Sports Illustrated
The magazine that turned every week into an event—full-color photographs of the biggest sports moments, waiting in your mailbox. From the swimsuit issue to SI for Kids in the classroom, Sports Illustrated was how America looked at sports in the pre-internet era. Each weekly delivery was the moment the season's story officially arrived.
Sports Illustrated launched in August 1954 from Time Inc., losing money for more than a decade before managing editor Andre Laguerre turned it around in the 1960s. Laguerre doubled circulation, redesigned the magazine, and pioneered full-color photo coverage of the week's games—revolutionary for a news magazine at the time. The swimsuit issue (started 1964) became famous and a major revenue driver, but the weekly SI itself was the cultural centerpiece: the cover was an event, the photography was the record of the season.
Before the internet, SI was how sports fans saw the games. Kids read SI for Kids (launched 1989) in classrooms; parents waited for the weekly mailbox delivery of the main magazine. The magazine earned recognition as the first publication with a circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, SI's famous subscription offer—a free football-shaped telephone—became its own nostalgic touchstone of the era.
The "cover jinx"—the legend that appearing on SI's cover brought an athlete bad luck—was never proven but endured as testament to the magazine's cultural power. SI remained weekly until 2018, then transitioned to biweekly, and eventually became monthly. The brand passed through multiple owners in the late 2010s and 2020s. For everyone who grew up with the magazine, its legacy as the visual center of sports fandom in the pre-internet era remained unmatched.
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