Mark Bennett: Sports Illustrated captured athletic drama, including local faces

Jan. 25—The latest stories of legends and heroes in the making arrived in the mailbox of my boyhood family's home week after week.

Sports Illustrated's great writers led millions of readers, many just kids like me, through the exploits of Bill Russell, Joe Namath, Johnny Bench, Mario Andretti, Chris Evert, Jean-Claude Killy, the Purple People Eaters, the Big Red Machine, the Steel Curtain, John Wooden's UCLA Bruins and so many other icons of 20th-century athletics.

The magazine thrived in the days before replays became instantly available on cellphones. The words of SI writers such as Frank Deford, Leigh Montville, Dan Jenkins, Ron Fimrite and Tex Maule, complemented by definitive photographs, painted images of big games, complex personalities and vexing issues.

SI artfully documented the sports world.

The sad news came this week of the magazine's apparent demise. It's a complex situation.

The Associated Press reported that Arena Group, the company now operating Sports Illustrated, announced last Friday the publication's staff would be laid off and that its licensing agreement ceased. It comes after six "rough" years, the AP reported, following the sale of SI in 2018 by Time Inc., which started the magazine in 1954, to Meredith Publishing. In 2019, Authentic Brands Group bought SI, and the Arena Group acquired its publishing rights for a decade.

Now, as AP reports, the SI staff's situation is in "limbo."

Its disappearance leaves a void in Americana. Millions of Americans have favorite classic Sports Illustrated issues — including its annual swimsuit editions, no doubt — stashed in attics and closets. A framed copy of the "Red October" edition in 1990, toasting the Cincinnati Reds' World Series victory, hangs on our basement wall.

Its pages also occasionally featured feats by athletes with Wabash Valley roots. Its Oct. 27, 1958 edition labeled NBA center Clyde Lovellette "one of the very best hook-shooters and rebounders of all time." In 1978, SI called Bobby "Slick" Leonard "a legendary player of hoops and cards." The April 11, 1960 issue described the ire of Terre Haute residents who "are telling themselves they have raised the best young basketball player in the country, and nobody has heard of him" — referring to Purdue basketball star Terry Dischinger.

Perhaps Hauteans' most memorable SI cover appeared Nov. 28, 1977, featuring Indiana State basketball star Larry Bird, with ISU cheerleaders Marcia Staub and Sharon Senefeld using the hush sign for "College Basketball's Secret Weapon."

Another former Sycamore great, Michael Menser, remembers his brush with SI fame 20 years after Bird's first cover story.

Sports Illustrated sent writer Alexander Wolff and photographer Damian Strohmeyer to Batesville, Indiana, to document the local high school team's attempt to win the last single-class boys basketball tournament in 1997. Menser was the star guard for the Batesville Bulldogs, a small school with just one loss going into "Hoosier Hysteria."

Nearly every Batesville resident — all 5,000 of them at the time — knew when Wolff and Strohmeyer came to town.

"It caused a big hubbub," Menser recalled Thursday morning by phone from Plainfield High School, where he's now the assistant principal. "That was the coolest part of the whole deal. They spent three weeks with us."

Menser and his teammates reveled in the stories the SI writer and photographer told of the athletes and coaches they'd covered.

Like so many sports aficionados, Menser had an SI subscription and a healthy collection of back issues. "You talk about Sports Illustrated now, not many kids know what you're talking about," he said. "But back then, you waited for it to come in the mail."

The hubbub in Batesville started when Menser and his teammates found out SI wanted to feature its story about Indiana's last one-class basketball tournament on the Bulldogs. What the players didn't know — and didn't find out until they'd graduated — was that SI was only going to run a story if Batesville won its sectional.

Indeed, the Bulldogs won their sectional, but only after rallying from a halftime deficit in the title game. Batesville made the SI story great by advancing to the New Castle Regional final, before losing a 61-58 heartbreaker to the host team, the Bulldogs' tournament nemesis. Wolff's story bears the headline "The End of the Road," alluding to both the Batesville's defeat and the demise of Indiana's old tourney system.

After the loss, all the townspeople still anxiously awaited SI's report. They flocked to the shops that stocked magazines to get it.

"To be told you were going to be in Sports Illustrated was surreal, but once you really were, it was so cool," Menser said.

He's now 44, and one of his three daughters is a high-scoring freshmen on the Plainfield girls basketball team. Their state tournament starts next week.

One of the journalists who helped craft SI's coverage in the early 1970s was my gifted former Tribune-Star colleague and fellow columnist Stephanie Salter.

She landed a job as a fact-checking writer at Sports Illustrated in its heyday, the early 1970s, straight out of Purdue University. It was the start of an Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame career for Salter that included three decades as the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A's beat writer and then the must-read columnist at the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle newspapers, followed by great work in her hometown as a Terre Haute Tribune-Star columnist.

"It was as good as it gets," Salter recalled Thursday of her SI years, from 1971 to '75. "All of the great names were there."

Salter wrote SI's popular "For the Record" section for nearly a year, and selected the "Faces in the Crowd" athletes — a long-running segment featuring yet-unknown amateurs. She fact-checked baseball stories, including alongside Fimrite at spring training in Arizona, and golf stories eloquently told by Jenkins from Augusta and Pebble Beach. She wrote college football scouting outlooks, and her byline stories included a "[George] Plimpton-esque" first-person piece "about my week as a 49ers cheerleader. They actually sang instead of danced."

And, as a woman working in a male-dominated field in the early 1970s, she dealt with ingrained sexism in her SI days. Salter got ejected from the New York Baseball Writers Association annual dinner, basically for crashing its all-male format. Three male colleagues walked out in protest in support of Salter, including SI writer Roy Blunt Jr. Casey Stengel was the featured speaker that night.

She wasn't a fan of SI's swimsuit editions either. "It was appalling for a feminist," Salter said. At SI, she had a bulletin board filled with "all kinds of transgressions against women."

Yet, Salter's journalistic skills sharpened at SI, especially in her fact-checking role. Each element of a story required two verifying sources. "As a reporter, the buck stopped with you," she said. And, combing through the sentences and paragraphs of "these great writers" influenced her future technique. Her memories of those experiences are largely fond.

"I truly believe I developed my ear as a writer, because it was like music — the tempo and the style," said Salter, now retired. "And I developed a major respect for getting your facts straight.

"It was such great training, and it was such great fun," she said.

Readers like me felt the same.

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.