Sports Illustrated | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Sports Illustrated

Using a blend of groundbreaking photography and revolutionary writing, Sports Illustrated changed the way spectator sports fit into American culture during the 1960s and 1970s. As the first weekly magazine devoted solely to sports, Sports Illustrated was a media leader that contributed, along with television, to sports moving from a pleasant diversion into big business, spewing out multi-million-dollar player salaries. The magazine's influence also cast beyond sports, as its annual mid-winter swimsuit issue became a popular phenomenon and created lasting changes in the modeling industry. " Sports Illustrated served as a counterbalance to the persistent hype of television, offering a way for new and educated fans to put the endless rounds of games and matches into a meaningful context," Michael MacCambridge observed in his book The Franchise. "It made an art out of in-depth reporting on those games, and thereby made the games themselves more important to more Americans."

Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc., the publisher of Time and Life, conceived the idea for Sports Illustrated. Though not much of a sports fan, Luce saw the potential for a weekly sports magazine based on the increased leisure time of the burgeoning post-war middle class, a large percentage of whom were migrating to the suburbs.

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