The movement from the conception of the new magazine in June 1953 to the final commitment to publish it in December, less than six months later, was, at least by Time Inc.’s deliberate standards, remarkably fast. Through the first half of 1954, James and his colleagues, with Luce’s intermittent but gradually fading presence, created dummy after dummy, still trying to find the right balance between pictures and text, and between serious writing and the long tradition of colloquial sports reporting. But almost everyone working on the magazine believed that it was on the right track—that it had started out good and was getting steadily better. Throughout the development stage of the magazine, the working title was “Sport.” There was, however, already a magazine using that name, which had offered to sell itself to Time Inc. for $250,000, more than Luce was willing to pay. In May, with the publication date approaching, Harry Phillips, the Time Inc. publisher of the as-yet unnamed magazine, ran into a friend in a restaurant who offered an alternative. The friend owned the title of a defunct magazine, Sports Illustrated. Everyone involved was immediately enthusiastic, and the company purchased the name for five thousand dollars.
There continued to be naysayers within the organization. Havemann was a consistent critic, always insisting that the project was doomed no matter how much work and creativity was poured into it. Journalists in other organizations looked at the dummies and were dismayed at what they considered the pretensions of the project, which they predicted would alienate sports fans. Advertisers were skeptical, convinced that only “mugs” would have enough interest in sports to buy the magazine. Others wondered how any sports magazine could sustain interest through the year, especially in winter months when sports activities contracted. Traditional sports journalism was in many ways incompatible with the style and culture of Time Inc. But that was both its burden and its great advantage. Luce had always expected his company’s magazines to be pathbreaking, raising the bar of both quality and innovation. Time was the first “newsmagazine.” Fortune had aspired to be the handsomest and most literate business magazine ever published, and in many ways it had achieved its goal. Life had set out to be the greatest picture magazine ever created, with the best photographers and the most lavish formats, and it too largely succeeded. From the start Luce expected Sports Illustrated to be equally unprecedented. It would not be a “fan” magazine, filled with gossip, adulation, and over-the-top language. It would not concentrate on any one area of sport. It would not be a quasi-trade magazine like Sporting News, which was, in effect, the official newspaper of the baseball industry. It would not compete with the daily newspaper coverage of sports. It would not focus too much on what had happened in the previous week. It would, rather, be a magazine compatible with the Time Inc. tradition, not the tradition of the sports world. It would have a handsome and dignified format. It would publish extraordinary pictures. It would look at sports not just as fun but, Luce wrote, as something that was “deeply inherent … in the human spirit.” And it would bring what Time Inc. had brought to all its magazines: a set of opinions and prejudices that in fact worked much better for Sports Illustrated than it did for Luce’s other publications.
The powerful advertising executive Leo Burnett asked Luce to explain the “raison d’être” of Sports Illustrated, which was struggling to generate interest from advertisers. Luce responded, at considerable length, with a rationale that bewildered most sports journalists. “We have the H-Bomb and we have SPORTS ILLUSTRATED,” he wrote. Americans were living under a cloud of mortal danger, but they were also assuming “that peace is possible … that … you live and work as if it is, right now.” Peace, he said, was defined in part by “leisure … the pursuit of happiness,” and for most Americans that meant “something to do with Sport.” Sports reflected “the hopes of the American people in a very simple human way—in a way universally understood and richly appreciated.” But the magazine did not really aspire to universalism. Sports Illustrated, like all of Luce’s magazines, wanted to attract educated and literate readers—people who could be attracted to sophisticated writing on “things beyond their own personal routine—the Miracle Mile, The Conquest of Everest, in Hunting and Fishing in their own domain and all over the world…. And so what we got excited about was creating a magazine for those people.” In their dummies the Sports Illustrated editors cut out advertisements from The New Yorker (still the American magazine with the most affluent readership) to suggest something of the elevated tone of this new sports magazine.17
The first issue of Sports Illustrated was published on August 16, 1954, a few days after issues actually appeared on newsstands. It sold out quickly. And on the whole it was greeted warmly by the press and by its readers. On the cover was a dramatic picture of a nighttime baseball game in Milwaukee, with the Braves’ Eddie Mathews in midswing, framed by a vast crowd in the steeply overhanging stadium. Inside the editors introduced themselves as “a happily recognizable member of the Time Inc. family.” To make the connection even clearer, the opening page was framed by pictures of the inaugural issues of Time, Fortune, and Life:
Today the word “newsmagazine” is as generic as cellophane.
Today the name FORTUNE is the nationally accepted hallmark of business journalism.
Today LIFE’s weekly millions of copies are an accepted fact of American life.
It is our hope and our promise that in some tomorrow you will no longer think of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED as Time Inc’s newest baby, but as the accepted and essential weekly reporter of the Wonderful World of Sport.18
The first story in this first issue, “The Duel of the Four-Minute Men,” chronicled the classic rivalry between Roger Bannister and John Landy, the first two men to run a four-minute mile. It also illustrated how unconventional a sports magazine it intended to be. “The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of unconsciousness at the instant of breasting the tape,” the Sports Illustrated writer Paul O’Neil began:
It is not an easy process … for the body rebels against such agonizing usage and must be disciplined by the spirit and the mind…. Few events in sport offer so ultimate a test of human courage and human will and human ability to dare and endure for the simple sake of struggle.
This elegant and sophisticated language was a sign of what Sports Illustrated aspired to be, and often accomplished—a magazine that would elevate the world of sports from being “just a game” to being a powerful metaphor for the human condition.
The first issue ranged widely across the landscape of sports. It reported the first ascent of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. It covered a dramatic prizefight. It offered a feature on baseball cards (complete with instructions on how to blow bubble gum), a lavishly photographed story on fly-fishing, another on foxhunting, a primer on poison ivy, and an essay on golf. But the most distinctive article in the first issue (and also the most self-serving) was an essay on the world of sport itself, with the trumpeting title, “The Golden Age Is Now.” It was, the staff writer Gerald Holland put it, “as if no other world existed…. For world-wide interest, for widespread participation, for thrilling triumphs of the human spirit, this is the greatest sports era in history.”19
Frank Deford, who began writing for Sports Illustrated in 1962 and became one of the magazine’s star writers for decades, described his own first reaction to the first issues when he was an adolescent athlete and fan. “It was a struggle to cozy up to Sports Illustrated,” he wrote years later:
[The magazine] often seemed ashamed of sports—except those swell activities engaged in by dukes and earls. One year one SI writer wrote 36 stories on yachting, while the magazine left baseball, football and basketball languishing on the sideline…. And yet, and yet…. Always within each issue there was something absolutely, well, lovely, there were intriguing paintings, stunning photographs of game action, and stories that actually read like stories, clever and engaging and whole…. Sports Illustrated was creating something altogether new, which was respectable
sports journalism.
In its first year the magazine’s cover stories illustrated why it was so different from conventional sports reporting. Of the three most popular spectator sports, baseball received six covers, football three, and basketball only one. Horseracing, with seven covers, had the most. Mostly, the magazine ranged widely across its chosen fields: yachting, auto racing, bird-watching (twice), skiing, bullfighting, gymnastics, track and field, mountain climbing, ballooning, scuba diving, and dogs. And on February 21, 1955, the magazine ran a cover of a smiling young woman in an unrevealing swimsuit (part of a feature on sports fashion)—an augury of one of the magazine’s most popular and sometimes controversial features of later decades. Little wonder that advertisers, and some readers, had a difficult time deciding what Sports Illustrated was, and who it was for. But little wonder too that many readers were dazzled by the range of its stories and the power of its photographs (which were laid out in formats very much like those in Life, not surprisingly since most of the founding editors had started there).20
Luce took particular pride in the quality of the writers he could attract to Sports Illustrated, including some who had never been willing to write for Life and Fortune. The revered New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling submitted an elegant essay on Stillman’s Gymnasium in New York City, where many notable boxers were trained. Wallace Stegner wrote an elegy to Yosemite National Park. Budd Schulberg wrote a sympathetic story about an aging prizefighter who was finally making it big. John Steinbeck insisted he could not write for Sports Illustrated because “my interests are too scattered and too unorthodox.” But he wrote a long letter on his eclectic interest in sports that the magazine published anyway. And William Faulkner wrote an extraordinary (and predictably unorthodox) account of the 1955 Kentucky Derby.21
Most articles in Sports Illustrated were written by less visible staff writers, but the richness of the prose remained one of the magazine’s most distinctive features. Robert Creamer, for example, wrote a story on the magazine’s second “Sportsman of the Year,” the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Johnny Podres. The article set out not just to describe a great baseball achievement but also to reveal the universality of sport. It was as much about Podres’s family of miners as about his achievement in pitching the Dodgers to victory over the Yankees in the 1955 World Series. The story profiled the grandfather, Barney, who “climbed out of the mines of czarist Russia and came to America,” raised a family, went into the mines of the Adirondacks, and “now … sits in his weather-beaten house in the company village of Witherbee, N.Y. ailing from ‘the silica,’ the miner’s disease, his great hands folded.” It described the father, Joe, who also worked in the mines, but who, having benefited from improved working conditions, played semipro baseball on weekends for years because he had “more time that is his own.” And then Johnny Podres, the son of this hardworking, inconspicuous family, “became the personification, the living realization of the forgotten ambitions of thousands and even millions of onlookers who had pitched curves against the sides of their own houses and evoked similar visions of glory, only to end up at the wheel of a truck or behind a desk in an office.”22
Sports Illustrated was much like Life in the initial disparity between its popularity among its readers and its limited appeal to advertisers. Circulation exceeded five hundred thousand in every issue in 1954, rose to six hundred thousand the following year, and climbed steadily through most of its history (to more than three million a week in 2009). It quickly established itself as by far the most famous and influential sports magazine ever published in the United States. Advertising, however, was painfully slow to catch up—particularly in relation to the enormous costs of publishing the magazine, which far exceeded the original estimates. Luce’s instinctive response to problems was to improve the editorial quality of his magazines, and there were constant reevaluations of both content and appearance. But he was also obliged to spend considerable time as well promoting the magazine and denying rumors that it might be shut down (something Luce never contemplated). Not until 1964, ten years after its first issue, did Sports Illustrated produce its first profit. By then, its identity was firmly established. Although its subjects were sports, the outdoors, and other forms of leisure, its readership was comparable to such general interest magazines as Time and Life. And for Luce, at least, it was a gratifying achievement. It signified his own sense of the extraordinary American success story of a nation of abundance, social unity, and the “pursuit of happiness”—a pursuit that he believed Sports Illustrated reflected.
As Luce neared his sixtieth birthday, all of his lifelong idiosyncrasies and habits grew, if anything, more pronounced. A friend who attended a dinner party with Luce in Paris in 1956 gave an account of his demeanor that mirrored descriptions of him from many other people: “Physically he does look like an old man—his head triangular, large high brow, bald on top with puffs of white hair at each side; heavy straight dark bushy eyebrows; blue eyes and plastic [-rimmed] glasses, narrow chin, a face concentrated, released occasionally into a rather elfish, quizzical expression.” He was dressed expensively, but—as was usually the case—somewhat sloppily. He had, his chronicler noted, “a rambling, desultory manner of speaking on politics … it lacked magnetism though evidenced sincerity…. He often did not finish sentences or abandoned them with impatience and started over again.” He was intimidatingly serious, without much humor, a difficult partner in conversation because “he does not let one escape with a frivolity or evasion.” But he left no one unaware of his power, his status as a “great man.”23
Other friends and colleagues, all of whom were fascinated by Luce, reveled in gossiping about this unusual man. High-ranking figures in Time Inc. devoted much—and often all—their time in serving his needs: arranging his travels, acting as intermediaries between him and Clare, buying the gifts for friends that Luce himself never remembered to get, and occasionally helping to facilitate his personal and romantic relationships. For someone who had managed his own life without help through much of his childhood and adolescence, he was often strangely helpless in managing his adulthood. Those who served him understood his preoccupation with ideas, projects, and missions, and his impatience with the quotidian affairs of life. They stepped in, often without his knowing it, to protect him from his own distractedness.24
Distraction was, in fact, among his most prominent characteristics (as his fragmented conversation suggested). He was often coldly silent around others, but he was also at times unstoppably garrulous, talking interminably about whatever was on his mind and rarely allowing others to interrupt his herky-jerky flow of words. He was inattentive to money, and in stores or restaurants often paid too little (which greatly embarrassed waiters and salesmen) or far too much. He was, and had been for years, fantastically rich, and it was not only the extravagant Clare who was determined to live in great luxury. When Luce traveled he almost always stayed in the largest suite in the most expensive hotel in whatever place he was visiting. But he did this as a mark of status, not really because he himself particularly enjoyed the elegance of his surroundings. Within hours of his arrival his suite was often in amazing disarray—with papers, books, clothes, and food scattered on tables, chairs, sofas, beds, and floors. Even in his own homes, in which he slept (as he had for years) apart from Clare, his bedroom in an otherwise lavishly decorated apartment or house was often almost monastically spartan.25
Like many famous and powerful people, Luce had many friends but few real friendships. Most of the people he encountered were intimidated by his presence, unable to interact with him as an equal. But Luce’s relative friendlessness was also a product of his personality. He was brusque and impatient, uninterested in small talk or gossip, always pressing for serious conversations even with people who were in no mood for such intensity. Nor was he willing to reveal very much about himself to others. He once said that he did not have a very high regard for “feelings,” that they were “secondary” to thought. “I actually don’t think he l
et anyone—but anyone—know him,” a longtime friend conceded after many years of conversation and correspondence. He was, she said, “the loneliest man I’ve ever known.” Luce recognized the absence of intimacy in his life, and he tried to fill the void with a series of intense, if never wholly open, friendships with women. His affair with Jean Dalrymple in the late 1940s had been one such effort to achieve real intimacy, but the relationship did not last. He had a longer and more important friendship with a woman he met by chance in Switzerland in 1946.26
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