Their Care Illustrates Excellence

You probably never heard of Sidney L. James. But you’ve heard of Sports Illustrated, right? Well, there would be no Sports Illustrated if it hadn’t been for Sidney L. James. Trust me. I was there.

You’ve noticed, if you’ve been paying attention, that the magazine is celebrating its 40th anniversary this month.

Nope. It is the 41st. Like I say, I was there.

The magazine, quite properly, computes its age from the time it was born, Aug. 16, 1954.

I prefer to date it from its period of gestation, the summer of 1953.

You see, before there could be a Volume 1, No. 1 on the newsstands, there had to be earlier issues, what the trade calls advertising dummies. Now, an advertising dummy is not a clumsy copywriter, it is a full-blown pre-publication sample issue of the magazine gotten up for distribution to Madison Avenue and its equivalent advertising citadels in Detroit, Chicago and L.A.

It’s hard to believe now that such a good idea would have been such a hard sell. Most of the naysayers were in our own company. The executive suites were so sure Henry Luce’s newest brainstorm would die in its crib they began laying off other company entertainment expenses on it. They would at least get tax breaks from its demise.

But we were not only bracketed by friendly fire. The New York sporting press snickered openly. Madison Avenue was skeptical. Rival magazines hooted.

They reckoned without Sid James. Sid did not deal in discouragement. They told him one reason the sports magazine would not succeed was because none ever had. Sid pointed out that when Luce started Time magazine in 1920, no news magazine had ever been successful. When he started Fortune magazine in 1930, no business magazine had either. And when he started Life in 1936, the most successful journalistic venture of all time, no pictorial magazine ever had sold.

James midwifed his magazine through such journalistic shot and shell, it’s a wonder it ever got out of the hangar. You were afraid to go to lunch that summer for fear someone would hoot at you to stop wasting Luce’s money.

James never let a discouraging word or a negative thought creep into the procedure. He was the most indefatigably optimistic editor I’ve ever met. Whenever one of us would show up for work that fateful summer of ‘53, shaken and uncertain, reeling from overnight votes of no confidence from our own colleagues, James would remind us that they called the invention of the steamboat “Fulton’s Folly.”

You never paid attention to what they say, James would remind us. “If you listened to what they have to say, we wouldn’t have the wheel yet.”

I still remember the day all those years ago when James walked into the 16th-floor office in Radio City to take over the new magazine.

“Do you believe in this magazine?” he asked, pointing at each of us.

If I had said “No” that day, you would not be reading this. I would not have been a sportswriter.

James has written his life story, a book called “Press Pass,” which is a detailed account of his extraordinary career at Time-Life. It is a panorama of American history in the 20th Century, an insider’s look at many of the events that shaped our world. Toynbee couldn’t have limned it better.

One of the things James recognized early on was the explosion that would take place in sports. Life magazine had been killed by television. Still pictures could not compete with moving pictures. But Sid positioned SI into a symbiotic relationship with TV.

“The Sports Revolution has probably created more millionaires in 10 years then the Industrial Revolution had in 50,” James writes. “Big business clamored to get into the act. Banks, life insurance companies, auto manufacturers, investment houses and even biscuit makers spent millions to buy golf and tennis tournaments to immortalize their names and attract new businesses. The day was finally gone when an advertising prospect had to be convinced with hard talk that ‘selling with sport’ (one of Sports Illustrated’s earliest sales ad slogans) made sense.”

The fact that Sports Illustrated is celebrating a 40th (or 41st) anniversary is a tribute to my old editor, who is 88 going on 50.

On a melancholy note, the 40th anniversary issue published last week reproduced the cover that was on its original issue. Ironically, it was a photo taken by Mark Kauffman, who died the very week it was reissued.

Kauffman was one of the original 16th-floor corps who was there the day James arrived to take over. In fact, that very night, Kauffman and I, with James’ blessing, went out on assignment to find a cover for the next dummy. I had a notion that photographing a night game in Yankee Stadium would be a dramatic and exciting cover subject.

I remember that to get the proper photographic angle Kauffman wanted, he decided to film from a 12th-story window of a neighboring apartment house. The gentlest of giants, Kauffman, astoundingly, was able to persuade a family to allow him to point his camera from the window of a child’s bedroom, where he photographed the crowd smoke curling up through the filigree of Yankee Stadium’s third deck.

Kauffman sent the family two dozen roses the next day--and he got a Life magazine cover photograph of Casey Stengel while he was at it.

I’m glad SI made it to 40. I simply hope it remembers two of the guys without whom it might not have made it to 1--Sidney L. James and Mark Kauffman.