After a well earned rest, we are back at it in 2024. It has been a busy off season as we have moved into a new location. The man cave is still quite not complete, but is slowly coming together. I am happy to report that an old tradition is back with the new digs – The Sports Illustrated Wall Calendar.
If you haven’t been following it, things have not exactly been quiet over at SI. The magazine was already on life support moving from a weekly to bi-weekly to now a monthly magazine. Of course, printed media itself is nearly dead as well. However, I have hundreds of covers all the way back to the 1950s. While it is disappointing to only get one issue a month, it will take me years to rotate through my existing collection of covers.
It is interesting the trends you see in sports when pulling covers from the last sixty plus years. Sometimes, I try to pull covers around a particular theme. I did not do this for April. My only criteria was to get a good distribution of years. Here are some random observations from this month’s wall calendar.
- April, not surprisingly, is loaded with Major League Baseball preview covers. Since the Texas Rangers are the current reigning MLB champs, I did pull a couple of Ranger covers with probably the most famous Ranger of them all – Nolan Ryan.
- Likewise, the Masters is a prominent event on the calendar and I could have done nearly the whole month with golf covers.
- Boxing was also much more popular back in the day. SI loved Muhammed Ali so there are a couple of his covers featured. April was also when perhaps the greatest three rounds of boxing occurred. I am, of course, referring to the Hagler-Hearns fight of April 15, 1985. While a short fight, it was non-stop carnage from start to finish.
- The “Illustrated” in SI also meant the occasional graphic cover with artwork. A couple of those covers found their way to the wall in April.
- While SI covers generally favored male subjects, sometimes women would get a cover. One would imagine that Caitlin Clark would easily have gotten a cover this year.
That’s all I got for now. Enjoy The Masters this weekend.