I am a lifelong subscriber to Sports Illustrated. There was a time when my brother and I would race to the mailbox to get the magazine first. Whoever got it would read it cover to cover, which often meant two to three days before the loser could get his hands on it. There was no robust media stream back in the Eighties so that delay seemed interminable. The magazine was a great mix of current news, along with long form stories with the occasional piece of fiction thrown in. It was also great writing and looking up words from many of those articles contributed to me crushing the verbal section of the SATs.
I saved those issues until eventually they were just too big to keep moving around. Switching to just the covers helped free up space and was a tolerable solution to my wife. Through the website and some of my airtime on the popular DC sports radio talk show, “The Sports Junkies”, I received an additional gift of hundreds of SI covers. While I don’t have a complete set from 1954, I am very close. With those covers, I would normally create a monthly wall calendar that took up a large share of wall space in my man cave. I have so many covers that I have multiple issues for every day of the year. That endeavor is on hiatus until our new house is finished, but it will return in robust fashion.
Or will it? A few years ago, SI went from being a weekly periodical, to bi-weekly, to now just monthly with special issues thrown in. Of course, the monthly approach kills my future wall calendars. Though, with so many covers it will be decades before my monthly calendar becomes redundant. I am also a realist. I understand the commercial imperative to create only a monthly magazine. There’s really no value in doing it weekly and I can barely keep up with my monthly issues. The writing still holds up along with the photos. Speaking of photos, I still keep some whole issues, typically anything where a Pittsburgh team is on the cover or the Swimsuit issue. Honestly, once I got over puberty, I really didn’t care for that issue. They had eliminated the feature articles associated with the annual Swimsuit issue, so it was just a lot of pictures of pretty models. I may not have read those articles every time, but I did read some of them. And, in this day and age, whatever purpose that issue served for young adolescent boys had long since been replaced by the internet.
Where’s my Martha?
The issue, though, was still supposed to be part of my monthly subscription. It isn’t like I was anxiously awaiting the issue, but with all the publicity associated with Martha Stewart being on the cover, I made a mental note that it should be coming. That was in May and now in late June, I still had no Swimsuit issue. After wading through a useless online customer service site (which directed me to the wrong customer telephone number, where I waited twenty-plus minutes to be told to call another number), I was told that “yes, mail subscriptions do not include the swimsuit issue.” Being old, cheap, and cranky, I countered that I am sure my subscription does include that issue. In fact, I had a screen shot that says it did. To the rep’s credit, she didn’t argue (although I would guess there was some eye-rolling on her end) and said she would send me the Martha cover as soon as they did the next reprint. I almost said just send me the Samantha Fox one instead, but I think the Martha cover has more character.
My subscription runs through October of 2024. (See, I am a dedicated subscriber.) The renewal rate is not that much, but again, I won’t get the Swimsuit issue. Sure, I can buy it for extra, but the cost of that issue is nearly the same cost as a full year’s renewal. It does not make feel like a valued customer. It was ironic that when the previously mentioned Sports Junkies talked about this year’s swimsuit issue, they openly mused, “Who, in this digital age, even gets the paper copy?” Hate to say it, but even this dinosaur has his limits. When Sports Illustrated gasps its last breath, I will know why.