Time, Inc. published its first issue of Sports Illustrated (SI) this week (Aug. 16) in 1954, enhancing the popularity of sports like no other magazine before or since. The first cover featured the great Milwaukee third baseman Eddie Mathews at the plate, N.Y. Giants catcher Wes Westrum behind the plate, and Umpire Augie Donatelli behind him.
The driving force behind the magazine was Time,Inc.’s publisher, Henry Luce, who was not a sports fan but had an intuitive sense that the media was not taking full advantage of America’s growing love affair with sports. There had been a few half-hearted attempts to publish a monthly sports magazine, but none had endured.
Luce decided Sports Illustrated would run weekly and include serious journalism, which was his first challenge because most people thought sports did not qualify as serious journalism. His other challenge was that most members of his Time, Inc. staff hated the idea — they nicknamed the magazine “Jockstrap” and “Sweat Socks” — and they tried to talk him out of it.
At first their skepticism seemed justified. Partly because the magazine was badly managed, and partly because, editorially, there was too much emphasis on “elitist” sports such as yachting and polo, the magazine lost money for years. But Luce persisted, and SI’s fortunes changed in 1960 when Luce hired Andre Laguerre, a former bureau chief for Time-Life, as his managing editor. Laguerre quickly redesigned the magazine, emphasizing the use of full-color photographs of the sports SI covered, and the focus quickly shifted from the high-brow to everyday sports such as baseball and football — Laguerre was among the first to understand the potential popularity of football. He also hired talented writers such as Frank Deford and Dan Jenkins.
Circulation more than doubled, and soon Sports Illustrated was the bible of sports journalism among its predominantly male readership
Speaking of that predominantly male readership, Laguerre was also the genius behind the SI swimsuit issue, launched in February of 1964 to counter what is generally a slow time of year sports-wise, and today, 50 years later, it is SI’s most popular issue.
And most controversial. Between the feminists who thought it exploited women, and those who thought peddling female flesh was not the object of a sports magazine, in its wake many thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions, as many still do today. So SI eventually offered subscribers the option of skipping the swimsuit edition and getting a one-issue credit, extending their subscription by a week.
As for SI milestones, its “Sportsman of the Century” was Muhammad Ali. The athlete most often on its cover is Michael Jordan (50 times).
The most popular SI swimsuit model? That argument is, happily for the guys, ongoing.
