Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated is a popular weekly
American sports
magazine owned by
media giant
Time Warner. It has over 3 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men, 19% of the adult males in the country. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice.
Its
swimsuit issue, which has been published since
1964, is now an annual publishing event that generates its own
television shows, videos and
calendars.
Two other magazines named
Sports Illustrated were actually started in the
1930s and
1940s, but they both quickly failed. In fact, there was no large-base, general sports magazine with a national following when
TIME patriarch
Henry Luce began considering whether his company should attempt to fill the gap. At the time, many believed sports was beneath the attention of serious
journalism and didn't think sports news could fill a weekly magazine, especially during the winter. A number of advisers to Luce, including
Life Magazine's Ernest Havemann, tried to kill the idea, but Luce, who was not a sports fan, decided the time was right.
[.]After unsuccessfully offering $200,000 to buy the name
Sport for the new magazine, they acquired the rights to the name
Sports Illustrated instead for just $10,000. The goal of the new magazine was to be "not
A sports magazine, but
THE sports magazine." Launched on
August 16,
1954, it was not profitable and not particularly well run at first, but Luce's timing could not have been better. The popularity of spectator sports in the United States was about to explode, and that popularity came to be driven largely by three things:
* economic prosperity
* television, and
*
Sports Illustrated.
The early issues of the magazine seemed caught between two opposing views of its audience. Much of the subject matter was directed at upper class activities (
yachting,
polo, and even
safaris), but upscale would-be
advertisers were unconvinced that sports fans were a significant part of their market.
[.]Innovations
From the start, however,
Sports Illustrated did introduce a number of innovations that are generally taken for granted today:
*Liberal use of color photos - though the six-week lead time initially meant they were unable to depict timely subject matter
*Scouting reports - including a
World Series Preview and New Year's Day bowl game roundup that enhanced the viewing of games on television
*In-depth sports reporting from writers like
Robert Creamer,
Tex Maule and
Dan Jenkins.
In
1956, Luce asked Time, Inc. senior European Correspondent
André Laguerre to come to New York and help define the magazine's character. Many of the staff had serious doubts that the English-born Frenchman could possibly know anything about American sports, but Laguerre won them over, and during his term as Managing Editor (
1960 -
1974),
SI became a model for other middle-class American magazines. Its writers developed their own characteristic style by daring to tell people what was important. Many would say that the magazine legitimized sports for a huge segment of the American population. The steady creation of landmark stories (e.g.,
"The Black Athlete - A Shameful Story" by Jack Olsen and
"Paper Lion" by
George Plimpton) showed that sports fans could be readers, and a generation of sportswriters patterned their own writing after what they read in
SI.
[.]Color printing
The magazine's photographers also made their mark with innovations like putting cameras
in the goal at a
hockey game and
behind a glass backboard at a
basketball game. In
1965,
offset printing began to allow the color pages of the magazine to be printed overnight, not only producing crisper and brighter images, but also finally enabling the editors to merge the best color with the latest news. By
1967, the magazine was printing 200 pages of "fast color" a year; in
1983,
SI became the first American full-color newsweekly. An intense rivalry developed between
photographers, particularly
Walter Iooss and
Neil Leifer, to get a decisive cover shot that would be on newsstands and in mailboxes only a few days later.
[.]In the late
1970s and early
1980s, during Gil Rogin's term as Managing Editor, the feature stories of
Frank Deford became the magazine's anchor. "Bonus pieces" on
Pete Rozelle,
Bear Bryant,
Howard Cosell and others became some of the most quoted sources about these figures, and Deford established a reputation as one of the best writers of the time.
[.]Creative decline
After the death of Henry Luce in 1967, the creative freedom that the staff had enjoyed seemed to diminish. By the 1980s and
1990s, the magazine had become more profitable than ever, but many also believed it had become more predictable.
Mark Mulvoy was the first top editor whose background contained nothing but sports; he had grown up as one of the magazine's readers, but he had no interest in fiction, movies, hobbies or history. Mulvoy's top writer
Rick Reilly had also been raised on
SI and followed in the footsteps of many of the great writers that he grew up admiring, but many felt that the magazine as a whole came to reflect Mulvoy's complete lack of sophistication. Mulvoy also hired the current creative director
Steven Hoffman. Critics said that it rarely broke (or even featured) stories on the major controversies in sports (drugs, violence, commercialism) any more, and that it focused on major sports and celebrities to the exclusion of other topics. The proliferation of "commemorative issues" and crass subscription incentives seemed to some like an exchange of journalistic integrity for commercial opportunism. More importantly, perhaps, many feel that 24-hour-a-day cable sports television networks and sports news web sites have forever diminished the role a weekly publication can play in today's world, and that it is unlikely any magazine will ever again achieve the level of prominence that
SI once had.
[.] |
Tom Brady on the cover ofSports Illustrated. |
|
The January 21, 2002 edition of Sports Illustrated addresses the subject of its very own jinx. |
Since its inception in 1954, Sports Illustrated magazine has annually presented the
Sportsman of the Year award to "the athlete or team whose performance that year most embodies the spirit of sportsmanship and achievement."
Roger Bannister won the first ever Sportsman of the year award thanks to his record breaking time of 3:59.4 for a mile (the first ever time a mile had been run under four minutes).
Tom Brady was Sports Illustrated's most recent Sportsman of the Year in 2005. Previous winners have included the
Boston Red Sox in 2004,
David Robinson and
Tim Duncan in 2003,
Lance Armstrong in 2002,
Curt Schilling and
Randy Johnson in 2001, and
Tiger Woods in 1996 and 2000.
When
Major League Baseball player
Eddie Mathews,
pictured on the cover of Volume 1,
Issue 1, suffered a hand injury a week later that forced him to miss seven games, the
"Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx" was born, as some noted that bad things seemed to happen to people soon after they appeared on the magazine's cover. Other notable cover coincidences include:
*
January 31, 1955 - The week that an
issue featuring herwas on the stands,
skier Jill Kinmont struck a tree during a practice run and was paralyzed from the neck down.
*
November 18, 1957 -- The
University of Oklahoma had won 47 consecutive games, which remains the longest winning streak in the history of college football. The cover carried the headline "Why Oklahoma is unbeatable." In their very next game, Oklahoma lost to the
University of Notre Dame, which was in the middle of a down period. Notre Dame had also been the last team to defeat Oklahoma before the streak began, in 1953.
*
May 26, 1958 -
SI's 1958
Indianapolis 500 preview issue featured
Pat O'Connor, who was killed in a 15-car pileup during the first lap of the race.
*
February 13, 1961 -
Laurence Owen was billed as
"America's Most Exciting Girl Skater." Two days after the cover date, Owen and the rest of the United States
figure skating team perished in a plane crash. The International Skating Union cancels the 1961 World Championships as a result.
*
December 14, 1970 - The
University of Texas, 10-0 and
enjoying a 30-game winning streak, fumbled nine times in its next game, a 24-11 loss to
Notre Dame in the
Cotton Bowl.
*
April 6, 1987 - Following a surprising 86-win season for the Indians in 1986,
the cover showed
Cleveland Indians sluggers
Joe Carter and
Cory Snyder, and carried the words "INDIAN UPRISING" and the sub-headline, "Believe it! Cleveland is the best team in the American League!" The Indians lost 101 games that year, retaining their own curse, the
Curse of Rocky Colavito.
*
September 4, 1989 - Not his picture, but Major League Baseball Commissioner
Bart Giamatti's words about
Pete Rose appeared on the cover the week Giamatti died of a heart attack.
*
October 31, 1994 - Because of the players' strike in 1994, the
Japan Series is featured in the space usually reserved for
Major League Baseball championships. A picture of a
Seibu Lions pitcher in demolishing the
Yomiuri Giants, 11-0, in Game 1 is shown from October 22. The issue was released on October 25, and on October 29, the
kyojin wins the Fall Classic in six.
*
June 5, 1995 - Three days after
his appearance,
San Francisco Giants third baseman Matt Williams, the National League leader in
home runs,
batting average and
RBIs, fouled a pitch off his right foot, breaking it, and forcing him to miss 2 1/2 months.
While the list of "examples" of the jinx is extensive, an individual record
49 cover appearances by
Michael Jordan, team record
61 covers by the
New York Yankees, and school record of 99 covers by the
UCLA Bruins have not hindered their success.
SI addressed their own cover jinx in a 2002 issue featuring a
black cat on the cover. Then St. Louis Rams quarterback
Kurt Warner was asked to pose with the cat, but refused. Warner and the Rams won their next two games to win their second NFC Championship in three years.
*
Marty Burns*
Jack McCallum*
Frank Deford*
Gary Smith*
Peter King*
Arash Markazi*
Rick Reilly*
Phil Taylor*
Gary Van Sickle*
Tom Verducci*
Paul Zimmerman*
Ed Hinton (
1995-
2000)
*
Steve RushinSports Illustrated has helped launched a number of related publishing ventures, including:
*
Sports Illustrated for Kids magazine (circulation 950,000)
** Launched in January
1989** Won the "Distinguished Achievement for Excellence in Educational Publishing" award 11 times
** Won the "Parents' Choice Magazine Award" 7 times
*
Sports Illustrated Almanac annuals
** Introduced in
1991** Yearly compilation of sports news and statistics in book form
*
SI.com sports news web site
** Launched on
July 17,
1997** Online version of the magazine and sports site for
CNN.com*
Sports Illustrated Women magazine (highest circulation 400,000)
** Launched in March
2000** Ceased publication in
December 2002 because of a weak advertising climate
*
Sports Illustrated on Campus magazine
** Launched on
September 4,
2003** Dedicated to college athletics and the sports interests of college students.
** Distributed free on 72 college campuses through a network of college newspapers.
** Circulation of one million readers between the ages of 18 and 24.
** Ceased publication in
December 2005 because of a weak advertising climate
*
