"Touch 'Em All: My Life and Career at Sports Illustrated" is the fascinating story of Larry Keith, an Alabama-born, North Carolina-bred, Big Apple-refined journalist. This entertaining memoir is not about a legendary athlete or championship team. It's about an accomplished writer and editor who chronicled legendary athletes and championship teams for more than three decades. Keith achieved all this at the pinnacle publication in the world of amateur and professional competition. Everything he witnessed and experienced, the highs and the lows, is nestled between these covers. You even encounter an actor stage-named Larry Keith and a bad actor who stole that name (and wound up in prison). Keith, the real one, also has much to say about the decline of print journalism, the professionalism of college sports, and the lavish Time Inc. lifestyle he took full advantage of.
Keith began his journey to SI and the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame when he was 14 years old, writing a game account in a spiral notebook after listening to a North Carolina basketball game on the radio. As his career gained momentum, he won awards and worked briefly in broadcasting. Less than a year after he graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, Sports Illustrated summoned him to New York.
Keith climbed the ladder from reporter, to writer, to editor, to the head of three Time Inc. development magazines and, finally, to editorial projects director. In his prolific career, he wrote 19 cover stories, created the concept for Sports Illustrated For Kids, oversaw three Olympic Games publications, personally generated approximately $250,000,000 in advertising revenue and won three Time Inc. President's Awards. Keith was a major player on both the editorial and publishing sides of Time Inc., and in this outstanding, fast-paced, behind-the-scenes memoir about sports and the publishing industry, the reader plays along with him. But beware of an unexpected, bone-rattling pothole along the way.