Sidebar: "Finally, It's North Carolina"
Alex once again reminds you he used to be an accountant. Is "Cover Story" a SLAM book? A 1892 YMCA the Magazine cover. The (non)-mystery of a James Worthy NCAA Sports Illustrated cover.
Hi everyone. Welcome to my newsletter companion to “Cover Story,” a basketball book I wrote which is set for release on October 19th and is available for pre-order here. If you want to tell your followers about my book, feel free to share this tweet or this Instagram post. If you’re not a newsletter subscriber, click here to make sure you get every post in your inbox.
Before we get started, I want to thank everyone for subscribing to the newsletter. The plan is to publish twice weekly on Tuesday and Friday. Yes, this is certainly a vehicle to promote my book but that’s not actually the ulterior motive here.
If you can indulge me for a few paragraphs as I explain.
I’m turning 37 this year, and I find myself spending a lot more time these days thinking about how life has just passed me by; not in a my life is filled with a series of regrets kind of way, but more of a I can’t reconcile the fact we have such a finite amount of time on Earth kind of thing. I want to blame the pandemic for this line of thinking but it’s probably just a part of growing old.
I spent most of my 20s trying to live up to the expectations of my parents, working as a chartered accountant across a series of jobs. As I was withering away in a cubicle in these corporate offices, I discovered a lifeline by creating a Tumblr blog (shoutout to the OG crew. Oakley & Allen what up!) which I regularly updated with 400-word posts on niche sports stories (which, by the way, Eric Nusbaum and Adam Villacin are doing but at an expert level with “Sports Stories”). I created a Twitter account under an alias so HR couldn’t find me tweeting about stupid meetings and eventually grew my following there.
At one of my last accounting jobs, I recruited a bunch of designers and illustrators and on my downtime I put money into publishing a zine. I started a podcast called steven lebron radio (here’s how long ago this was: I did an episode with Desus, and we recorded twice in my apartment in the span of a week because I forgot to press record the first time) and had my friend Jon Ng edit them for me.
I spent the past decade establishing myself as a writer and got some incredible opportunities, putting together a series of features and oral histories for all the publications I dreamed of writing about from GQ to the New York Times to ESPN to SLAM to many others. In the past few years, I’ve moved towards doing on-camera work hosting shows, behind-the-scenes scripting and producing for others, and producing social media content.
I’m making more money now than I have across two careers, but I’ve really missed the time I spent writing. I’ve also missed the exhilarating feeling of being passionate about a particular project. My first few years of trying to break into the writing industry was the most excited I’ve ever felt. The fear of having to go back to my old career drove me. I came up with some of the best story ideas in the game. I chased after every feature and interview like my life depended on it. I rediscovered those feelings in the past year and a half while working on “Cover Story,” and this newsletter is an extension of that rediscovery.
I really should be devoting more time to my next book (it’s coming in 2023 and about the origin story of how the Toronto Raptors became a basketball franchise. The working title is “Prehistoric” which I’m starting to fall in love with) and to anyone from my publisher reading this (lol) I am working on it, but I also want to use this space to share with you some leftover cover stories, a little bit of my thought process behind putting this book together, interviews with some of my favorite people on the Internet, and more. And yes, there will be giveaways.
My goal is for this newsletter to be a “Cover Story” companion. While I’ll be talking about the book and things in the book, you won’t find book excerpts or direct stories that are in the book here. I want to make reading “Cover Story” its own experience. But the goal is for these newsletter posts to be something you can read leading up to the book or to come back and revisit for more context when you’re finished.
The most common question I’ve received is whether this is a book about SLAM.
Listen. I get it. The book cover is a homage to SLAM. And how you can talk about a book that explores the most iconic-basketball related magazine covers without the self-proclaimed In Your Face Basketball magazine. SLAM is a huge part of “Cover Story.” Russ Bengtson (who wrote the foreword in addition to putting up with my emails and texts and phone calls), Scoop Jackson, Tony Gervino, and Dennis Page are four of the most prominent voices in the book. But before we get to introducing SLAM, I spent part one of the book looking at Sports Illustrated and how Michael Jordan became the most popular cover subject in the magazine’s history. The best way I can describe “Cover Story” is it covers a period from 1984 to 2003 and weaves a narrative across four parts (three main sections and a postscript).
Is every chapter about a single magazine cover?
Yes and no (oh shit, this book sounds nuanced as hell; I must pre-order a copy!). Each chapter focuses on a single magazine cover, but the level of focus and how the story about the cover is told varies. One of the things I spent a lot of time thinking about before starting the interview and writing process for this book was the themes I wanted to hit.
Each chapter needed a particular differentiation. So the “A Star Is Born” chapter about Michael Jordan’s iconic 1984 Sports Illustrated cover during his rookie season about the Chicago Bulls became a chapter about what happened when basketball phenoms appeared on the cover. To properly tell the story, we had to go back to the origins of Sports Illustrated, understand how the magazine’s cover became the defining image in sports every week, and examine the basketball phenoms who landed on the cover over the years. Every chapter in the book underwent this type of process, where I would pull a thread about a magazine cover, and it would take me in a bunch of directions.
The biggest challenge was finding a starting point.
Man. I’m laughing just thinking about my original table of contents. I had this grand plan to start with a YMCA Magazine from 1892 when James Naismith described the rules of basketball. I’m kind of amazed by the audacity of me thinking I could write a book about magazine covers spanning this time period. Eventually, after reading Michael MacCambridge’s “The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine,” and really thinking about what I wanted this book to be about, I landed on a starting point.
But even landing on the first cover story was a challenge.
The April 5th, 1982, cover of Sports Illustrated above features James Worthy of the North Carolina Tar Heels. This was the managing editor’s choice for the national championship game cover. If you check the box score from North Carolina’s 63-62 win over Georgetown today, the cover makes complete sense. Worthy scored a game-high 28 points and was named the Most Outstanding Player of the tournament—a feat worthy of the Sports Illustrated cover. But it was a freshman guard named Michael Jordan who hit the game-winner to clinch the national championship.
For weeks, I obsessed over the fact the magazine omitted Jordan from the cover. At first, I wanted the simplest explanation to make sense. The NCAA national championship cover was always a time crunch for Sports Illustrated because their deadline to send each week’s magazine to the printers was Monday evening. The game usually didn’t end until around midnight. Back in those days, photographers would ship the pictures on a plane back to the New York office while a writer polished up a pre-written story with details from the game.
My initial assumption was a photo of Jordan pulling up in front of the Tar Heels bench for the game-winner didn’t arrive in time at the office to be the cover photo choice. I reached out to Alexander Wolff, a Sports Illustrated writer at the time, to pick his brain about my conundrum. He replied:
I looked at the layouts, and you’ll notice, there were a couple of shots from the Saturday semifinals (pages that closed earlier on Monday alongside “profile” text); only the cover, the opening spread, and that shot of Ewing goaltending very early in the game are from Monday night. Our ability to crowbar late-closing photos into layouts was compromised because we couldn’t wire images the way it’s done now . . . film had to be hustled on to a chartered Lear jet, get edited on the plane, and shown in the wee hours to underslept editors in NYC.
This seemed like a sound explanation until I scanned photographer Manny Millan’s pictures inside the magazine accompanying the cover story and saw a picture from the celebration after the buzzer sounded. There’s a possibility Sports Illustrated didn’t get a perfect photo of the game-winning shot, but in my haste to try and find the cover story I was looking for, I neglected to look at what was probably the actual and obvious answer: Worthy was also a more than reasonable choice to be the cover subject, as Wolff (and others) pointed out to me:
I will say this: At that time, no one knew MJ was going to become MJ, so the idea that there was some oversight in not including a photo of his shot might not have occurred to anyone. Yet. And while he made the shot on UNC’s final possession, recall there was great drama over Fred Brown’s errant pass to James Worthy after Georgetown inbounded the ball . . . there’s no photo of that sequence either.
This was an early lesson for me: the context of a magazine cover changes over time. In 1982, no one would have found a Sports Illustrated cover featuring the Most Outstanding Player to be a peculiar choice. But today, given everything we know about Michael Jordan, his absence from any cover feels like a story worth exploring. It also taught me something else: sometimes the backstory of a magazine cover is simply shit happens. I ended up landing on another Michael Jordan cover to start, which you can read about in the book.
I’ll be back on Friday to talk about SLAM and Scoop Jackson’s favorite magazine covers of all-time.
Thanks for reading the newsletter. Feel free to subscribe if it’s your first time reading. You can pre-order “Cover Story” here and find me on Twitter and Instagram. Email me if you want to chat.