Shining a spotlight

My basement is filled with magazines, all carefully shelved, spines out, and organized by date for easy reference.

A decade of David Granger’s Esquire sits just above a decade of the Southern literary and cultural journal Oxford American. A decade of Wired, a holdover from my years covering manufacturing technology, is another shelf down. Two full decades of The New Yorker, almost a thousand issues, loom in the corner. Other runs are sprinkled in alphabetically: Appalachia Journal, The Believer, The Chicagoan, FourFourTwo, Lucky Peach, The New York Times Magazine, Outside. I own issues of Life older than my parents. I own a copy of Time published the week after JFK was assassinated. I own one issue of Playboy — cover dated the month I was born, just because it was once a cultural touchstone and because I happened to find it at a retro thrift shop.

There were other beloved titles before these: Disney Adventures and TV Guide (so much good entertainment journalism tucked alongside all those episode listings, plus a crossword!), GamePro and Wizard. But one title stands out for me — always has, always will, even in its present depleted state.

I love Sports Illustrated.

Magazines are more than a first draft of history. The best provide a snapshot of a moment that feels worth remembering. And there is something very different about flipping printed pages compared to clicking through websites and image galleries.

Descend 14 steps from my kitchen and sift through memories of Super Bowls and World Series, of golf and tennis majors. I’ll turn 40 later this year. I was 11 when I picked up my first Sports Illustrated and read it cover to cover. I can still pick up issues and remember something about being 11, about being 21 or 31. So much about SI was stellar for so long — reporting, writing, photography, impeccable copy editing. Reading it every week pushed me toward magazines. Decades later, I still love magazines and I still work in magazines — and now I’m telling your stories.

Our team strives to offer a snapshot of the golf course maintenance industry every month, and we want to tell as many great stories as we can. Which is why we are so happy to introduce our new Spotlight Series later this year.

Inspired by SI’s long-running Faces in the Crowd department — and not-as-long-running Sports People section — we want to shine a light on the great people who help this industry every day. Assistant superintendents. Spray technicians. Crew members. Equipment managers and technicians. Maybe you have a 40-year club employee on your team who you could not work without. Or your team includes three brothers, each of them able to communicate wordlessly, who keep the whole operation humming. We want to hear about them. And we want to share their stories in print and online.

Editor-in-chief Guy Cipriano and I will write some Spotlight Series stories, but our voices will be far from the only ones. Much like our annual Turfheads Take Over issue — the eighth annual extravaganza will arrive in your mailbox in December and submissions are welcome any time from now through the November 3 deadline — bylines are open for anybody in the industry. If you want to write about your veteran crew foreman or agronomist emeritus, or if they want to write about themselves, we will absolutely have room for them in Spotlight Series.

To nominate a candidate for Spotlight Series, send an email to me at mlawell@gie.net or Guy at gcipriano@gie.net. There are so many great stories in this industry. Some of them are about superintendents and agronomy directors. Far more are not. We want Spotlight Series to become the kind of feature that not only encourages you to hold on to your old Golf Course Industrys but to flip through them and, years from now, be able to hold a snapshot of a moment worth remembering.