Sports Celebrities--SI Has Them Covered

What do Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs have in common with Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

All have made record numbers of appearances on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Aug. 16 marks SI’s 35th anniversary, an event that has inspired the magazine to stir up enough arcane facts to complete a set of Trivial Pursuit playing cards. Ali and Abdul-Jabbar, for example, have appeared on the cover of the weekly sports magazine 29 and 25 times respectively, followed by Jack Nicklaus (22 appearances), Pete Rose (17) and Earvin (Magic) Johnson (15).

Tiegs and Brinkley, along with Elle Macpherson, hold the record for making the cover of the magazine’s swimsuit issues, with three appearances apiece.

SI has grown from a circulation of 450,000 in 1954 to 3,150,000, playing a key role in shaping sports literature along the way.

In the magazine’s first year alone, contributors included not only renowned sports writers such as Red Smith and Jim Murray, but also mainstream literary celebs John Steinbeck and William Faulkner.

Of fishing, Steinbeck wrote: “Here is no sentiment, no contest, no grandeur, no economics. From the sanctity of this occupation, a man may emerge refreshed and in control of his own soul. He is not idle. He is fishing, alone with himself in dignity and peace.”

Of hockey, Faulkner wrote: “To the innocent, who had never seen hockey before, it seemed discorded and inconsequent, bizarre and paradoxical, like the frantic darting of the weightless bugs which run on the surface of stagnant pools. . . . “

Over the years, SI has developed a stable of staff writers widely regarded as among the best in the business.

“It’s got as many legends as the Yankees,” said Pete Dexter, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, the author of the novels “Paris Trout,” and “Deadwood,” and an occasional contributor to SI. “I think it’s the best magazine out there, bar none. I’m not going to say it’s the best-written magazine, but the mix--the way it looks and the way it sounds--(makes it) as successful as any magazine I can think of.”

As an example of this mix, Dexter points to a 1980 story, in which SI rounded up all the fighters Muhammad Ali beat in his career. “I can’t remember being so moved by anything I’ve seen in a magazine. It just stunned me.”

Not all observers praise SI unequivocally.

“The concern for excellence has long since been superseded by the ledger and the accountants,” said Frank Deford, who is widely acknowledged as one of the finest sports writers in the country, and who recently left Sports Illustrated to become the founding editor of the National, a soon-to-be-launched daily sports newspaper.

“The present editor is simply more interested in pretty pictures and breaking stories, so it no longer casts the kind of shadow it did once upon a time,” he said. “. . . It’s simply not the writers’ magazine it once was.”

Deford conceded that his views may be tinged with the bitterness of his current dispute with Sports Illustrated over $215,625 in company stock. Deford contends that managing editor Mark Mulvoy reneged on a promise to keep him on the payroll until he became vested in the stock.

Mulvoy, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday, has publicly stated that Deford misrepresented the nature of the job for which he was leaving Sports Illustrated, a claim Deford vehemently denied.

Bill Dwyre, sports editor of the Los Angeles Times, had a different sort of complaint about SI. The magazine, he lamented, has saddled him with “a whole new age of yuppie sports writers,” who admire SI’s features and think the leisurely creative pace of that weekly can carry over to daily newspaper reporting.

“Another area that just infuriates me,” Dwyre said, is that “. . . they are paying some sports figures to spill their guts.” Dwyre gave the October, 1988, story on steroid abuse by University of South Carolina football star Tommy Chaikin as an example.

Roger Jackson, a spokesman for SI, said that the magazine pays only for first-person, or “as-told-to” accounts, and runs those only rarely. Even then, he said, “we’re not really doing anything different than Newsweek or Time do when they pay for the memoirs of Henry Kissinger or Jimmy Carter.”

Dwyre conceded that some of the spleen he vents against SI will sound like sour grapes. “I get sour because they steal my good people,” he said. “I’m sometimes a farm team for Mark Mulvoy and I don’t like it.”

And despite his complaints, he believes SI “has been the leader in making sports writers some of the best writers in the country.”

Sports Illustrated, which won this year’s National Magazine Award for general excellence, won’t celebrate its anniversary till November, when it plans to lure out a cast of 1954 sports heroes for an affair in New York. In the meantime, the Aug. 14 edition will feature Michael Jordan on its cover, and a feature on the basketball star’s love of golf. Jordan hopes to join the professional golf circuit when he hangs up his high-tops, SI reports.

Decisions, Decisions

An American business executive, pushing hard to conquer a high Himalayan pass, encounters a barefoot sadhu, or Hindu holy man. The sadhu is on the verge of death. The executive is tired and the long-sought goal beckons: What should be done?

The current issue of the Marina del Rey-based quarterly, Ethics--Easier Said Than Done, presents that actual encounter as a parable for the ethical issues confronting American business.

“The instant decisions executives make under pressure reveal the most about personal and corporate character,” Bowden McCoy writes in “The Parable of the Sadhu,” which was first published by the Harvard Business Review.

In an accompanying article, Ethics founder Michael Josephson discusses the complex forces that determine how those decisions are made in corporate America. The aphorism “Good ethics are good business,” is too simplistic, he asserts. So is Milton Friedman’s dictum that “the only obligation of a business is to make a profit.”

Swirling about in the abstract cloud of discussion concerning a corporate credo, however, are hard hailstones of ethical choice, for the employee who considers cheating on his expense account; for the manager who would deceive employees to increase production, and for the CEO who hedges in revealing the full environmental effects of his company’s processes.

Josephson concludes that from the top to bottom rung of the corporate ladder, bad ethical choices are made for the same reasons: A compulsion to win, fear, and low self-esteem. But he is not just bashing business. Members of the business community are “no better nor worse,” he writes, “than lawyers, journalists, politicians, or soldiers who, when the chips are down, conclude that their occupational goals are so important that the ends justify the means.”