It should have been so perfect. Here was Bob Kravitz, young, hungry, and talented, returning to New York, the place he was born, to work for the most important sports publication in the world. On top of that, he was writing about hockey, the sport he knew, he played, he adored.
But hockey was Kravitz’s curse. His boss at SI was Mark Mulvoy, a Bostonian who had been the magazine’s NHL beat writer. “Kravitz was one of what seemed like a half-dozen people during the Mulvoy era who tried in vain to cover hockey in a manner that pleased the boss,” says one of Kravitz’s former SI co-workers. “An impossible task, sort of like being Martha Stewart’s housekeeper.”
For his part, Mulvoy remembers Kravitz as a newspaper writer who struggled to translate to magazines. “He was trying to figure out who he was as a writer,” Mulvoy says. “A lot of guys came to Sports Illustrated and wanted to write like (Frank) Deford and (Dan) Jenkins. Kravitz was not without talent. But he was fighting himself, trying too hard to be something he wasn’t.”
The editing, Kravitz says, was so heavy-handed that he didn’t read his stories for months so he could forget what he had originally written, lessening the hurt. He went weeks without sleep. “When you are 26 and single, your whole self-image is tied into what you are doing at work,” says Kravitz. “So when that crumbled, I was a bit of a mess.”
Finally, after two hard years, Kravitz left SI. “I always think of it as a firing,” he says. “But it was really kind of a mutual thing because I wasn’t happy there.”
He wasn’t happy in the weeks following his departure, either. He fell into a self-destructive pattern, staying out too late, drinking and hanging out and partying all night. “It was an empty, shitty time,” he says. “I remember standing in an unemployment line when my checks ran out. I was in Brooklyn or the Bronx or somewhere and I was like, ‘Holy shit, what happened?’”