Bound to the Past: Hey! We Made the National Press!

As a very youthful sports fan living in a small market with major league sports organizations, it was a rarity to see one of your teams or players on a national publication.  It always sucked looking at the covers of Sports Illustrated, Sport, The Sporting News, any of the Digests, and seeing the goddamn Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers and Giants, (both baseball and football), Cowboys, Steelers, and Bears on the covers. 

So it was badass when Robin Yount appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated (twice, even) in the fall of 1982, the Bucks Sidney Moncrief did the same, and in the fall of 1983, Football Digest was emblazoned with the image of my personal hero Lynn Dickey, who I wax nostalgic about here:  King Kong ain't got nothing on Lynn.

The impossibility of finding and purchasing these damn periodicals in an era long-preceding the internet really sucked for the 11 year old sport fanatic.  I hit the newstand looking, but never finding.  Many others already had beaten me to the punch.  I read that Football Digest issue that I just mentioned multitudes of times.  You couldn't check it out from the library as it was a periodical, and I flirted with the thought of making off with it, but I didn't have that kind of mindset. 

I wouldn't have been able to live with the guilt.  I was just a kid.

So, in the case of the Brewers, it wouldn't be until they started the 1987 season 13-0 that they graced the cover of Sports Illustrated again.  A Milwaukee Buck wouldn't appear on the cover of SI until Giannis showed up, and that's saying a lot.  Remember, the Bucks had amongst the most competitive teams of the 1990's when Ray Allen, Sam Cassell, and Big Dog Robinson made a few runs at the NBA title.  Surely, there had to be a cover or two in there.  Unless I'm wrong, I don't think there is. 

And of course the Packers never showed up on Sports Illustrated until the embarrassing blunder of drafting Tony Mandarich as "The Incredible Bulk" got us there.   And then, not again until the Super Bowl era of Favre, Reggie and the Crew of 1996. 

So it was slim pickings being a Wisconsin sports fan and hoping for any sort of colorful national spectacle to celebrate your team.  It just plain didn't happen.   In recent years there's been a few, like the return of the Bucks with Giannis, Tony Plush and the Boys with a Brewers playoff kick, and several in the Aaron Rodgers era of the Packers. 

But it's not quite the same for a grown ass man.  It was better back in the day, because social media has your guys everywhere in all shapes and sizes.  Damn that internet. 

At the same time, the internet is the tool that has allowed me to find these three covers, 40 years later, inexpensively.  So I guess the internet, in hundreds of ways, is a double edged sword. 

That fluttering breath of warm nostalgia that I have described in several other blog posts was emitted every time I opened one of these antiquated periodicals for the first time in 40 years.

In a couple of cases, ever. 

Somehow, media was better then.