George Gervin

Gervin was inducted to the Basketball Hall of Fame, had his #44 jersey retired by the Spurs and was named to the NBA's fifty greatest players list. Sports Illustrated has helped launched a number of related publishing ventures, including:. His trademark was the finger roll, a technique consisting in shooting his layups by rolling the basketball along his fingertips. While the list of "examples" of the jinx is extensive, an individual record 49 cover appearances by Michael Jordan and team record 61 covers by the New York Yankees have not hindered their success. Although Thompson came up with a memorable performance for the last game of the regular season, scoring 73 points, Gervin maintained his slight lead by dropping 63 points on his last game of the season. Other notable cover coincidences include:. He defeated fellow scorer David Thompson by seven hundredths of a point (27.22 to 27.15). "The Dreaded SI Cover Jinx" -- was born, as some noted that bad things seemed to happen to people soon after they appeared on the magazine's cover.

His first scoring crown, which took place in 1978, was one of NBA's most famed moments. When Major League Baseball player Eddie Mathews, pictured on the cover of Volume 1, Issue 1, suffered a hand injury a week later that forced him to miss seven games, the "Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx" -- a.k.a. He gained his fourth and last scoring title in 1982. Since its inception, Sports Illustrated has annually presented the "Sportsman of the Year" award. Nicknamed Iceman for his cool demeanor on the court, Gervin was primarily known for his scoring talents, leading the NBA in scoring average three years in a row from 1978 to 1980. 8-9, 268-273, 354-358, 394-398, 402-405). Gervin holds the interesting distinction of being a former teammate of both Julius Erving (with the Squires) and Michael Jordan (with the Bulls), although in Gervin's only season in Chicago, Jordan played only eighteen games due to injury. (MacCambridge, 1997, pp.

Gervin never failed to average at least fourteen points in any of his fourteen ABA and NBA seasons, and finished an NBA career average of 26.2 points per game. More importantly, perhaps, many feel that 24-hour-a-day cable sports television networks and sports news web sites have forever diminished the role a weekly publication can play in today's world, and that it is unlikely any magazine will ever again achieve the level of prominence that SI once had. George Gervin (born April 27, 1952 in Detroit, Michigan) is a former professional basketball player, a shooting guard for the ABA's Virginia Squires and the NBA's San Antonio Spurs and Chicago Bulls. The proliferation of "commemorative issues" and crass subscription incentives seemed to some like an exchange of journalistic integrity for commercial opportunism. Critics said that it rarely broke (or even featured) stories on the major controversies in sports (drugs, violence, commercialism) any more, and that it focused on major sports and celebrities to the exclusion of other topics. Mulvoy's top writer Rick Reilly had also been raised on SI and followed in the footsteps of many of the great writers that he grew up admiring, but many felt that the magazine as a whole came to reflect Mulvoy's complete lack of sophistication.

Mark Mulvoy was the first top editor whose background contained nothing but sports; he had grown up as one of the magazine's readers, but he had no interest in fiction, movies, hobbies or history. By the 1980s and 1990s, the magazine had become more profitable than ever, but many also believed it had become more predictable. After the death of Henry Luce in 1967, the creative freedom that the staff had enjoyed seemed to diminish. 236-238).

(MacCambridge, 1997, pp. "Bonus pieces" on Pete Rozelle, Bear Bryant, Howard Cosell and others became some of the most quoted sources about these figures, and Deford established a reputation as one of the best writers of the time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, during Gil Rogin's term as Managing Editor, the feature stories of Frank Deford became the magazine's anchor. 108-111, 139-141, 149-151, 236).

(MacCambridge, 1997, pp. An intense rivalry developed between photographers, particularly Walter Iooss and Neil Leifer, to get a decisive cover shot that would be on newsstands and in mailboxes only a few days later. By 1967, the magazine was printing 200 pages of "fast color" a year; in 1983, SI became the first American full-color newsweekly. In 1965, offset printing began to allow the color pages of the magazine to be printed overnight, not only producing crisper and brighter images, but also finally enabling the editors to merge the best color with the latest news.

The magazine's photographers also made their mark with innovations like putting cameras in the goal at a hockey game and behind a glass backboard at a basketball game. 5-8, 160). (MacCambridge, 1997, pp. The steady creation of landmark stories (e.g., "The Black Athlete - A Shameful Story" by Jack Olsen and "Paper Lion" by George Plimpton) showed that sports fans could be readers, and a generation of sportswriters patterned their own writing after what they read in SI.

Many would say that the magazine legitimized sports -- and being a sports fan -- for a huge segment of the American population. Its writers developed their own characteristic style by daring to tell people what was important. Many of the staff had serious doubts that the English-born Frenchman could possibly know anything about American sports, but Laguerre won them over, and during his term as Managing Editor (1960 - 1974), SI became a model for other middle-class American magazines. senior European Correspondent André Laguerre to come to New York and help define the magazine's character.

In 1956, Luce asked Time, Inc. From the start, however, SI did introduce a number of innovations that are generally taken for granted today:. 6, 27, 42). (MacCambridge, 1997, pp.

Much of the subject matter was directed at upper class activities (yachting, polo, and even safaris), but upscale would-be advertisers were unconvinced that sports fans were a significant part of their market. The early issues of the magazine seemed caught between two opposing views of its audience. The popularity of spectator sports in the United States was about to explode, and that popularity came to be driven largely by three things:. The goal of the new magazine was to be "not A sports magazine, but THE sports magazine." Launched on August 16, 1954, it was not profitable and not particularly well run at first, but Luce's timing could not have been better.

After unsuccessfully offering $200,000 to buy the name Sport for the new magazine, they acquired the rights to the name Sports Illustrated instead for just $10,000. 17-25). (MacCambridge, 1997, pp. A number of advisers to Luce, including Life Magazine's Ernest Havemann, tried to kill the idea, but Luce, who was not a sports fan, decided the time was right.

At the time, many believed sports was beneath the attention of serious journalism and didn't think sports news could fill a weekly magazine, especially during the winter. In fact, there was no large-base, general sports magazine with a national following when TIME patriarch Henry Luce began considering whether his company should attempt to fill the gap. Two other magazines named Sports Illustrated were actually started in the 1930s and 1940s, but they both quickly failed. .

Its "swimsuit issue," which has been published since 1964, is now an annual publishing event that generates its own television shows, videos and calendars. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the National Magazine Award for General Excellence twice. It has over 3 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men, 19% of the adult males in the country. Sports Illustrated is a popular weekly American sports magazine owned by media giant Time Warner.

Michael MacCambridge, 1997, The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine, Hyperion Press ISBN 0786862165. Ceased publication in December 2005 because of a weak advertising climate. Circulation of one million readers between the ages of 18 and 24. Distributed free on 72 college campuses through a network of college newspapers.

Dedicated to college athletics and the sports interests of college students. Launched on September 4, 2003. Sports Illustrated on Campus magazine