August 16, 1954: "Sports Illustrated" Debuts

August 16, 1954: Sports Illustrated debuts, produced by Time, Inc. The 1st cover of the weekly magazine shows a scene from a baseball game at Milwaukee County Stadium: Eddie Matthews of the host Milwaukee Braves is swinging his bat, in front of New York Giants catcher Wes Westrum. Behind Westrum is umpire Augie Donatelli.

It wasn't the 1st magazine with the name. In 1936, Stuart Scheffel created Sports Illustrated as a monthly magazine, with golf, tennis and skiing as its main focus. It failed after 2 years, and Scheffel sold the rights to the name to Dell Publications. (Aside from the name, that company has no connection to electronics company Dell Technologies.) 

In 1949, Dell released a monthly magazine with the name, and that lasted just 6 issues, despite expanding its coverage to boxing and the major team sports. But it couldn't compete against Sport, the monthly that was the biggest sports magazine since its founding in 1946.

At the time, there were 2 problems with producing a sports magazine. It would cost too much to do so more regularly than monthly. This led to the 2nd problem: Timeliness. For example: Suppose you were running a publishing house in the Summer of 1951, and you wanted to launch a sports magazine. You decide that your 1st issue will be a preview of that year's World Series. You see the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers leading their respective Leagues. So you conclude that the Series will be between those 2 teams.

And your premiere issue comes out at the end of September. By that point, the Dodgers have blown their big lead, to the New York Giants. On October 3, "The Giants win the Pennant!" And you look like a fool. No one wants to buy your magazine. And you're out of business before you can publish an issue previewing the 1951 NFL Championship Game and the New Year's Day 1952 college football bowl games.

For this reason, the biggest sports-themed magazines of the era were the baseball preview issues published by Baseball Digest and Street & Smith. They would make predictions for the season to come, but it was a lot easier to overcome ridicule for making a bad prediction for October in March than it would be in September.

By this time, the post-World War II economic boom was in full swing, so more people were in a position to buy magazines. And to buy the television sets on which to watch sporting events. And to buy tickets to watch the events live. The market for a weekly sports magazine, which could keep up with events as they were happening, was there -- for a publishing house that could afford to produce it.

Henry Robinson Luce could afford it: He ran Time, Inc., and had already succeeded with the newsmagazine Time (a weekly founded in 1923), the photo-based newsmagazine Life (a weekly founded in 1936), and the business-themed magazine Fortune (a monthly founded in 1929). And in 1953, he thought the time was right to try a weekly that would be, essentially, Time, but focused on sports. When the owners of Sport weren't willing to sell their magazine, or the rights to their magazine's name, at any price, Luce bought the rights to the name Sports Illustrated.

But Luce's background worked against the magazine: A graduate of Yale University, his friends were mainly the very rich, like himself. Their pastimes included golf, tennis, sailing, hunting, fishing, and the card game of contract bridge. Now, I am of the firm belief that golf is not a sport. Tennis is. Competitive sailing, I suppose, qualifies. But fishing is not a sport. Nor is hunting: As has been pointed out many times, including by Rick Reilly in SI in the 1980s, it's not a "sport" if "the other team" doesn't even know there's a competition.

Bridge? That's not a sport. It's a game -- one I have never played, and I don't know the rules -- and not athletic in the slightest. And yet, Luce published articles about the game in Sports Illustrated. Twice, he put Charles Goren, both the leading bridge player and the leading writer about the game in his generation, on the SI cover, and frequently printed Goren's articles. I have frequently lamented ESPN's televising of competitive poker, because it's a card game and not a sport. Well, Luce publishing Goren's bridge articles was the 1950s' equivalent.

(For those of you who do enjoy playing bridge: I'm not saying it's a bad game, or that it's not worth your time. And I'm certainly not casting aspersions on Goren. I'm saying that the game shouldn't be discussed in a magazine about sports, except maybe as an aside in an article about a real athlete. For example: If Heavyweight Champion Rocky Marciano enjoyed playing bridge -- and I don't know if he enjoyed any card games -- that might be worth mentioning in an SI article about him, along with his preferences in food, music and TV shows.)

Just as Time had been producing a Man of the Year issue since 1927, SI issued an end-of-the-year Sportsman of the Year issue. The 1st honoree was Roger Bannister, the British medical student who, a few weeks before the 1st issue, had become the 1st person to run a mile race in less than 4 minutes; then, a few weeks later, having his record beaten by the Australian runner John Landy, beat Landy in a much-publicized race at the British Empire Games in Vancouver.

Now known as "Sportsperson of the Year," the title has occasionally been awarded to multiple individuals, and sometimes even to entire teams. It's gone to performers in the various sports this many times: Baseball 18, football 17, basketball 17, track and field 8, golf 7, tennis 5, hockey 4, boxing 3; 2 each in soccer, cycling and speed skating; and 1 each in auto racing, horse racing (to a jockey, not a horse), gymnastics and swimming.

The 1st black recipient was decathlete Rafer Johnson in 1958, while Kip Keino, awarded in 1987 for his charitable efforts even though his Olympic running achievements were in 1968 and 1972, was the 1st African native to receive the award. The 1st Hispanic recipient was golfer Lee Trevino in 1971, while Sammy Sosa receiving a co-award with Mark McGwire in 1998 made him the 1st Latin American native to get it.

The 1st female recipient was Billie Jean King in 1972, sharing it (the first time it was split) with UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. The 1st female sole recipient was also a tennis player, Chris Evert in 1976. Billie Jean was still in the closet at the time, so the 1st openly gay recipient was Megan Rapinoe in 2019. Tiger Woods, whose mother was from Thailand, was the 1st recipient of Asian descent, in 1996. South Korean native Byun-Hyun Kim, as part of the collective award to the 2004 Boston Red Sox, was the 1st recipient from an Asian country.

It's been awarded to 5 Canadians (hockey players Bobby Orr, Wayne Gretzky and Bob Bourne; football player Laurent Duvernay-Tardif, and basketball player Chris Boucher as part of the collective award to the 2018 Golden State Warriors), an Englishman (Bannister), a Scotsman (auto racer Jackie Stewart), a Swede (boxer Ingemar Johansson), a Kenyan (Keino), a Norwegian (speed skater Johan Olav Koss), a Dominican (baseball players Sosa, and 2004 Red Sox David Ortiz, Manny Ramírez, Pedro Martínez, Sandy Martínez, Anastacio Martínez and Pedro Astacio -- none of those Martínezes is related to any of the others), a Puerto Rican (César Crespo with the 2004 Red Sox), a Colombian (Orlando Cabrera with the 2004 Red Sox), a Panamanian (Ramiro Mendoza with the 2004 Red Sox), a Korean (Kim), a Venezuelan (baseball player José Altuve), a Georgian (Zaza Pachulia of the 2018 Warriors) and a Japanese (tennis player Naomi Osaka).

Until Woods in 2000, no one had received the award more than once. Basketball player LeBron James has gotten it 3 times, while Woods and football player Tom Brady have gotten it twice. Of course, Brady, Sosa, Altuve, and, collectively, the 2004 Red Sox have since been exposed as blatant and unrepentant cheaters.

Sometimes, the award is controversial, and more of a "lifetime achievement award" than an award for that specific year. Such examples include baseball player Stan Musial in 1957, basketball coaches John Wooden in 1972 and Dean Smith in 1997, golfer Jack Nicklaus in 1978, football coaches Joe Paterno in 1986 and Don Shula in 1993, tennis player Arthur Ashe in 1992, and football player Brett Favre in 2007. While Ashe was dying of AIDS after a lifetime of activism, each of these honorees could legitimately have been said to have had better years than the ones in which they were honored (although Wooden did win a National Championship in the year in question, and Paterno was about to finish off such a season).

In 1960, André Laguerre became managing editor of SI. The magazine had never turned a profit, but Luce could afford to not care about that. Laguerre made it turn a profit by 1964, with the maxim, "It doesn't matter what you write about. All that matters is how well you write."

It was under Laugerre that SI began to resemble the magazine we know today. He phased out the rich man's "sportsman" articles, and focused on the sports that middle-class Americans were interested in: Boxing, horse racing, and the major team sports. The magazine became known for its season preview issues and its Olympic coverage.

And, starting in 1964, for Laugerre's creation, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. It usually comes out in February, possibly a reference to Paul Gallico, who, when asked in 1937 why he gave up sportswriting, said, "February." In other words, when it was too cold in most of the country for outdoor sports like baseball, football, track and field, golf, tennis and horse racing. Indoor sports like basketball and hockey had yet to become big business; while Americans couldn't have cared less about soccer, played around the world in the Winter, no matter how cold it got.

Aside from the Swimsuit Issue, if there's one thing people know about the magazine, it's "The Dreaded SI Cover Jinx." It began almost immediately: Matthews soon suffered a broken hand, although he only missed 7 games. But on January 30, 1955, skier Jill Kinmont suffered a crash that left her paralyzed. The SI issue with her on the cover, already in stores and mailed to subscribers, was dated the very next day. 

On February 13, 1961, 16-year-old Laurence Owen was on the cover, for a preview of the World Figure Skating Championships. Two days later, along with the entire U.S. team, she was killed in a plane crash on the way to the event. Other cover subjects included skiers and auto racers who ended up killed in competitions; and race horse breeder Prince Aly Khan, and golfer Tony Lema, all by 1966.

The most memorable non-fatal example came in the issue dated November 18, 1957. It featured the University of Oklahoma football team, riding a 47-game winning streak, still a college football record. The cover headline was, "Why Oklahoma is Unbeatable." The 2-time defending National Champions were upset by Notre Dame on November 16.

For the 1987 Baseball Preview Issue, SI put Cleveland Indians sluggers Joe Carter and Cory Snyder on the cover, under the headline "INDIAN UPRISING," adding, "Believe it! Cleveland is the best team in the American League." This soon turned out to be, spectacularly, not the case, and manager Pat Corrales answered a question about the Jinx, saying, "Sports Illustrated isn't getting my hitters out. Sports Illustrated isn't hitting my pitchers." He was soon fired.

But the jinx doesn't affect most honorees. For many years, boxer Muhammad Ali held the record for most appearances on the cover, and he is generally regarded as what he called himself: "The Greatest of All Time!" He has now appeared 40 times. But Michael Jordan, usually (if inaccurately) called the greatest basketball player ever, now holds the record, with 50 SI covers. Among active athletes, LeBron leads with 25. Most appearances by team? The Los Angeles Lakers have had 67, just ahead of the New York Yankees with 65.

*

August 16, 1954, like all dates on SI covers, was a Monday. There was only one score on this historic day: The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 9-6 at Ebbets Field. Even this game wasn't supposed to be played on this day: It was the rescheduling of a rainout on May 25.

For the Phils: Catcher Forrest "Smoky" Burgess went 4-for-5 with an RBI, and shortstop Bobby Morgan, a Dodger until that year, went 3-for-5 with 2 RBIs. Hall of Fame center fielder Richie Ashburn went 0-for-3, but did draw 2 walks. Robin Roberts went the distance, moving to 19-10 on a season that would see him finish 23-15.

For Dem Bums: Bob Darnell started, Clem Labine ended up as the losing pitcher, and both Elwin "Preacher" Roe and Don Newcombe came out of the bullpen. Pee Wee Reese and Gil Hodges hit home runs, Duke Snider went 2-for-4 with 2 RBIs, and Jackie Robinson went 0-for-3 with a walk.

Also on this day, film director James Cameron was born.

August 10, 1963: George Plimpton, Paper Lion

August 10, 1963: The Detroit Lions run a practice session at their preseason training camp, in the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, Michigan. George Plimpton runs a series at quarterback. It doesn't go well. But it forms the basis of one of the most famous books ever written about football: Paper Lion.

George Ames Plimpton was born on March 18, 1927 in Manhattan, and grew up a rich kid on the Upper East Side, the son of a diplomat, with several prominent ancestors, including Mayflower passengers on both sides. On his mother's side, these ancestors included Benjamin Franklin Butler and Adelbert Ames, both Union Generals of the American Civil War who became Governors of Massachusetts.

It explained why, to the end of his life, despite living most of his life in Manhattan, Plimpton maintained an upper-crust New England accent. His son, Taylor, described it as a mixture of "old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King's College King's English."

Despite this background -- or, perhaps, leaning into his General ancestry, because of it -- he served in the U.S. Army between World War II and the Korean War, as a tank driver. He graduated from Harvard University, having written for the Harvard Lampoon, and from King's College at Cambridge University in England.

Interviewed for Ken Burns' 1994 Baseball miniseries, he said he was at Cambridge, playing chess and listening to Armed Forces Radio to hear the 1951 National League Playoff between his beloved New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, and when Bobby Thomson hit the Pennant-winning home run, he was so thrilled that he pounded his fist on the board, and sent the chess pieces flying. His English opponent didn't understand. He also described his feeling of the 1957 move of the Giants to San Francisco, and the accompanying move of the Dodgers to Los Angeles, as "a deep, deep sadness."

In 1952, Plimpton was hired to write for, and edit, The Paris Review, a quarterly English-language magazine that promoted several American writers. Its poetry editor was Donald Hall, a prep-school classmate of Plimpton's, who would also be interviewed by Burns for Baseball.

In 1960, Plimpton, who loved sports but had never been an athlete, arranged to pitch to a lineup of professional baseball players in a preseason (but All-Star) exhibition at Yankee Stadium, presumably to answer the question, "How would the average man off of the street fare in an attempt to compete with the stars of professional sports?" He tired easily, and had to be relieved. In 1961, he got into the ring with Light Heavyweight Champion Archie Moore. This turned out to be a painful mistake. He chronicled these experiences in his book, Out of My League.

In 1958, Plimpton had interviewed Ernest Hemingway for The Paris Review. In one of the last of his writings published before his death, Hemingway -- himself a boxing fan who had tried sparring with professionals, with similar results -- wrote for The Paris Review that Out of My League was "beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, his account of a self-imposed ordeal that has the chilling quality of a true nightmare... It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty," the daydreaming character created by James Thurber, and played by Danny Kaye in the 1947 film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

To write Paper Lion, Plimpton repeated the experiment in the National Football League in 1963, joining the training camp of the Detroit Lions, on the premise of trying out to be the team's third-string quarterback. He was 36 years old, on the old side for a professional football player, and he showed how unlikely it would be for an "average" person to succeed as one, at any age. The book is an expanded version of Plimpton's two-part series which appeared in back-to-back issues of Sports Illustrated magazine in September 1964.

Plimpton had contacted several teams about his idea, including his hometown New York Giants and New York Jets, and the Baltimore Colts. The Lions finally agreed to host Plimpton in their training camp.

The coaches were aware of the experiment -- it has been unfairly called a "deception" and a "publicity stunt" -- but the players, most of whom hadn't heard of Plimpton, were not, until it became apparent that Plimpton did not know how to receive the snap from center. Despite his struggles, Plimpton convinced head coach George Wilson to let him take the first five snaps of the annual intra-squad scrimmage. Plimpton managed to lose yardage on each play.

Feeling confident he could do better, Plimpton hung around training camp one more week as the team prepared for its first pre-season game against the Cleveland Browns, being sure that, if the Lions had a big enough lead near the end of the game, Wilson would let him play. However, team officials informed Plimpton at halftime that NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, an erudite man who had heard of him, would not allow him to play under any circumstance. The next day Plimpton packed up and ended his experiment.

With Earl Morrall as the starting quarterback, Milt Plum as the backup, and Sonny Gibbs as a 3rd-stringer who did not appear in an NFL game until the next season, the Lions went 5-8-1 in the 1963 season, after having gone 11-3 the year before. No one blamed Plimpton, although they were hurt by the absence of Alex Karras, their great defensive tackle who had been suspended for the season for gambling offenses. (Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers was also suspended for the season. Both men cooperated fully with Rozelle, and were reinstated for the next season.) In 1964, with Karras reinstated, they went 7-5-2.

Paper Lion was made into a film in 1968, with a pre-M*A*S*H Alan Alda playing Plimpton. That year, Plimpton campaigned with his Harvard classmate Robert F. Kennedy, and was there at the assassination in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Along with Olympic decathlon Gold Medalist Rafer Johnson and football star Rosey Grier, Plimpton wrestled the accused assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, to the floor so that he could be arrested. That time, nobody minded Plimpton joining actual athletes in action.

Plimpton revisited pro football in 1971, this time joining the Colts, defending Super Bowl Champions, and actually seeing action in an exhibition game against his previous team, the Lions. These experiences served as the basis of Mad Ducks and Bears (1973), although much of the book dealt with the off-field escapades and observations of football friends Karras (nicknamed "Mad Duck") and John Gordy ("Bear").

Plimpton's The Bogey Man (1968) chronicles his attempt to play professional golf on the PGA Tour. Among other challenges for Sports Illustrated, he attempted to play top-level bridge (a safe, if frustrating, pastime), and spent some time as a high-wire circus performer (less safe).

Some of these events, such as his stint with the Colts, and an attempt at stand-up comedy, were presented as TV specials on ABC. His 1985 book Open Net saw him train as a goalie with the Boston Bruins -- wearing uniform Number 00, as opposed to the single zero he wore with the Lions and the Colts -- and even playing part of an NHL preseason game.

He went on to write serious books about Hank Aaron's chase of the career home run record, a history of fireworks, and a biography of writer Truman Capote.

In the early 1980s, he did commercials for Mattel's Intellivision video game system. In 1985, he returned to Sports Illustrated to write an article titled The Curious Case of Sidd Finch, about a Buddhist monk from England who could supposedly throw a baseball 168 miles per hour, and was trying out with the New York Mets. It was an April Fool's gag, later expanded into a novel that showed what might have happened if it had been real.

On a 1997 episode of the NBC sitcom Suddenly Susan, Plimpton appeared as one of the poker buddies of magazine publisher Jack Richmond, played by Judd Nelson. The other "poker buddies" -- like Plimpton, playing caricatures of themselves were tennis star John McEnroe, actor Mr. T, Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco (where the series took place), and Donald Trump. Somehow, as the caricature of himself, Plimpton managed to be more annoying than any of the others. Yes, even more annoying than Judd Nelson. That same year, he began playing John Truman Carter Sr., grandfather of the surgeon played by Noah Wyle, on ER.

His first wife, whom he married in 1968 and divorced in 1988, was Freddy Medora Espy, a photographer's assistant. They had two children: Medora Ames Plimpton and Taylor Ames Plimpton, who has published a memoir entitled Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark. In 1992, Plimpton married Sarah Whitehead Dudley, a freelance writer.Plimpton and Dudley were the parents of twin daughters Laura Dudley Plimpton and Olivia Hartley Plimpton.

Plimpton once wrote, "The smaller the ball, the better the writing about the sport. There are many excellent books about golf, some very good books about baseball, not many good books about football, and hardly any good books about basketball. There are no books about beach balls."

He was wrong. Reading about golf is almost as boring as watching it. And there have been plenty of good books about football -- including Paper Lion -- and basketball.

Another sportswriter, Roy Blount Jr., who wrote a very good book about football (About Three Bricks Shy of a Load, about him covering the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 1973 season), once, however unwittingly, expanded on Plimpton's size-of-the-ball judging of writing about a sport, when he remarked that there were no good novels about bowling. He received several recommendations, and admitted that some of them were good.

George Plimpton died on September 25, 2003, of a heart attack at his Manhattan apartment, at the age of 76.

*

August 10, 1963 was a Saturday. British-American political scientist Andrew Sullivan was born. Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, the 1956 Democratic nominee for Vice President, died. This was also the day that Stevie Wonder hit Number 1 on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 chart with "Fingertips -- Part 2," making him, at 13, the youngest performer ever to top that chart. I have a separate entry for that event.

Football, as I said, was in preseason. The NBA and the NHL were in their off-seasons. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the Los Angeles Angels, 2-1 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where the Angels were groundsharing with the Dodgers while waiting for their stadium in Anaheim to be built. Whitey Ford outpitched Dean Chance. Bobby Richardson drove in the Yankee runs with a single in the top of the 9th inning. Mickey Mantle appeared as a pinch-hitter, and drew a walk.

* The New York Mets lost to the Chicago Cubs, 4-0 at the Polo Grounds. Larry Jackson pitched a 7-hit shutout. Ron Hunt got 3 of those hits. Ernie Banks did not play for the Cubs, but Ellis Burton hit a home run for them.

* The San Francisco Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 7-6 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia. Willie Mays went 2-for-5. Harvey Kuenn, Orlando Cepeda and Felipe Alou each got 3 hits. 

* The Washington Senators beat the Baltimore Orioles, 6-5 at District of Columbia Stadium (later renamed Robert F. Kennedy Stadium) in Washington. Brooks Robinson appeared as a pinch-hitter, and did not reach base. Despite being so close, and in the same League, neither the Senators nor the Orioles ever considered the other a rival, although they might have if there had ever been a serious Pennant race between them.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Houston Colt .45's, 3-2 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Roberto Clemente went 1-for-4 with an RBI. The Colts became the Houston Astros in 1965.

* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Cleveland Indians, 6-3 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds, 10-3 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Don Drysdale went the distance for the win, striking out 13 and walking none. Frank Robinson went 1-for-4. Pete Rose, soon to be named National League Rookie of the Year, went 2-for-4.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-1 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Al Kaline went 2-for-4 with an RBI.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Milwaukee Braves, 6-5 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Stan Musial, in his last season as a player, had an RBI on a pinch-hit single. Hank Aaron went 3-for-5 with 2 RBIs.

* And the Minnesota Twins beat the Boston Red Sox, 5-3 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Harmon Killebrew went 0-for-3, but had an RBI on a sacrifice fly. For the Red Sox, Dick Stuart hit 2 home runs, and even played errorless ball at 1st base; but Carl Yastrzemski went 0-for-4.

March 29, 1985: The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

March 29, 1985: A new issue of Sports Illustrated hits the newsstands. The cover is about the NCAA Final Four, which featured Louisiana State of the Southeastern Conference, and 3 teams from the Big East Conference: Georgetown, St. John's, and Villanova. Three days later, Villanova would beat Georgetown in the Final, one of the all-time greatest sports upsets.

But an even more improbable occurrence was in that issue of SI. George Plimpton, who had written so well about so many subjects, especially sports, wrote an article about a pitcher whose scouting report was shown in a photograph, and concluded with the words: "Could be the phenom of all time. Very hard to figure."

The article was titled "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch." The teaser sentence for the article said, "He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga -- and his future in baseball."

The player in question was born Hayden Siddhartha Finch -- "Siddhartha" in honor of Siddhartha Gautama, the ancient Indian philosopher known as Buddha -- in England. He grew up in an orphanage there, attended Harvard University, and went to Tibet to, essentially, live up to his name. He had learned what he called "yogic mastery of mind-body," and said, "I have mastered the art of the pitch."

He showed up at the Spring Training camp of the New York Mets, then in St. Petersburg, Florida. He demonstrated his pitching, oddly dressed. Or, rather, oddly shod: His left foot, he kept bare; on his right foot, he wore a hiking boot, for balance, he said. And he wore his cap backwards, this being before it became a part of hip-hop style.

And he threw a ball faster than anyone had ever seen before. He was brought into Mets camp. Not wanting to risk All-Star catcher Gary Carter in case the experiment went haywire, pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre, a former All-Star pitcher for the New York Yankees, had backup catcher Ronn Reynolds catch him. A radar gun was set up to see just how fast Finch could throw. Reynolds yelped in pain on the very first pitch, his catcher's mitt offering little protection. He said, "Don't tell me, Mel. I don't want to know."

Mets brass wanted to know. The radar gun read 168. Sidd Finch had thrown a baseball at one hundred and sixty-eight miles per hour. At the time, the record was 101. (The measurement is different now, and it is widely believed that 101 on the old scale would be 107 on the current one.)

Finch kept mainly to himself, reading philosophy, and playing the French horn. The article made no mention of family, other than an adoptive father who was dead. No mention was made of a wife or girlfriend, or even of Finch's age.

Finch was given uniform Number 21, most familiar to Met fans as being that of 1969 "Miracle" season outfielder Cleon Jones, although worn by Hall of Fame pitchers Warren Spahn and Bob Lemon, and the previous season's American League Rookie of the Year, Roger Clemens. Could Finch be the 1985 National League Rookie of the Year, succeeding his new Met teammate, Dwight Gooden?

For one brief, shining moment, Met fans had reason to believe they had a pitcher better than Gooden, better than Tom Seaver, better than any the Yankees they hated so much had ever had. They had reason to believe that, having gotten into their 1st Pennant race in 11 years the season before, Finch was going to help them go all the way in 1985.

The article began with the words, "The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement."  

As it turned out, the statement the team issued, which SI covered in its next issue, was that Finch had lost his control due to the media pressure, and thus his great speed became a liability -- not just to the counting of balls and strikes, but to the lives of anyone his pitches might hit. The team said he was quitting baseball so he didn't hurt anyone.

It may have been that Major League Baseball uniform requirements meant that he had to abandon his choice (and his non-choice) of footwear, and wear standard baseball socks and cleats, and that this threw him off, rendering his great speed a danger to all and sundry. Finch said he had to quit, and would go off to play his horn.

The date on the cover for the original story was April 1, 1985. Some of us suspected that it was too good to be true, and considered the date to be a hint that some flim-flammery was going on. Some people figured out that the first letter of each word of the teaser sentence spelled out, "HAPPY APRIL FOOLS DAY -- AH, FIB."

It would one more issue before SI fessed up. The man playing Finch was Joe Berton, a junior high school art teacher in the suburbs of Chicago -- and a fan of the Chicago Cubs, who had beaten the Mets out for the NL Eastern Division title the year before. He was a friend of SI photographer Lane Stewart, who recruited him for the article.

In 1987, Plimpton expanded the article into a novel, giving Finch a girlfriend who talks him into coming back. In his 1st game, he throws 81 pitches, all strikes, for 27 outs and a perfect game. But in his 2nd game, his control starts to give, and, concerned for the safety of all, he has to give it up once again.

George Plimpton

Plimpton died in 2003. In 2015, appropriately enough on the 30th Anniversary of the hoax, ESPN aired a 30 for 30 documentary on Finch, as if the story were real. (They've also done this for the movies Rocky IV and the 1994 version of Angels in the Outfield.) That same year, the Brooklyn Cyclones, a Mets farm team, held a Sidd Finch Bobblehead Doll Night, and invited Berton, who signed autographs, under both his real name and his nom de base.

*

March 29, 1985 was a Friday. As I said, baseball was in Spring Training. The NFL was in its off-season. But there was a game that night in the USFL: The Tampa Bay Bandits beat the Memphis Showboats, 28-20 at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis.

There were 6 games played in the NBA:

* The New Jersey Nets lost to the Washington Bullets, 122-98 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 112-108 at the Boston Garden.

* The Houston Rockets beat the Golden State Warriors, 121-116 at The Summit in Houston. (The arena has since been converted into the Central Campus of the Lakewood Church, Dr. Joel Osteen's "megachurch.")

* The Utah Jazz beat the San Antonio Spurs, 114-109 at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. Despite the Spurs' defeat, Mike Mitchell scored 38 points for him, leading all NBA scorers on the night.

* The Los Angeles Lakers beat the Dallas Mavericks, 120-115 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California.

* And the Portland Trail Blazers beat their arch-rivals, the Seattle SuperSonics, 125-99 at the Seattle Center Coliseum.

There were 3 games played in the NHL:

* The Hartford Whalers beat the Edmonton Oilers, 8-7 at the Hartford Civic Center. (It's now named the PeoplesBank Arena). Ray Ferraro scored a hat trick for the Whalers.

* The Chicago Black Hawks and the Winnipeg Jets played to a tie, 5-5 at the Winnipeg Arena.

* And the Calgary Flames beat the Los Angeles Kings, 3-0 at the Saddledome in Calgary.

February 15, 1961: The U.S. Figure Skating Team Crash

Laurence Owen

February 15, 1961: Sabena Flight 548 crashes near Brussels, Belgium, killing 73, including the entire United States figure skating team and several coaches. This includes 16-year-old Laurence Owen, who had just won the U.S. women's singles championship, and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, dated just 2 days earlier. Her mother and her sister also died in the crash. This was one of the earliest and scariest examples of "The Dreaded SI Cover Jinx."

Later in the year, ABC would begin airing its sports anthology program Wide World of Sports. Throughout its 37-year run, it frequently covered figure skating. But there would be little American presence at major events like the World Championships and the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.

It would take a long time for American skating to recover. Peggy Fleming’s Gold Medal at the 1968 Winter Olympics, in Grenoble, France, inspired Dorothy Hamill. But it was Hamill’s Gold Medal, in Innsbruck in 1976, that really got things going again.

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February 15, 1961 was a Wednesday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were 2 games in the NBA. The St. Louis Hawks beat the Philadelphia Warriors, 135-98 at the Philadelphia Arena. Wilt Chamberlain led all scorers with 28 for the Warriors, but it was far from enough. And the New York Knicks beat the Syracuse Nationals, 129-127 in overtime at the old Madison Square Garden.

And there were 2 games played in the NHL. The New York Rangers lost to the Chicago Black Hawks, 5-2 at the Chicago Stadium. And the Montreal Canadiens beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-1 at Maple Leaf Garden in Toronto. The Boston Bruins and the Detroit Red Wings were not scheduled.