Sports Illustrated’s debut was a risk. It turned into an American gem
Sports Illustrated, the iconic magazine that defined quality sports journalism for decades before recently hitting hard times, made its debut 70 years ago this week amid a fair number of doubters.
That first issue, dated Aug. 16, 1954, featured Milwaukee Braves star Eddie Mathews on the cover, but there was no story on him or the Braves in the magazine. (And the photo was more than two months old.) Legendary publisher and Time co-founder Henry R. Luce launched the sports weekly as a way to diversify Time Inc.’s publications, which included Time, Life and Fortune.
Luce went forward with Sports Illustrated “against the advice of his most trusted aides, who viewed the very idea of starting a weekly magazine devoted solely to sports as an expensive, misguided, and inherently trivial folly,” wrote Michael MacCambridge in his book, “The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine.”
MacCambridge noted that spectator sports in the 1950s were still viewed as a blue-collar pursuit — “an early Time Inc. study of the market described sports fans as ‘juveniles and ne’er-do-wells’),” he wrote, and that there were serious questions about whether there were enough sports to justify a weekly magazine.
“Within the society as a whole sports were more compartmentalized, regionalized, marginalized,” he wrote. “In 1954, the football season ended on January 1, and there were more hours of game shows on television than actual games.”
So in the months leading up to the first issue — which ran 144 pages and cost 25 cents — there was internal doubt at the parent company. The year before, “the still unnamed magazine was in the project stage, and was known colloquially, and somewhat skeptically, to members of other Time Inc. publications as ‘Muscles,’” SI’s publisher wrote in a 1974 essay.
Time Inc. chose the name Sports Illustrated over candidates such as “Arena,” “Weekend,” “Leisure” and “Score,” according to a 1954 Wall Street Journal story. The New York Herald Tribune reported at the time that “Muscles” and “Trops” were also on the table. (Wait, “Trops?” Read it backward, the newspaper advised.)
Luce bought the rights to a previous publication with the name “Sports Illustrated” for $5,000 (about $60,000 in today’s dollars) and a lifetime subscription to the previous owner of the name.
A ‘stimulating but wise chronicler'
When SI debuted, it got a boost from its sister publication. Time magazine ran a story touting Sports Illustrated’s 350,000 subscription orders, and kvelled that the magazine sold out advertising space in its first issue. SI had orders of $1.3 million worth of ads (about $15 million in today’s dollars) from more than 200 companies.
“Under Managing Editor Sidney L. James, former assistant managing editor of LIFE, 50 editorial staffers put together a book packed with color pictures, features and spot sports news,” Time wrote. “This week’s lead story: an account of the British Empire Games in Vancouver, B.C.”
“When we were working out the idea of a weekly sports magazine, there was a good deal of doubt felt in all quarters,” said Sports Illustrated publisher H.H.S. Phillips Jr., who had worked as advertising director at Time. “There’s not much doubt left now. We’re off to one of the fastest starts in the history of publishing.”
The inaugural magazine, which listed Luce as its editor-in-chief, included advertisements for women’s coats, men’s and women’s clothing, gasoline, tires, cars, cigarette lighters, sports equipment, Scotch and champagne, among other products.
In a “Memo from the Publisher” — printed alongside vintage covers of Time, Life and Fortune magazines — Phillips laid out what the new magazine hoped to offer readers.
“Sports Illustrated is the newest offspring of Time Incorporated,” it began. “And as with any new arrival, friends are bound to gather and look for family likenesses.”
Harking back to Time’s creation, Phillips wrote, “In 1923, there was no magazine for an exciting and excited world that was bursting at the seams with curiosity about itself. So Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, was invented. And in Sports Illustrated you will see something of Time’s nose for news and the full, coherent weekly recital of that fascinating world in itself, the Wonderful World of Sport.”
He promised readers that in Sports Illustrated, “you will see that sport has emerged from the era of isolated contest into a new era of tremendous size, of national and international importance; again, a new phenomenon, needing and deserving its stimulating but wise chronicler. … Today’s miraculous cameras will have a weekly field day in a field that is peculiarly theirs, to capture the instants of dramatic excitement, of human and animal grace, of victory and defeat, that are what sport is made of.”
The first issue of SI, which would eventually feature such high-powered writers as Frank Deford and Roy Blount Jr., included at least one high-profile contributor, a future Pulitzer Prize winning columnist. “Red Smith discovers a nice guy named Leo Durocher who may finish first,” the magazine’s table of contents teased, a play on the fiery manager Durocher’s famous line, “Nice guys finish last.” One of SI’s original staff writers was Robert Creamer, who would go on to author a highly acclaimed biography of Babe Ruth.
There was also a story on runners who excel at the mile race (“Duel of the Four-Minute Men”), a piece called “The Battle of the Bubble Gum: The weapons are baseball players, the prize, millions of young Americans”; and articles on hunting, horse racing and boxing.
The magazine ran a feature called “Jimmy Jemail’s Hotbox,” in which the writer asked, “What sport provokes the most arguments in your home?” One woman from Oakland answered that it was horse racing, recalling how she went to the racetrack with her husband. After some big losses, “he pleaded, ‘Let me have your money. I can get out of it. I know the jockey.’ Like a fool I did. Now we’re separated.”
That first issue previewed the next one, including a feature called Wimbledon in Color: “The drama and excitement of the world tennis championships, as well as the beauty of their setting, captured in fine photographs by Jerry Cooke.”
A sports world on the move
Sports Illustrated debuted in a far different athletic landscape. There were only 12 NFL teams, nine NBA teams and six NHL franchises.
But it was also an era of great upheaval, with several of MLB’s 16 teams beginning to move across the continent, helping to jolt attendance for moribund franchises. In 1953 the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee, where they saw a more than sixfold attendance increase, from 281,000 to 1.83 million. The next season, the St. Louis Browns relocated to Baltimore, and in 1955, the Athletics moved from Philadelphia to Kansas City. Before the end of the decade, the Dodgers and Giants would fundamentally change American sports by moving from New York to California, MLB’s first foray to the West Coast.
Sports Illustrated’s inaugural cover sought to capture the energy of teams on the march. On its table of content page, it included this description:
“Nowhere does baseball create more enthusiasm than in Milwaukee. Last season, after moving to town from Boston, the Braves drew 1,826,379 fans, a National League record. This year, despite slow starts by sluggers like Ed Mathews, shown in baseball’s classic home plate tableau in a game against the Giants, attendance over two million seems certain.”
That turned out to be accurate: The Braves would draw a league-best 2.13 million fans in 1954. But attendance would tank in the 1960s, bottoming out at 555,000 in 1965, the team’s final year in Milwaukee before moving on again, this time to Atlanta.
Despite some early struggles, the magazine benefited from societal changes the year it launched, such as the introduction of the first color TV and the first modern jet, MacCambridge observed in his book.
“After its troubled beginning, Sports Illustrated would eventually refocus itself, developing a distinctive tone that resulted from an unforeseen and unlikely creative amalgam. In the late ’50s and ’60s, the magazine’s prose was altered and enlivened by an infusion of Texas sports writers, whose prose was lucid, irreverent, and unapologetic about the central role of sports in modern society,” wrote MacCambridge, who called SI “the quintessential American middle-class magazine of the postwar era.”
In addition to its notable staff writers, several celebrities also wrote pieces for the magazine, as SI recounted in a 2013 story, such as John F. Kennedy, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Jack Kerouac and Jimmy Breslin.
Gracing the cover of SI was a sign an athlete had made it, and the magazine helped define success in athletics with its Sportsperson of the Year award, starting in 1954 when Roger Bannister was named Sportsman of the Year after becoming the first person to run the mile in less than four minutes.
“It was a year of shining performances in a host of sports — by personalities recognizable simply as Willie and Yogi and Dusty and Rocky and Billy Joe and Banana Nose and the Dancer and Hopalong and Crazylegs,” SI wrote in that first “Sportsman” write-up on Jan. 3, 1955. “It was a year of zealous pursuit of a hundred other sports by tens of millions of leisure-time sportsmen, from the President of the United States on down. The cast of candidates was tremendous — and yet, when it came to picking the Sportsman of the Year, the compelling choice was the man who set himself an athlete’s severest challenge, the four-minute mile; who met the challenge superbly (in exchange for a couple of small, inexpensive medals), and then turned to the next challenge, that of a strenuous profession; the miler-turned doctor, Roger Bannister.”
The story also gave shout-outs to other deserving athletes, such as Giants center fielder Willie Mays, who had won the NL MVP in 1954 and made the most famous catch in World Series history. The magazine saluted Mays, who died this year at 93, as “baseball’s electric character of the year … Willie was almost too good to be true.”
To its devotees, the same description fit Sports Illustrated. But like other print publications, the magazine was badly hurt by the internet and changing habits, and it has become a shell of itself in recent years. In 2017 the Meredith Corporation purchased Time Inc., including Time magazine, SI and People, for around $3 billion.
Then in 2019, after several rounds of layoffs at the magazine, Authentic Brands Group purchased SI’s intellectual property, recouping its investment through licensing deals. In January of this year, much of the magazine’s staff received layoff notices, in the midst of a dispute between Authentic and the Arena Group, which paid Authentic for the rights to publish SI in print and online.
The magazine, once a weekly staple, switched to twice a month, and, in 2020, to a monthly.
In March, Authentic Brands Group announced it had found a new publisher, London-based Minute Media, which publishes websites including the Players’ Tribune, putting an end to months of uncertainty over who would run the 70-year-old magazine.