Heavyweights Being heavyweight champion of the world is no guarantee that you'll be on the cover (tough luck, Lennox Lewis), but it worked for these tough guys

Rocky Marciano, 1955
Floyd Patterson, 1956
Ingemar Johansson, 1959
Sonny Liston, 1962
Muhammad Ali, 1967
Joe Frazier, 1971
George Foreman, 1975
Leon Spinks, 1978
Ken Norton, 1978
Larry Holmes, 1985
Michael Spinks, 1988
Buster Douglas, 1990
Mike Tyson, 1991
Riddick Bowe, 1992
Evander Holyfield, 1996

presidents

JFK, boating enthusiast, and Gerald Ford, notoriously inaccurate
golfer and former football player, were SI's earliest forays into
politics. After that, we never promised you a rose garden, but a
big win might get you into the Rose Garden for a quick
meet-and-greet with the most powerful man in the world

John & Jackie Kennedy, Dec. 26, 1960
Gerald Ford, July 8, 1974
Ronald Reagan with Hoyas, Nov. 26, 1984
Reagan with Dennis Connor, Feb. 16, 1987
Bill Clinton, March 21, 1994

dogs

In the magazine's early days, a dog--almost every kind of dog, it
seems--was some SI editor's best friend

Oct. 25, 1954
Feb. 14, 1955
July 4, 1955
Dec. 12, 1955
March 12, 1956
Nov. 5, 1956
Feb. 11, 1957
July 14, 1958
Jan. 19, 1959
Nov. 30, 1959
Feb. 8, 1960
Feb. 24, 1975
July 27, 1987
April 28, 1997

THIRTY-FOUR COLOR PHOTOS