Sports Illustrated

• 1. Introduction

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  Sports Illustrated arrived on newsstands on the 9th of August, 1954, at a moment when many serious journalists believed sports was beneath their craft. Time patriarch Henry Luce disagreed. He was not even a sports fan himself, yet he saw a gap no one else was filling: there was no large-scale, general, weekly sports magazine with a national following on actual, current events. The monthlies of the 1940s simply could not keep pace. Luce decided to build one.

  His own colleagues mocked the vision. In a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Luce, author W. A. Swanberg recorded that Time-Life intellectuals dubbed the proposed magazine "Muscle", "Jockstrap", and "Sweat Socks". Senior advisers, including Life magazine's Ernest Havemann, actively tried to kill the project. Luce pressed forward anyway.

  What followed was a seven-decade story of financial struggle, editorial reinvention, corporate shuffles, and cultural weight. A magazine that would put Muhammad Ali on its cover dozens of times. A magazine whose annual swimsuit issue would grow into its own industry. A magazine that would eventually miss delivering a print edition to subscribers for the first time in its seventy-year history. How all of that happened is the story ahead.

• 2. Before Luce

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  Stuart Scheftel created the very first magazine called Sports Illustrated in 1936, targeting sportsmen with coverage of golf, tennis, and skiing. He published it monthly until 1942, then sold the name to Dell Publications. Dell's version, focused on baseball, basketball, and boxing, lasted only six issues before folding in 1949.

  Both of those earlier magazines shared the same structural problem: they were monthlies. Publishing once a month made it impossible to cover sports as news. A boxing match or a pennant race could not wait four weeks for context. The weekly gap in the market was real, and Luce spotted it.

  His planning meetings for the new magazine took place in 1954 at Pine Lakes Country Club in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the oldest golf course in that city. The course's pro shop still displays a plaque noting those meetings, and the plaque records that the first issue of Sports Illustrated was given to the course. Tracy Conner, executive director of the Myrtle Beach Area Golf Course Owners Association, has credited the magazine with making Myrtle Beach a recognized golf destination.

• 3. The Laguerre Years

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  Andre Laguerre was a European correspondent for Time, Inc. who had also run the Time-Life news bureaux in Paris and London, at one point overseeing both simultaneously. Henry Luce first took notice of him in 1956, when Laguerre produced singular coverage of the Winter Olympic Games in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. That coverage became the backbone of Sports Illustrated's reporting on those Games, and in May 1956 Luce brought Laguerre to New York as assistant managing editor.

  Laguerre was named managing editor in 1960. He more than doubled the circulation through a series of structural changes: he built a system of departmental editors, redesigned the internal format, and pioneered the use of full-color photographic coverage of the week's sports events in a news magazine. He was also among the first editors anywhere to recognize the rising national appetite for professional football.

  One of his most lasting innovations was the "bonus piece", a single long, well-crafted story placed at the end of every issue. These in-depth articles set Sports Illustrated apart from other sports publications. Frank Deford, who became the magazine's anchor writer under a later managing editor, wrote of Laguerre in March 2010: "He smoked cigars and drank Scotch and made the sun move across the heavens... His genius as an editor was that he made you want to please him, but he wanted you to do that by writing in your own distinct way." Laguerre is also credited with conceiving the annual Swimsuit Issue.

• 4. Print in Color

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  Offset printing arrived at Sports Illustrated in 1965, and it changed what the magazine could actually do. Before that shift, color pages took too long to produce to be paired with breaking news. After it, color spreads could be printed overnight, yielding crisper images and, crucially, the ability to put the best photography alongside the latest results. By 1967, the magazine was running 200 pages of what editors called "fast color" per year. In 1983, Sports Illustrated became the first American full-color newsweekly.

  That technological leap fed a fierce competition among photographers. Walter Iooss and Neil Leifer developed an intense rivalry to land the decisive cover shot, with their images reaching newsstands and mailboxes within days of the events they depicted.

  In 1984, Mark Mulvoy became the youngest managing editor in the magazine's history. He pushed Sports Illustrated toward investigative journalism, wanting it to serve as "the conscience of sports". He doubled the swimsuit issue to 40 pages, established the Golf Plus insert for older readers, and launched Sports Illustrated Kids for younger ones. Under his tenure, profits for the magazine more than quadrupled. In 1986, the co-owned property HBO/Cannon Video agreed to produce video versions of the magazine priced at $20 on the sell-through market, each running 30-45 minutes.

• 5. Brand Sold, Staff Cut

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  Meredith Corporation acquired parent company Time Inc. in 2018 and moved quickly to sell Sports Illustrated, which did not fit its lifestyle portfolio. Authentic Brands Group announced its intent to buy the magazine for $110 million. The publishing rights to its editorial operations were then licensed to the digital media company theMaven, Inc. under a 10-year contract, with Ross Levinsohn as CEO.

  TheMaven, later renamed The Arena Group, ran the editorial operation while ABG licensed the brand for non-editorial ventures. In 2022 those ventures included an apparel line for JCPenney and resort hotels planned for Orlando and Punta Cana. On the 27th of November 2023, the publication Futurism alleged that Sports Illustrated was running articles credited to authors who were AI-generated, including fabricated profile photos sourced from online marketplaces. After Futurism contacted The Arena Group, some of the implicated writers were removed and their articles republished under different AI-generated names with disclaimers. A spokesperson attributed the articles to a third-party company called AdVon Commerce, claiming it used pseudonyms to protect author privacy and had already been cut off.

  On the 5th of January, 2024, The Arena Group missed a $3.75 million quarterly licensing payment to Authentic Brands Group. Two weeks later, on the 19th of January, ABG terminated the license. The Arena Group laid off the entire Sports Illustrated editorial staff. By March 2024, ABG had licensed the publishing rights to Minute Media in a new 10-year deal, with plans to revive both the print and digital editions by rehiring some of the dismissed staff.

• 6. The Awards Tradition

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  Roger Bannister won the very first Sportsman of the Year award from Sports Illustrated, recognized for running a mile in 3:59.4, the first time any human had broken the four-minute barrier. The award has been given every year since 1954, honoring "the athlete or team whose performance that year most embodies the spirit of sportsmanship and achievement". Its name has shifted over the decades from Sportsman of the Year to, in some years, Sportswoman of the Year, and now Sportsperson of the Year.

  In 1999, Sports Illustrated named Muhammad Ali the Sportsman of the Century at its 20th Century Sports Awards ceremony at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Ali had first appeared on the magazine's cover in 1963 and went on to accumulate 40 cover appearances, second only to Michael Jordan's 50 over the same 1954-2016 span.

  In 2015, the magazine renamed its legacy award after Ali. The Sports Illustrated Muhammad Ali Legacy Award, originally created in 2008, honors former sports figures who embody sportsmanship, leadership, and philanthropy. Ali's widow Lonnie Ali is consulted in selecting each recipient. In 2017, the award was presented to football quarterback Colin Kaepernick, with Beyonce delivering the presentation. The magazine also began presenting annual awards to sportswear designers as early as 1956, with the first American Sportswear Designer Awards going to Claire McCardell and Rudi Gernreich following a vote of 200 top American retailers.

• 7. Beyond the Magazine

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  Sports Illustrated Kids launched in January 1989 with a circulation that would reach 950,000. It won the Distinguished Achievement for Excellence in Educational Publishing award eleven times and the Parents' Choice Magazine Award seven times. The Sports Illustrated Almanac, a yearly compilation of sports statistics and news in book form, followed in 1991.

  CNNSI.com, a 24-hour sports news site and the online version of the magazine, launched on the 17th of July, 1997. The domain name was eventually sold in May 2015. Sports Illustrated Women launched in March 2000, reaching a peak circulation of 400,000 before folding in December 2002 due to a weak advertising climate. Sports Illustrated on Campus launched on the 4th of September, 2003, distributed free across 72 college campuses through college newspapers, reaching one million readers between the ages of 18 and 24; it too ceased publication in December 2005.

  The brand's expansion continued into areas well removed from print journalism. Sports Illustrated Online Casino launched on the 7th of February, 2023, in Michigan, operated in cooperation with 888 Holdings. The Sports Illustrated Sportsbook had launched before that, in September 2021. Esports Illustrated launched in March 2023 in partnership with Gaud-Hammer Gaming Group. In August 2024, Minute Media and RTA Media Holdings announced a partnership bringing Racing America's NASCAR coverage to Sports Illustrated's platforms under the name Racing America on SI.