MEMO from the publisher
Next week, in the spirit of the season, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S Special Holiday Issue encompasses a full and festive range—from the Rose Bowl to rodeo, from Rome to Ruth.
The annual Bowl Game Previews will include not only the Rose but the Cotton and the Sugar, the Orange and the Gator; and scouting reports on the 10 teams playing in them.
This year-end issue will also announce SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S fourth Silver Anniversary All-America. More than 70 colleges have each nominated the one man who has most distinguished himself in his career and community since earning his football letter 25 years ago. From this group 24 leading Americans have selected the 25 men they consider the most outstanding for an award which recognizes values common to football and American life.
No less American than football is rodeo, a complex competition in riding, roping and animal wrestling, which the uninitiated eye tends to see as man against animal but misses as man against man. World Champion Cowboy Jim Shoulders, with Writer Joan Dickinson and Artist Sam Savitt, tells how to watch (and how to score) a sport as sophisticated as it is spectacular.
The most spectacular of all sports spectacles must be the Olympics. But in 1960 they will be sharing the stage with the stage itself, which is Rome. In 18 pages of color, Photographer Dmitri Kessel captures the splendor and the grandeur of the Eternal City as it becomes between dusk and dawn the nocturnal city.
Kessel's portfolio suggests what to see in Rome. As for what to do, those in Rome are always well advised to do as the Romans do. So next week Samuel Chamberlain advises well, on matters of wining and dining; and Horace Sutton tells how to take a modern Roman holiday on the tiny islands which lie off Italy's west coast and offer vacation pleasures both rich and reasonable.
If it's hard to think of things more festive than the Rose Bowl, rodeo or Rome, there's always Ruth. The Babe's records in festivity may last even longer than in home runs. A recent find of historic baseball documents reveals how Ruth paid for his fun and got paid for his talent, and how others around him, like Gehrig and Meusel, Pennock and Combs, got paid for theirs.
And those are some of the reasons it's called a Special Holiday Issue.
PHOTO