Starfucker Friday: Jock Jams, Part 2

[nb: I got way overenthusiastic when I planned this week’s SFF, so I’ll be presenting it in six parts over the next couple of days.]

The sixties were by far the best decade of Sports Illustrated covers. The NFL was only starting to exist, the NBA wasn’t the all-consuming monster it would become, and people still cared about winter sports, which gave a diversity to the number of sports represented on the cover. Of course, you may be looking at the pictures below and thinking that by diversity I mean “a lot of white people,” but the few minorities that made the SI cover in the sixties (like Sonny Liston) tended to be big fugballs. Also, I’m not so attracted to Muhammad Ali, who made the first bunch of his 37 cover appearances in this decade. I’m much more partial to the wildly sexy Swedish heavyweight Ingomar Johansson, who was on three (I think) covers in 1960, including one for being man of the year. Anyway, here’s the ten hunkiest men on the ten hunkiest SI covers of the sixties, in chronological order:

Five men, eight chins, a Commie track star, and the most delightfully gratuitous ab display in the history of Sports Illustrated. I want them all.

Ahhh, Jean-Claude Killy. Le swoon…. He was on three covers in the span of a year or so, but this one is the foxiest, I think. The man drips with Gallic sex, like Jean-Paul Belmondo on skis and with pathologically cute sweaters and a dashingly cute side-part in his pretty pretty hair.  Also, new SI logo.  Much better!

As an Italian-American, I’d like to say that Nino Benvenuti is a damn fine specimen of man, and I seriously don’t even care that the magazine cover is totally implying that Italians are hedonists who only care about the pasta and the wine, because damn, do I want Nino for dinner. Unrelatedly, here’s a couple of sentences about what he did after his boxing career ended, from his weird entry on Wikipedia:

Benvenuti became a successful businessman, show host and city counselor in Trieste. He opened a high class restaurant and forged friendships with [Carlos] Monzon and [Emile] Griffith, and he sent his son to take boxing classes with Griffith in New York. Monzon was a guest of honor at Benvenuti’s television show several times, and, when he was accused of murdering his wife in 1988, Benvenuti became one of his most loyal supporters, visiting him in jail in Argentina several times, and clamoring for Monzon’s freedom.

In 1995, Benvenuti caused sensation with the news that he was turning away from the material world and had travelled to Calcutta, India, to become a volunteer at Mother Teresa’s hospice.

That’s weird, huh?

Some of the hottest cover pictures, as we’ll see in the decades to come, are of guys that just can’t seem to get a break. I think it’s because they’re in uniform, but not actually moving around and thus less inclined to, like, have their mouth wide open with their tongue kind of hanging out. Or, in the case of football players, they’re not moving around and thus wearing a helmet that covers up their devilishly handsome features. Although the Denny McLain cover is the rare instance of somebody running with their mouth open that still manages to look good. (Because action shots from baseball games NEVER look good, mostly because the pitcher’s the only person that really moves, and they move in a way that invariably makes them look totally deformed.)

One of the problems with basketball-themed SI covers is that the magazine likes pictures of players moving, which means that generally they’re making really, really dumb faces. Also, the basketball uniforms were really ugly–no matter how much arm and gam they show, there’s still those dumb socks. Now, with soccer players, dumb socks are fine, because they’re covering up shin guards which are totally functional because soccer’s all about wearing cleats and kicking each other. But, I repeat, basketball uniforms just had dumb socks. So, cheers to Karl Monroe for not being photographed with his socks on.

Because the sixties were such a heydey for SI covers, here’s some of the non-manly ones to feast your eyes on. Note, if you will, a scene from a horror film, the biggest hairdo I think I’ve ever seen, a scene from a supercool spy movie, Peggy Fleming in Paris, a really cool variation on the Olympic logo, and a whole bunch of really awesome auto racing-related covers. Totally not in that order: