Stymie started with a simple, good idea from founding editor Eric Smetana: smart sports storytelling in a variety of different styles. From that good idea has come a consistently good literary magazine focused on exploring sports through the lenses of fiction and poetry.
In January of 1955, a then-fledgling Sports Illustrated sent William Faulkner to a Rangers/Canadiens game at the old Madison Square Garden. The resulting essay is brief, great, and exactly as Faulkner At A Hockey Game as you'd expect.
It doesn't necessarily seem like good news, at least from a singularity/rise-of-the-robots perspective, that Yahoo has a team of robo-writers churning out reams of fantasy football copy. The good news, though, is that these robot-crafted fantasy football recaps read as if they were written by and for strange fifth graders.
Ted Leonsis owns a bad basketball team, and hates reading bad things about his basketball team. But while it wasn't that surprising that Leonsis went in on those charged with writing about the Wizards on Wednesday, his choice of target was a little strange. And a little awful, actually.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot of really lovely words over the course of his long, sad life. He wrote exactly one sentence during his career at Sports Illustrated, although it was a pretty good sentence.
