Sports 🏈 Sports 🏀 Illustrated

EDITORS’ LETTER

LIFE AND LEGACY

SPORTS AND the culture around them have always been imbued with a certain glibness about death. The manufactured drama of sudden-death overtime. Stars celebrated for their killer instincts. The harsh cliché about retirement that says every athlete dies twice, the first ending being the day they stop competing.

That glibness melted away on Jan. 26, when 41-year-old Kobe Bryant, his daughter Gianna and seven others died in a helicopter crash outside of Los Angeles. As Michael McKnight describes in his story on page 48, the grieving for Bryant quickly spread from its core at Staples Center to become a global phenomenon. It was a reminder of just how beloved the Lakers icon is even outside of basketball circles.

It was also an opportunity to reflect on legacies, second acts and hard questions about which parts of Bryant’s past were and were not fair game for public discussion in the wake of his passing. In other words, Bryant’s death reminded us of something that can be too easy to forget in our highlight-driven, minute-by-minute obsession with sports and the people who play them: For better and worse, athletes, even the ones on the short list of NBA GOAT candidates, are complicated and sometimes contradictory. They’re human, too.

In all its manifestations, humanity courses through this issue. Greg Bishop dives deep into cover subject Mikaela Shiffrin’s dominance on the ski slopes and how she can struggle to feel comfortable at the top of her sport. Robert Sanchez explores the trend of rampant cheating, or at least rampant accusations of cheating, in the suddenly big-business sport of Paralympic swimming. Steve Rushin examines how Christian Pulisic, a U.S. soccer star in London, is bridging countries and cultures. Jon Wertheim’s entertaining look back at the All-Star Café is more than a 1990s nostalgia-soaked sports memorabilia caper; it’s a snapshot of how a youthful transgression can be overcome later in life.

All of these stories aim to explore the games and athletes we cover as more than the two-dimensional figures we see on television or rail about on social media. Kobe Bryant will certainly be remembered that way. We hope the same is true of all the stories we continue to tell at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.

JOHN W. MCDONOUGH (BRYANT); THOMAS LOVELOCK (SHIFFRIN)