Scorecard section first, he said, just so I can be sure what fish or birds are going to be extinct and take care that Im not doing anything wrong. Then I can move on to the more interesting stuff.

So with Valvanos comments and Mulvoys dictate in mind, I came up with the idea of running a short item about Carradine, without comment, under the headline This Weeks Sign That The Apocalypse Is Upon Us. I cant remember why I came up with Apocalypse other than I found its absurd overstatement humorous and the whole thing could be nicely twinned with the venerable They Said It, a Scorecard staple for decades. It did lead me to discover that the word itself, now charged through and through with biblical doom, does not literally mean end of the world. It means, from the ancient Greek, lifting of the veil, i.e. the revealing of something not known, in effect, a prophecy or revelation. The fact that so many apocalypses were related to the end of the world changed the meaning. And, not incidentally, we are pleased to be bringing you this in 2012, the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar.

The concept of a weekly Apocalypse was a bit of a hard sell with some of the higher-ups at SI, but most of my colleagues, and many readers, got it immediately and began bringing potential Apocalypses to the attention of myself and Rich OBrien, with whom I co-edited the section. The rules for the weekly Apocalypse just kind of evolved. It had to be an item that, in and of itself, was not worthy of major coverage. The O.J. Simpson murder case, which happened early in the life of the Apocalypse, for example, was not a candidate; it was front-page stuff all the way. But in the wake of the grisly attacks, the over-covered trial and the increasingly pathetic saga of the one-time-crossover-hero-turned-national-joke came a glut of O.J.-related Apocalypses. O.J. was one of those gifts that kept on giving, and I suspect there will be Juice-related Apocalypses until the day he dies.

Rich and I decided that the Apocalypses, like that first one about Carradine, would be devoid of editorial comment; the item itself, coupled with the vastly overblown rubric, would constitute the statement. Sometimes, though, you could have a little fun with the deadpan delivery without violating the rule, notes OBrien, as when we identified Queen Elizabeth with the helpful phrase ruler of Britain. We also decided that the Apocalypses should be one sentence, no matter how complicated the information that had to be given; that was just a little writing exercise that amused and sometimes perplexed us.