ED NOTE: My tour of Nuptials continues on for yet another week (Good luck Ethan and Amy and Kim and Guy. ((those are two separate couples who held two separate weddings, not one wacky remake of a 1970′s George Segal swingers movie) ) While we’re always happy to have John from 200 Miles from the Citi to pinch-hit, this week we welcome a very special guest into the batter’s box. A couple of months back, we interviewed Michael Weinreb, author of the great book, “Bigger Than The Game.” (If you haven’t read it yet, GET ON THAT! What else are you doing with your time? It’s not like you go to weddings every weekend. That’s only me.) This week, Michael returns the favor, reviewing SI and giving us a glimpse into his psyche. Also, he uses asterisks. And when you’re done reading this, check out his website.
And so, without further ado, ladies and Gentleman, Michael Weinreb..
I am sitting in a narrow, high-ceilinged room in Brooklyn, New York, next to a stack of Sports Illustrated magazines from the year 1986. I purchased these periodicals on EBay, ostensibly in order to research my most recent book; I purchased them because, at the time, the SI Vault did not yet exist. But I also purchased them because I owned them once before, and then my parents euthanized them, and I will never forgive my mother and father, both for that decision and for the events that took place the night of Ari Grossman’s Bar Mitzvah, which cannot be recounted on young Justin’s family-friendly website.
I have an extracted an issue at random*: February 24, 1986, an unforgettable cover, addressed to the equally unforgettable Mr. Ronald A. Fussell of Westfield Drive in San Antonio, Texas. It is adorned with the logos of the three major networks**above a console television set and a high-tech cable box tuned to Channel 3 (which, in the basic cable plan of my youth, was always PBS. And nobody covered sports like McNeil and Lehrer). The headline contained within this retro idiot box: WHY TV SPORTS ARE IN BIG TROUBLE.
Now, as we all know, televised events were once a major part of the sporting landscape, before they were replaced by transistor radios and carrier pigeons. But let us not just celebrate the obvious prescience of Sports Illustrated; let us dig down to its innards. Most notably, the commercial material: On Page 5, the advertisement for Statis Pro Football and Statis Pro Baseball, the TWO GREATEST SPORTING BOARD GAMES EVER DEVISED BY MANKIND;***on Page 23, the advertisement for TRUE GOLD cigarettes (“Blended for Smoothness”); on Pages 44-45, the promo card for Time-Life Books’ “The Enchanted World” series, beginning with Wizards and Witches and carrying through Blood-Sucking Parasitic Zombies; and of course, the back-page solicitation, from Pioneer electronics, in which a Rick Springfield impersonator, sitting in front of a shelf of books that appear to have been acquired from the $1 tables at The Strand, declares, “A CD PLAYER THAT’LL PLAY SIX DISCS? I SAID I’D TAKE IT BEFORE THE SALESMAN EVER OPENED HIS MOUTH. (AND NOW I WILL PUT ON PHIL COLLINS’ ‘NO JACKET REQUIRED’ AND TORTURE A PAIR OF PROSTITUTES.)”
So there you have it. Sports Illustrated: Prophesizing the future of America in 79 glossy pages. Like the works of Nostradamus, but with glossy 2-foot by 3-foot promotional posters of Gary Hogeboom available for mail-order, and letters to the editor requesting Paulina Porizkova’s digits, and hirsute men slowly contracting lung cancer. Also, Frank Deford, Bill Nack, Rick Reilly and Jack McCallum at the peak of their careers, many of whom are the reason I became writer in the first place.**** But hell, only an idiot reads magazines for the articles.
And now, on to modernity—the issue of October 4, 2010:
