MEMO FROM THE PUBLISHER

At 7 A.M. Tuesday, January 3 SPORTS ILLUSTRATED began to roll off the presses at its regular time to start its regular way to newsstands and subscribers. Many of our readers have written to comment with appreciation and some surprise on the fact that this issue arrived complete with accounts of the bowl games. One of them, the Rose Bowl, had concluded only 11 hours and 25 minutes before the presses began to run.

Closings like this and the split-second coordination over thousands of miles between reporter, writer, editor and printer which they require are of course essential to a weekly magazine which reports news. And the bowl games are only one of many instances in which SI's trained journalists have been able to bring full and authoritative reports on last-minute events to readers while they were news and not a pleasant memory.

In our very first issue, in fact, with Paul O'Neil's account of the Mile of the Century in Vancouver, SI made an auspicious start in meeting this responsibility. Despite the pressing deadline against which it was written, the story captured so well the facts and the significance of the unprecedented race that it was at once acclaimed a classic among sports stories.

I think you will be interested to know that SI has made special arrangements to airlift next week's issue to Cortina. There the magazine and its PREVIEW of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin next Thursday, will be in the hands of the members of the American team even before they take off on Cortina's slopes. SI will fly again the following week to give our athletes their first account in English of what they, as well as all the other teams, have been doing in the Games—at the same time that you will be reading it here.

For one American at Cortina, next week's SPORTS ILLUSTRATED will have particular interest. He is Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, who will see for the first time the article on himself written by SI's Robert Creamer. Throwing new light on a man who has long been a dominant and controversial figure in amateur sport, it is a fine example of how SI brings to events like the Olympics the background which lets the news fall smoothly in place.

PHOTO

AVERY BRUNDAGE