A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.
What: Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue
“Crossing the Line” reads the cover of this year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.
And so it does, crossing the line from daring to dumb in 218 tedious pages.
For years, Sports Illustrated made news each winter by being one of the only mainstream magazines to show half-naked women. It would include the photos around its regular sports stories, subscribers would chuckle about hiding it under the bed, it was a nice inside joke.
Then, wouldn’t you know it, half-naked women began appearing in everything mainstream, from magazines to billboards to network television. Today you can see a picture of a half-naked woman any time of the year, in your home or in stores, without recourse or shame.
Realizing it lost some of its market, Sports Illustrated has changed the annual edition’s focus.
Good luck figuring out what that focus is.
This year--I swear it--there are photos of fully clothed TV weather “girls” offering such inane tidbits as their sexiest weather term.
This year--swear again--there are photos of seven athletes with their swimsuit-clad wives. The theme of the photo spread is how these women are the ones with all the brains and style in the family . . . yet offers no information about them.
“Trophy Wives,” it could have been called. Or, “Setting The Women’s Movement Back 25 Years.”
OK, there is an accompanying feature on Janet Jones Gretzky, but in it, she is begging the writer to help her revive an acting career that included a starring role in the classic, “Police Academy 5.”
Not to worry, there are still the traditionally realistic photo layouts--a woman dancing around African tribesmen in a $500 bikini, a women disrobing on an Ecuadorean prairie.
But even if you still buy it only for the Sports Illustrated models, it is difficult to tell precisely who they are. Thanks to clever advertisers, the magazine is also filled with bikinied women selling everything from cellular phones to colognes.
Perhaps you know a magazine is in trouble when the best thing you can say about it is, it smells good.
