A consumer’s guide to the best and...

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: Sports Illustrated Women/Sport magazine.

Price: $2.95.

Atop the editor’s page in the debut issue of Sports Illustrated Women/Sport are miniature reproductions of six old SI covers that featured famous female faces and bodies, not one of them clad in a thong bikini.

My wife looked at the small cover shots of Carol Heiss, Donna de Varona, Robyn Smith, Mary Decker, Chris Evert and the 1996 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team and joked, “So, these are all the women athletes who ever made the cover of Sports Illustrated.”

Not quite, but close enough to understand the raison d’etre for SI Women/Sport.

Sports Illustrated’s inability or refusal to devote more than cursory coverage to women’s athletics made a spinoff like Women/Sport inevitable, and necessary.

The first issue includes an examination of volleyball coach Rick Butler, accused by several former players of sexual abuse; a first-person essay by softball star Dot Richardson on the homophobia surrounding her sport; a look at the increasingly male-only domain of jockeys; author Anna Quindlen on the joys of weightlifting; and a moving profile on Rutgers women’s basketball Coach Vivian Stringer, whose family has been stricken by death and illness.

Here, and only here, will you find a photo of a pregnant basketball player--Sheryl Swoopes--gracing the cover of a national sports publication, or Oscar De La Hoya being asked which female athlete he’d most like to be. Oscar opted for Gabrielle Reece because “She’s good-looking, physically fit, strong-minded and understands competition. She could take my place and I could take hers.”