MEMO from the publisher
As in previous years, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's Special Holiday Issue next week salutes the festival season. Some of its features I can preview for you here:
The third Silver Anniversary All-America, 25 football lettermen of the college class of '34, receive their deserved recognition from a jury of their peers, 25 judges with careers as distinguished as those of the men they honor.
The professional football season, on the eve of its climax, is the subject of an analytical report, and the Cotton, Gator, Orange, Rose and Sugar bowls, of scouting reports.
Four colorful and palm-fringed pages describe the Caribbean's newest resort and golf course: Puerto Rico's and Laurance Rockefeller's magnificent and sports-filled Dorado Beach.
Charles Goren turns the tables and this time asks the bridge questions. Now, as he intrepidly points out, by comparing results with last year's quiz you can tell whether his instruction has been doing your game any good.
Artist Jules Feiffer presents the cartoon history of the world's greatest athlete, who became a distressing problem in patriotism because he didn't really want to win.
Among the last color pictures taken by Ylla, the great animal photographer, were these of a pet tiger cub in Pandit Nehru's garden with a distressing problem of its own: how to maintain feline majesty while bothered by a fly.
The recent death of James Michael Curley, whose political career was one thing, evoked another thing in Herbert Warren Wind. Out of personal childhood memories Wind writes nostalgically of Nantasket Beach summertimes when the boss of Boston cast conversational spells on his youthful listeners and, forsaking politics, laid open a vast inventory of lore in sports.
Continuing in the tradition of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's instructional articles, Champion Maribel Vinson and Artist Robert Riger combine on the first of two parts on the fundamentals of figure skating.
If you think America's girl athletic stars look pretty on the tennis courts, in the water and on the fairways, you're right. But you should see them in their formals. And you will, in color.
In a troubled year for baseball—with minor leagues still in peril, third leagues brewing, Congress watching closely and players asking for a big bite of TV revenue—Gerald Holland has discovered some startling proposals for a way out. He reveals them in The Inside Story of the Napier Plan to Save Baseball.
And there is even more in next week's Christmas issue. But this week there's no more space to tell you what it is. A good omen, it seems to me, of the bounty coming up—and you won't have to wait till Christmas to open it!
TEN ILLUSTRATIONS