If His Magazine Can’t Illustrate It, He Won’t Cover It

This week’s Sports Illustrated was supposed to have a hockey cover.

Don’t look for it. It was yanked. It seems there’s an SI-NHL feud.

The Detroit Red Wings pulled the plug on an SI photographer at a recent game and an angry Mark Mulvoy, the magazine’s managing editor, killed both the cover and the story.

The beef started when Red Wing management shut off the power to the photographers’ station, according to the magazine, meaning cameramen couldn’t use strobe lights.

The magazine had planned a hockey cover for the Stanley Cup playoffs. A profile was written on the Red Wings’ Paul Coffey and a photographer was dispatched to shoot Sunday’s Detroit-Dallas game.

“During the national anthem, someone connected with (Red Wing owner) Mike Ilitch pulled the plug on us,” Mulvoy said. “They also pulled three other strobes as well.”

That meant SI had no fresh pictures and with no pictures, Mulvoy said, there would be no cover and no story.

“We’ve pulled the story,” he said. “Without pictures, you can’t run it. This is the era of color and you can’t use 3-year-old pictures.”

Mulvoy said he contacted NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.

“He’s as mad as I am,” he said.

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Trivia time: What jockey finished third, first, first and second in consecutive Kentucky Derbies?

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And for his next trick . . .: When it comes to water-skiing, as it always does with barefoot skier Banana George Blair, there’s hardly anything he hasn’t done, reports Ross Atkin in the Christian Science Monitor.

“(Blair) has skied behind an airboat in alligator-dotted Florida waters. He has kite-skied, and dropped like a rock when the tow boat ran out of gas. He has skied barefoot in the debris-strewn Seine in Paris and in the icy waters of Antarctica, where in 1986 he became the only person to barefoot-ski on every continent.

“And he has performed countless times in Florida’s Cypress Gardens water-ski shows, which are practically down the street from his Winter Haven home.

“ ‘I’ve never skied in the Arctic,’ he says. ‘I came close once, doing 28 shows in Norway and Sweden. We were scheduled to do a show in the Arctic Circle, but for one reason or another it got canceled.’ ”

Blair is the major stockholder and executive of a New Jersey bank, but remains most active in his avocation. Not surprising, perhaps, until you learn that he’s in his 80s.

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Take that! Steve Jacobson of Newsday suggests baseball fans show their contempt for the player strike by not buying officially licensed T-shirts or caps for a month--and by bringing their own food to the games.

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Otherwise, good job: In a recent analysis of the Kentucky Derby, Washington Post writer Andrew Beyer was praising some of the jockeys in the recent race, until he got to Julie Krone’s ride.

Beyer: “The exception to these excellent efforts was Krone, whose exhibition on Suave Prospect was a professional disgrace.

“After finding herself in perfect position near the rail on the backstretch, she needlessly bailed out and steered her mount nine-wide--well out of harm’s way.

“Having suffered several injuries in spills, she has become cautious and tentative in her day-to-day riding, but it was a shock to see her ride so pitifully in a race of this magnitude.”

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Trivia answer: James Winkfield, 1900-03. He’s also the last black jockey to have won the Derby.

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Quotebook: Former Yankee announcer Mel Allen, talking about both his Alabama law school days and his fondness for an occasional cocktail: “I really did pass the bar. And, as some would say, I haven’t passed one since.”