Goodbye, S.I.

 

 

George Harrison said all things must pass, but I didn't think he included Sports Illustrated magazine, which pulled the plug last week.

Sports Illustrated was simply the best sports magazine ever.  Sure, the others were good, but S.I. had it all. Good writing and excellent photographs, and in February, they had girls in bathing suits.

They had writers like Tex Maule, who loved the NFL as much as he hated the AFL.  He thought Randy Johnson (the first starting quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons) was a better quarterback than Bob Griese.  History does not show that.

However, Maule could write. He said this about a fight he covered between Muhammad Ali and Ernest Terrell:  "It was a wonderful demonstration of boxing skill and a barbarous display of cruelty."

They had Dan Jenkins.  He wrote over 500 articles for S.I., including a piece that introduced us to the world of an Illinois college student named Dick Butkus.

Jenkins wrote the book Semi-Tough, which is, in my humble opinion, the funniest book ever written about pro football.

Jenkins also said, "Archie Griffin won the Heisman twice, and he didn't deserve it once."  I have used a variation of that line for years.

I could go on and on. Frank Deford. Ron Fimrite. Rick Reilly. All of them could write, and all of them wrote well.

Sports Illustrated was the king when it came to sports photography.  The pictures they published captured the moment. It was the literal thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

At one time, pro football ended in mid-January, and it would be another month until Spring Training.  S.I. developed their "Swimsuit" edition to fill in the time between. 

Kids, you have no idea what big deal it became.

First of all, having a sports magazine publishing pictures of women in skimpy bathing suits seems kind of off, but you know, boys like looking at pictures of women in skimpy bathing suits.

Secondly, as time progressed, the "bathing suits" were only bathing suits in the technical sense. I never saw a girl wearing a bathing suit S.I. published because it usually showed the model's hindquarters and sometimes all of the upper part of the torso.  That was a big deal to a fourteen-year-old boy in the South. 

Once, S.I. had a model named Cheryl Tiegs. She was super.

One of her bathing suits was mesh. I never saw a girl wear a mesh bathing suit. As we said in the library at Wheeler High School, you saw everything.  By the way, Cheryl Tiegs is now 76 years old.

Well, with time, the internet came, and people stopped reading magazines. You couldn't give away enough football phones to get people to buy a subscription to the magazine.

Sports Illustrated began making odd decisions to get people to buy their magazine. The cover girl for the swimsuit issue a few years back was, as we say, husky. Last year's cover girl wasn't technically a girl, at least in the total physical sense. 

Their last Sportsperson Of The Year was Deion Sanders who lead the Colorado Buffaloes to a 4-8 record. That's when I should have known S.I. was going down.

It is sad that future generations won't look forward to Thursday for the weekly Sports Illustrated.  But hopefully, some of us boomers have kept copies for those coming behind us. Just don't tell your mother and grandmother which ones you find because one of them might have the pictures Cheryl Tiegs and her mesh bathing suit.