Postcards from the Empire
Postcard from 1967
Review of Sports Illustrated, December 4, 1967 issue. Those who experienced living in the U.S. in the 1960s know that mainstream sources of information were very limited then. We walked across the room to change the TV channel, and our choices pretty much consisted of the local CBS, ABC and NBC affiliates along with PBS, which was mainly for the upper crust.
The local and national news broadcasts were similar in content, especially the three national shows. Lots of Americans grumbled about liberal bias but there was nowhere else to go. Then as now, corporations, NGOs, foundations and the federal government poured money into “mainstream” and left wing media and publications, while the right wing press was mostly underground and very difficult to find.
The same liberal bias was reinforced by the weekly magazines such as Time, Newsweek, Life and Look. When it came to sports, Sports Illustrated was the undisputed king, having started in 1954 and by 1967 had a weekly paid circulation of three million. The initial issue in 1954 had a circulation of 350,000, showing that SI had substantial backing from the get-go as well as establishment approval.
The cover of Sports Illustrated’s December 4th, 1967 issue
SI’s only semi-serious competitor was Sport magazine, which ran from 1946 to 2000 but was always second fiddle to Sports Illustrated. The Sporting News, owned by the Spink family of St. Louis, was another weekly, but concentrated mostly on baseball for much of its existence before being bought by corporate interests, which fairly quickly ruined it by turning what had been a serious publication into worthless fluff. What’s left of Sporting News (the “The” in its title was dropped in 2002) is now online and read by just about nobody.
Sports Illustrated similarly declined in recent decades. Its circulation fell and it eventually went from a weekly to a monthly, and stopped printing altogether for a while in 2024 but its present owners claim that the print issue will continue.
The question is, does anyone care? SI was known for its photography, its generally high-quality journalism (albeit always echoing the mainstream liberal party line of the time), and its annual swimsuit issue, which came out each year while much of the country was in the midst of the worst of winter weather. Which model was going to be on the cover was always a matter of great interest, as were all the models, featuring beautiful girls wearing seemingly less each year. Models like Heidi Klum, Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley were propelled to fame after appearing in SI’s swimsuit issue.
But the leftist radicals eventually destroyed SI, just as they did everything else in society. Within recent years, SI’s swimsuit issue has featured old women, fat women, trannies and men, which fast-tracked the publication’s already quick descent into irrelevance.
So looking back through the pages of an old Sports Illustrated is much like opening a time capsule, a look at an America that is now long gone, but not forgotten by those who experienced it. I have a number of Sports Illustrateds from the 1960s and ‘70s and if the interest is there I will continue to feature these brief looks back in time.
The cover of the December 4, 1967 SI shows a drawing of a basketball court from roughly the free throw line to the basket along with five stick-type players, two wearing red and three wearing blue. It cost 40 cents. Three of the stick figures are White, the other two Black. Even though the stick features have no other identifiable features including no facial features, SI was careful to represent their race.
And of course, spoken or unspoken – perhaps written or unwritten is a more apt way to put it – race has always been extremely important in the way it’s portrayed to the general culture, the mass consumers of sports, entertainment and politics.
In 1967, Whites were still 88% of the U.S. population, and were generally shown in that ratio in advertising, movies and television. In 2025, the White population is now estimated at just 58%, and Whites, especially White men, have been all but eliminated from most forms of media, all part of The Great Replacement supported by the entire regime outside of a few dissidents in Congress and segments of the alternative media.
The 12/4/67 SI is thick with advertising. The weekly feature found in the front of each issue called “Scorecard” doesn’t begin until Page 17. Scorecard featured a short, usually not serious, look at various stories from the previous week. This issue starts off by quoting an Argentine leftist, Juan Jose Sebreli, who believes football (soccer) “educates the masses for passivity, for nonaction and for non-participation in public life,” adding, “Mussolini, Hitler and even the senile Petain were promoters of sports, and their example has been followed by most of today’s world leaders. Monopolistic, capitalistic and fascist regimes use it as a means of psychological control of the masses by means of conditioned reflexes.” Ah, the obligatory Hitler reference, something that hasn’t changed in the intervening 58 years.
But there does seem to be a connection between sports fanaticism and having little to no interest in politics. Rooting for sports mercenaries – who now make upwards of $60 million and more per year – and the cities they supposedly represent is a safety valve form of pseudo-tribalism that actually diminishes real tribalism, especially among Whites who thanks to the anti-White Caste System in sports (think DEI if you don’t know what the Caste System is yet) have been well trained to root and cheer for Blacks over their own kind.
There’s a mountain of direct and indirect evidence to support the reality that DEI came to sports in a major way just as the Permanent Cultural Revolution was fully implemented in 1968 and thereafter. To cite just one example, here are the athletes who have appeared on the most SI covers: Michael Jordan (50 covers), Muhammad Ali (40), LeBron James (25), Tiger Woods (24), Magic Johnson (23), and Kareem Abdul Jabar (22).
After Scorecard, some of the weekly featured articles were about the New York Giants, Yale defeating Harvard in their annual football matchup, a preview of College Basketball 1968, a car race in Daytona Beach, and a speedboat race at Lake Havasu, Arizona.
There was a weekly wrap-up of college football results from the previous week, and a column on Bridge by Charles Goren. At the back of the magazine was “For the Record,” a small print summary covering the week’s news in basketball, boating, football, handball, harness racing, hockey, horse racing, motor sports, and track and field. The right hand column displayed “Faces in the Crowd,” notable athletic achievements by mostly young people, a few of whom later became famous athletes. “The 19th Hole,” letters from readers, always occupied the last few pages of each issue in between the endless pages of advertisements.
The most interesting article to appear in this issue was titled “A Step to an Olympic Boycott,” by Jonathan Rodgers. About 200 people had recently attended a meeting of the Western Regional Black Youth Conference at a Baptist church in Los Angeles, for the purpose of deciding whether or not to call for a boycott by Black Olympians of the upcoming 1968 Summer games in Mexico City.
Reported SI: “The workshop was an orderly one, although outside the church a bloody fracas erupted between militant Black Power followers. . . and a group of self-styled Communists.”
The workshop was organized and led by Harry Edwards, a then 24-year-old part-time instructor of sociology at San Jose State. If his name sounds familiar, it’s because Edwards, now 82, has been publicized and praised time and again by the corporate media as a militant agitator on behalf of Blacks, or Negroes as they were still called in SI. It wasn’t until early 1968 that the term Negro was dropped, seemingly overnight, and replaced with Black and later African-American, though that seven-syllable tag never really caught on like Black did and still does.
Whether Edwards was an outright communist like some of those engaging in skirmishes outside the church isn’t clear, but there’s no doubt that he was very militant, although he doesn’t seem to have ever been criticized by anyone in the establishment. Curious how that works, isn’t it? Among others quotes, Edwards says of Black athletes and the Olympics: “It’s time for the Black people to stand up as men and women and refuse to be utilized as performing animals for a little extra dog food. You see, this may be our last opportunity to settle this mess short of violence.”
Harry Edwards, now in his 80s and still at it
For a “performing animal,” Edwards seemed to have attained a position of privilege even then at the age of 24. He was a center on San Jose State’s basketball team, then went to Cornell and obtained two advanced degrees and was working on his Ph.D. at the time of this issue of SI.
As it turned out, there was no Black boycott of the memorable 1968 Mexico City Olympics. But the most remembered event to this day was when two Black U.S. sprinters, John Carlos and Tommy Smith, who had finished first and second in the 200 meter sprint, looked down and raised clenched fists in the air while the national anthem played. Harry Edwards, the life-long militant who was always embraced and promoted by the system he was supposedly fighting against, played a large role in bringing about Carlos’ and Smith’s act of protest.
Tommie Smith (center) and John Carlos (right) after receiving their medals
Looking at the advertisements and comparing them to today is always instructive. The majority of the ads in the 12/4/67 SI featured a picture of the product being pushed. When people were shown they were invariably White, usually young or middle-aged, well-dressed and looking complacent but not giddy unlike today when Whites are rarely seen in advertising and when they are they are often shown acting orgasmic after biting into a hamburger or candy bar.
The car ads are always fun to look at, cars like the Toronado with its cool name and looks. The headline for that one is “Toronado. Built for leaders, not followers,” with a picture of White man about 40 years old in a suit standing beside a burgundy colored Toronado.
1967 Toronado
Sports Illustrated in late 1967 was still geared primarily to middle class White sports fans, mostly men. That was reflected in the articles and ads. But the article about Harry Edwards and the proposed Black boycott of the Olympics was an important harbinger of what was to come as the Permanent Cultural Revolution was fully unleashed in 1968, perhaps still the most fateful year in American history.