Since the early 1980s I have been an admirer of ESPN, the all sports television channel whose motto is “The worldwide leader in sports.” I even read a book about the history of the company a couple of years ago. The ESPN story is an interesting tale of how a down-on-his- luck hockey announcer came up with a great idea and was able to talk Getty Oil Company into backing it financially to create what would really become the worldwide leader in sports programming.
Today, ESPN is 80 percent owned by the Disney Company and 20 percent by the Hearst Corporation. ESPN has multiple channels, tie-ins to ABC Television, due to its ownership, a radio network and ESPN ? The Magazine.
It is a recent announcement about ESPN ? The Magazine that is causing me some concern about the direction that ESPN is taking, at least with the magazine division. ESPN ? The Magazine has announced that it will debut what it is calling the “Body Issue” this October. In this issue, top athletes, amateur and professional, will pose nude. Since they are not changing their magazine classification to become like Playboy or Penthouse, they are owned by Disney, for Pete”s sake, they will cover the athletes” “privates” with sports equipment, of course.
Personally, I view this as an obvious commercialization ploy for the ESPN magazine to better compete and possibly take advertising revenue dollars and readers away from Sports Illustrated magazine (SI), which has been producing their annual swimsuit issue since the 1960s. Although the SI swimsuit models are nice to look at, I have never been a big fan of that concept, either. What do gorgeous models have to do with sports like baseball, football and basketball that the magazine regularly covers? Nothing ? it”s just a marketing scheme that provides a huge increase in copies sold for that issue, which translates into millions of dollars worth of advertising sales.
The ESPN approach takes the SI idea one step further. While they are correcting the SI problem of having non-athletes as the stars of the issue, I believe they will wind up damaging the reputation of the athletes who choose to participate. I may be old fashioned, but, I have a real problem with superstar athletes turning into nude magazine models. I understand they will be paid for it, but most of them don”t need the money. For me, it just serves to disintegrate whatever positive, role model-type image still remains for our top athletes, which seems to be disappearing with each passing year. The sports news these days is often more like a police blotter than information about the games we enjoy.
I don”t know if the ESPN ? The Magazine experiment will succeed or fail. We”ll have to wait until the issue is published and see how the public responds. It might be the biggest sensation in sports magazines since the SI swimsuit issue began. I will not pull a “Rush Limbaugh” and state that I hope it fails. I just want to be on record that I believe our sports heroes should act more heroic. Being paid to pose nude in a sports magazine doesn”t fit my description of heroic.
Gary Dickson is the editor and publisher of the Record-Bee. He can be reached at gdickson@record-bee.com or (707) 263-5636, ext. 24.
