To Our Readers We have devoted this double issue to the images that will endure.

This being the season for doubles--the ground rule kind, the
mixed kind, the bogey kind--it seemed high time to put out our
first summer double issue. This also being vacation season,
SPORTS ILLUSTRATED will be on hiatus next week. We say this as
much to inform you, the reader, as to protect every postal
worker and newsstand operator who risks incurring the wrath of
confused SI faithful when a separate Aug. 2 issue fails to
materialize. To repeat: There will be no magazine next week. But
this week's double issue is special enough to make up for it.

For the fourth installment of our millennium series, we have
picked our favorite sports photographs of the century. No easy
task, considering that the first sports photographers were
working long before SI was born in 1954. To make sure we didn't
miss any good candidates, our photo staff spent months sifting
through 100 years of material, some long forgotten. "Although
there were certain obvious choices, like the second Ali-Liston
fight or Willie Mays's famous catch," says photo researcher
Trish Pfeifer, "we wanted to uncover the other gems." While some
pictures, for their epic subject matter or technical brilliance,
might be considered the "best" photos of the century, we were
picking a slightly different group--our favorites; the ones,
explains senior editor Chris Hunt, that "immediately, for
whatever reason, strike a chord within."

One of these is Marvin Newman's locker-room shot of the Texas
Christian football team just before the Horned Frogs set out to
face Jim Brown and Syracuse in the 1957 Cotton Bowl. As Gary
Smith writes in dissecting the players and the scene (page 133),
"This is what sports is most about: the moments before, the
times when a person takes a flashlight to his soul and inspects
himself for will and courage and spirit." The photo brilliantly
captures that soul-searching, which explains why the members of
the '57 TCU team, who were reunited for the picture on page 148,
aren't the only ones who can look at Newman's shot and see
themselves.

Since 1954 the mission of SI has been to deliver to our readers,
in words and pictures, the game they may have missed (or a new
perspective on the one they watched on TV), the play their
bleacher seats didn't allow them to see, the locker-room meeting
to which they had no access. As much as we try to re-create
important sports moments through colorful, insightful prose,
sometimes a picture says more than a paragraph ever could.
That's why, out of all the great people, places and pieces of
journalism that define sports in the 20th century, we have
devoted this double issue to the images that will endure and
continue to affect us for centuries to come.

B/W PHOTO: UPI/CORBIS Joe Cool In 1938 Joe DiMaggio could hear shutters snap as he took his cuts.