Sports Illustrated recently announced that they are going from a weekly to bi-weekly format. While disappointing, it’s not much of a stretch. With all the double issues they’ve been making lately, the publication was practically already bi-weekly. What’s more distressing is that my wall calendar is going to start repeating more often. I still haven’t gone through all my covers. I probably have one more year of new looks, and then I am going to start recycling covers. Here are some highlights from March.
Given that it is a Winter Olympic year, I put up as many Olympic themed covers as possible. Immediately, I noticed two skiing stars from this year’s Olympics, Lindsey Vonn and Mikaela Shiffrin who had graced previous covers. Skiing and snowboarding held their own both in the games and on the wall. The women’s cross-country team would be wall worthy with an inspiring come from behind win in the Women’s freestyle sprint by Jessica Diggins, and Kikkan Randall for the first U.S. gold ever in Women’s cross-country skiing. However, with only bi-weekly opportunities, their chance for immortal wall fame is unlikely. Snowboard Chloe Kim already claimed last week’s cover.
Unfortunately most of the covers focused on skating: speed and figure. Those were certainly disappointments in 2018. A big surprise this year’s was the Men’s Curling team taking the gold over Sweden, not unlike the Men’s bobsled team winning in 2010.
The last Olympic cover is for my Canadian friends out there who are probably still smarting from their bronze in Men’s hockey and silver in the Women’s. Interesting probably only to me, but my alma mater, Mercyhurst University had three players in the Olympics between various teams. Not bad for a tiny liberal arts school in Erie, Pa.
The Olympic covers fall off after the first week and hoops and baseball tend to take over. Teams that are currently champs in their respective league typically get representation on the wall if they have a cover that month, that even usually includes the Patriots (hopefully one where they are losing).
However, the cover that really caught my eye was one with “Sammy, Junior and Mac” as the Power Pack. Dig the caption: “All the Juice is in the National League.” With apologies to Griffey, that cover just drips with irony given their cartoonish big heads. Just six year’s later, there’s a cover with Barry Bonds and his real life gigantic dome. The accompanying article is naturally about steroids. A good reminder that today’s hero’s may be tomorrow’s scoundrels.
