- Publish date:
Memo from the Publisher
Last week, even though you were starting with Vol. 1, No. 1, you found yourself right in the middle of the story. And this week you take it from there.
For sport is endless. There's always tomorrow's game—always another chance at the big one that got away—and next week you're positive you can break 90. We have planned SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, however, so that you may begin each week at the start and read through to the finish line in a fairly dependable sequence.
We'll nearly always open with a story of top interest (the editors call it the "lead story") on an event which has dominated the sports scene during the previous week. Last week, for example, Bannister and Landy, the great milers, provided us with the perfect lead, and an auspicious one for our very first issue. Our lead stories will have a wide variety of subject and locale—a Channel swim, a record-breaking Kentucky Derby, a Rose Bowl classic—and they will always be the last story to go on the press each Monday night.
Immediately following will be Soundtrack, in which the editors will then sweep the whole field of sports, according to their inclinations; and here they will call 'em as they see 'em.
Spectacle comes next, each week a noteworthy series of photographs, sometimes in full color and sometimes in faster-closing black and white. This week, beginning on page 15, you'll see the Wimbledon you've always read about as it really looks, with all the tradition of this greatest of tennis tournaments—roses and ivy, heraldry and red-and-green cushions—and this year a star in the great tradition of U.S. Wimbledon stars, Maureen Connolly.
The Wonderful World of Sport (page 19) will be pictures also, but news pictures, and with a broader theme: a kaleidoscope of the usual and unusual which make sport international and universal—and wonderful.
Features then take over the middle section of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, their topics as unpredictable as the outcome of tonight's game. Their tone will sometimes be informative, as in Herbert Warren Wind's Preview of the National Amateur golf tourney (page 36), or amusing, as in what befalls (page 33) a Wall Street broker when he realizes the American dream and finally gets to own a real live ball club.
Although it's not tagged as such, Outdoors will always occupy a prominent spot in the feature section. This week you'll find in it a discussion of the best ways to lug your gear along with you in the woods; some gorgeous color pictures of teen-agers climbing Mt. Rainier; and fishing expert Hart Stilwell's account of his battles with the six-foot alligator gar in muddy Southern rivers.
From page 53 on, columnists and special departments will populate the back of the magazine. There's Bill Talbert on Tennis, Red Smith on Baseball, Herman Hickman on Football, among the columnists; there's Scoreboard, assembling last week's winners for you in one tidy place, from their hideouts on ticker tapes and sports pages; The Sporting Look, which tells some of the wonderful things sports do for clothes and clothes do for sports; You Should Know, by the Know-it-all, who this week introduces you (page 53) to some of the finer points of a fascinating sport: bird watching.
This being only Vol. 1, No. 2, it's still too early for our letters-to-the-editor section, which, incidentally, will be called The 19th Hole. The 19th Hole will begin next week, and then or at some future date I certainly hope to see you there.
