The Publisher (74 page)

By the spring of 1953 Luce was once again in what Billings called “an empire-building mood,” which usually meant launching a new magazine. And even though Luce had never been very much interested in sports or wilderness activities himself, he began to imagine a “sporting magazine” that would capture what he believed was a growing market for leisure, and thus for sports. There was brief talk of buying up such existing magazines as
Outdoor Life
or
Popular Science
. But what Luce really wanted was “our own Sports Weekly.” Some of his colleagues were aghast at the idea, convinced that a sports magazine would degrade the Time Inc. brand by focusing on trivial and consumer-driven activities. Others worried that the costs would be prohibitive and that the audience would be too narrow. “Time Inc. is not a ‘sporting’ outfit,” Billings wrote contemptuously in his diary, noting that he was “really against a Sports Magazine” and saw it “only as a Luce whim.” (Luce’s deputy, Allen Grover, rarely disagreed openly with his boss—and did not do so on this issue—but he quietly agreed with Billings.) Other colleagues were similarly dubious about the project, and many of them told Luce bluntly that he was making a dangerous error. He was not impervious to these criticisms, and at times he wavered in his commitment. “I still don’t see any real deep conviction about the magazine among its sponsors,” Billings noted several months into the planning. But Luce did not give up.
¹³

He enlisted the
Life
reporter Ernest Havemann, an avid sports fan, to supervise the planning of what was tentatively named “Sport.” But almost immediately the two men were at odds. In one of the first substantive
meetings on the new magazine, Havemann proposed a magazine written mostly by Time Inc. staff, just like the company’s other publications. Luce strongly disagreed and insisted that outside writers should be the principal source of stories. This was partly because he wanted serious writers, and not sports fans, to shape the magazine; he feared that full-time sports writers would simply replicate the language to which sports fans were accustomed—“a style of writing at once labyrinthine and rococo,” one newspaper editor predicted. But Luce’s preference for outside writers was also partly because of his belief that using freelancers would be less expensive than building a staff, and Luce hoped to produce this magazine relatively cheaply. A few weeks into the planning Havemann wrote a bombshell memo, distributed widely among those working on the new magazine, in which he announced that he now believed that the project “was wrong and impractical” and that “he wanted out right away as head of the experimental department.” His undisclosed “research” had convinced him that there was no real market for a general magazine on sports. People interested in baseball would not want to read about golf. People who liked tennis would not want to read about football. The potential audience was too fragmented to create a large-enough base to support “Sport.” In the absence of Luce (who was in Rome with Clare), Billings enlisted Larsen to help him find a way out of the impasse Havemann had created. Both men shared Havemann’s skepticism, but they dared not give up until Luce himself did.
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Their solution was to enlist Sidney James, a
Life
editor with no particular background or knowledge of sports, to take over the project. He was a man of boundless energy and what Luce later described as vast “nerve and enthusiasm.” James breezily rejected the knotty problems of what he called “semantics and theory” that had plagued the project in its first months: the debates over whether the magazine should be directed at a mass audience (1,000,000 circulation or more) or, as Larsen tentatively suggested, a relatively small audience (around 350,000) that would, like
The New Yorker
, attract the affluent and elite readership that advertisers valued; and the debates over whether the magazine should cover sports alone or make itself into a magazine devoted to a larger conception of leisure and entertainment. James decided instantly that he liked the idea of a “100% sports weekly, either mass or class,” but he decided too that he should be elastic in what “sports” meant. More important, he started immediately to lay out pages and collect articles. He even coined what became one of the magazine’s most important promotional slogans: “The wonderful world of sport!” In less than a month
he was ready to show layouts and covers to Billings and Larsen, who became sudden converts to the project. “I was duly impressed and exuded [
sic
]
,”
Billings wrote. “Considering he … got it all up in about three weeks, it seemed pretty wonderful.”
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Luce returned from Italy a few weeks later. He looked at what James had produced with something close to incredulity. When
Life
was in development, there were many weeks, even months, of deep unhappiness with the project; Luce had not been entirely satisfied even when the first issue of
Life
went to press. But James, without even having produced a complete dummy, had made Luce an immediate and passionate supporter of the magazine. The best evidence of that was that Luce himself began to spend hours, even days, in the “experimental department” where the magazine was being developed. “Sometimes it seemed that we saw more of Luce than we did of our wives,” one member of James’s staff later said. “Some of us were assigned to escort him to sports events and explain the action and identify the players.” Over long lunches, Billings recorded, Luce “got on the why and wherefore of such a magazine—what’s its purpose? To make money? Sure. But here’s a big segment of human activity, anti-intellectual if you will, which Luce proposes to report in the intelligent adult style, also because it’s never been done before.” Luce’s most resonant and bewildering statement, at least to some of his colleagues, was, “I hope we can have a civilizing influence.” All of this seemed familiar to the many editors and writers who had worked with Luce in creating
Fortune
and
Life
—his high sense of purpose, his search for meaning, his long philosophical speculations. But this time something was missing: the Lucean brilliance that had always justified his frustrating meanderings. Luce was no less enthusiastic than he had been in the past. But whether because the subject remained alien to him, or because he was too long removed from the work of magazine production, he was no longer the driving force behind the new project. “Luce looked at spreads—this in, this out,” Billings described work on an early dummy. “But then he’d get stuck and go silent for five and ten minutes for lack of a good idea. His inspiration is running low and he is no longer the creative genius of magazine journalism.” Luce gradually reduced the amount of time he spent with the magazine, which left James to continue on his pragmatic path. Uncharacteristically Luce declined to write the prospectus for the magazine. James wrote it instead, and Luce—without much editing or questioning—announced that “it’s very good, all in the right direction.”
¹⁶

The movement from the conception of the new magazine in June
1953 to the final commitment to publish it in December, less than six months later, was, at least by Time Inc.’s deliberate standards, remarkably fast. Through the first half of 1954, James and his colleagues, with Luce’s intermittent but gradually fading presence, created dummy after dummy, still trying to find the right balance between pictures and text, and between serious writing and the long tradition of colloquial sports reporting. But almost everyone working on the magazine believed that it was on the right track—that it had started out good and was getting steadily better. Throughout the development stage of the magazine, the working title was “Sport.” There was, however, already a magazine using that name, which had offered to sell itself to Time Inc. for $250,000, more than Luce was willing to pay. In May, with the publication date approaching, Harry Phillips, the Time Inc. publisher of the as-yet unnamed magazine, ran into a friend in a restaurant who offered an alternative. The friend owned the title of a defunct magazine,
Sports Illustrated
. Everyone involved was immediately enthusiastic, and the company purchased the name for five thousand dollars.

There continued to be naysayers within the organization. Havemann was a consistent critic, always insisting that the project was doomed no matter how much work and creativity was poured into it. Journalists in other organizations looked at the dummies and were dismayed at what they considered the pretensions of the project, which they predicted would alienate sports fans. Advertisers were skeptical, convinced that only “mugs” would have enough interest in sports to buy the magazine. Others wondered how any sports magazine could sustain interest through the year, especially in winter months when sports activities contracted. Traditional sports journalism was in many ways incompatible with the style and culture of Time Inc. But that was both its burden and its great advantage. Luce had always expected his company’s magazines to be pathbreaking, raising the bar of both quality and innovation.
Time
was the first “newsmagazine.”
Fortune
had aspired to be the handsomest and most literate business magazine ever published, and in many ways it had achieved its goal.
Life
had set out to be the greatest picture magazine ever created, with the best photographers and the most lavish formats, and it too largely succeeded. From the start Luce expected
Sports Illustrated
to be equally unprecedented. It would not be a “fan” magazine, filled with gossip, adulation, and over-the-top language. It would not concentrate on any one area of sport. It would not be a quasi-trade magazine like
Sporting News
, which was, in effect, the official newspaper of the baseball industry. It would not compete with the daily
newspaper coverage of sports. It would not focus too much on what had happened in the previous week. It would, rather, be a magazine compatible with the Time Inc. tradition, not the tradition of the sports world. It would have a handsome and dignified format. It would publish extraordinary pictures. It would look at sports not just as fun but, Luce wrote, as something that was “deeply inherent … in the human spirit.” And it would bring what Time Inc. had brought to all its magazines: a set of opinions and prejudices that in fact worked much better for
Sports Illustrated
than it did for Luce’s other publications.

The powerful advertising executive Leo Burnett asked Luce to explain the “raison d’être” of
Sports Illustrated
, which was struggling to generate interest from advertisers. Luce responded, at considerable length, with a rationale that bewildered most sports journalists. “We have the H-Bomb and we have SPORTS ILLUSTRATED,” he wrote. Americans were living under a cloud of mortal danger, but they were also assuming “that peace is possible … that … you live and work as if it is, right now.” Peace, he said, was defined in part by “leisure … the pursuit of happiness,” and for most Americans that meant “something to do with Sport.” Sports reflected “the hopes of the American people in a very simple human way—in a way universally understood and richly appreciated.” But the magazine did not really aspire to universalism.
Sports Illustrated
, like all of Luce’s magazines, wanted to attract educated and literate readers—people who could be attracted to sophisticated writing on “things beyond their own personal routine—the Miracle Mile, The Conquest of Everest, in Hunting and Fishing in their own domain and all over the world…. And so what we got excited about was creating a magazine for
those
people.” In their dummies the
Sports Illustrated
editors cut out advertisements from
The New Yorker
(still the American magazine with the most affluent readership) to suggest something of the elevated tone of this new sports magazine.
¹⁷

The first issue of
Sports Illustrated
was published on August 16, 1954, a few days after issues actually appeared on newsstands. It sold out quickly. And on the whole it was greeted warmly by the press and by its readers. On the cover was a dramatic picture of a nighttime baseball game in Milwaukee, with the Braves’ Eddie Mathews in midswing, framed by a vast crowd in the steeply overhanging stadium. Inside the editors introduced themselves as “a happily recognizable member of the Time Inc. family.” To make the connection even clearer, the opening page was framed by pictures of the inaugural issues of
Time, Fortune
, and
Life:

The first story in this first issue, “The Duel of the Four-Minute Men,” chronicled the classic rivalry between Roger Bannister and John Landy, the first two men to run a four-minute mile. It also illustrated how unconventional a sports magazine it intended to be. “The art of running the mile consists, in essence, of reaching the threshold of unconsciousness at the instant of breasting the tape,” the
Sports Illustrated
writer Paul O’Neil began:

This elegant and sophisticated language was a sign of what
Sports Illustrated
aspired to be, and often accomplished—a magazine that would elevate the world of sports from being “just a game” to being a powerful metaphor for the human condition.

The first issue ranged widely across the landscape of sports. It reported the first ascent of K2, the second-highest mountain in the world. It covered a dramatic prizefight. It offered a feature on baseball cards (complete with instructions on how to blow bubble gum), a lavishly photographed story on fly-fishing, another on foxhunting, a primer on poison ivy, and an essay on golf. But the most distinctive article in the first issue (and also the most self-serving) was an essay on the world of sport itself, with the trumpeting title, “The Golden Age Is Now.” It was, the staff writer Gerald Holland put it, “as if no other world existed…. For world-wide interest, for widespread participation, for thrilling triumphs of the human spirit, this is the greatest sports era in history.”
¹⁹