ESPN Magazine Subscription

Yeah, you caught me. I found a pile of sports and fitness magazines on the laundry room swap table. We must have a wannabe body builder in the building 'cause I don't see any muscles bulging anywhere in the halls. Along with Men's Health, there was a pile of recent issues of ESPN: The Magazine. I grabbed a few to look at and while I was at it I looked at the Epinions' database and found something like 146 entries; I figured one more review wouldn't hurt so here goes.

Physically, it's a BIG magazine at 10 by 12 inches. It kinda reminds me of some of the old picture magazines from the 1940s and 50s that I used to take from the waiting room of my doctor father's office. His were mostly Sports Afield, Sports Illustrated, Popular Mechanics and some women's magazines like Redbook, Women's Day and Good Housekeeping. He'd get those after my mother was through with them. When I look at this magazine, LIFE comes to mind, but the format is gossipy and sometimes trite, like Cosmo and some other magazines geared to the female youth market, but this is all for youngish men.

The cover features three American soccer players who are glaring at the viewer over a bright neon orange caption: Why Not US? While soccer players Landon Donovan, Clint Mathis and DaMarcus Beasley glare, a bracket declares WELL . . . Argentina, France, Italy, Portugal . . . you get the message. The "US" is a double entendre meaning the word us, and it's the abbreviation for the United States. Clever copywriter?

That got me thinking about Elsa70, a member who lives in Italy and wrote what seemed to be her last piece about the then World Soccer Championships before she whizzed off to a European site to make some $$$. A recent e-mail told me it pays her enough a month to take care of her cell phone bill, and that's a lot better than I'm doing pumping out book reviews here on Eeps. I wish her luck.

Finding the feature article on page 82 was next to no problem, but I was diverted by lotsa flashy ads along the way. I found the Table of Contents on page 7 with a continuation on page 10. Everything ion the magazine is interspersed with ads, and I really should talk about those. It seems this magazine has all the bases covered and the age groups identified. It seems to be geared toward the upper end of the teen-age market through thirty-ish jocks that want some quick factoids regarding what's going on in the world of sports and on the ESPN Channels.

There were a myriad quick takes on the Astro's Lance Berkman, the Laker's Robert Horry, the seven games of the Stanley Cup Finals. Then we went on to Tiger Woods on the PGA Tour, eight first-draft players for the MLB and what happened to a 15-year old white girl who was housed in a dorm full of black athletes at the University of Alabama. Can you say "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll"?

There were scads of double-spread color ads. The first one showed a Nissan Xterra parked on a sand dune while two young people slid down this huge dune on what I assumed were snowboards. The back of the magazine is equally saturated. Other front-of-the-magazine ads included Feria Extra Bleach Blonde by L'Oreal of Paris, with two male models (one was black) and one female model. They were all tipped, streaked or totally bleached.

Following that was an ad for Anchor Blue Brand clothing. The clothing was awful and it looked like nothing more than clean work clothes. Is that new Grunge, is that still in fashion? Next, there was an ad for Absolut Squeeze, a Mandarin Orange flavored vodka. God forbid we forget that these kids are approaching drinking age. At least I didn't see any of the dreaded piercing.

The ads continue at a staggering rate. At one point I encountered a strange chocolate beverage called Love Bus Brew that was loaded with vitamins and ginseng, a two-page spread on Gatorade and a huge green three-dimensional foldout ad of a cigarette pack for Kool Menthols. It was scary and fascinating at the same time in its complexity and I'm still trying to figure out who it was aimed at.

On page 24 I found a section called The JUMP, which seems to have the last word on the big stories. Right at the top at #1 was a question about whether or nor Greg Piazza was gay. For those of you who don't know who he is, he's the All-Star catcher for the New York Mets that is said to be dating a still-closeted local TV personality in New York City. I still see snickers and guesses about that supposed pairing is about in the gay press gossip columns.

The answer to that question was: "He says no, But here's the real question: Is it any of your business? Again, no. Until you try to date him." Well I kinda liked that response and certainly agree that it's his business who he sleeps with, but what's the "until" remark all about? Better they should have just left it alone.

I read in the gay press that Esera Tuaolo, a native Hawaiian and former Green Bay Packer, just revealed that he's gay. The 6-foot 2 Super Bowl player kept his orientation a secret as part of why he retired in 1999. He said the anti-gay jokes he heard in the locker rooms made him feel ashamed, depressed and suicidal.

ESPN's Sterling Sharpe, a former teammate suggested that it would have been dangerous for Tuaolo to come out while he was playing. "He would have been eaten alive and hated for it." But by coming out now, he's shown the world that gay athletes are indeed playing at the elite levels of sport and are part of the pro sports community.

David Kopay and Roy Simmons are the only other NFL players to publicly acknowledge being gay. I mean, who's going to be that shocked about a gay Olympic ice skater or diver like Rudy Galindo or Greg Louganis except that they both have AIDS?

The Table of Contents promised to tell me Everything from A to Z about the 2002 World Cup Soccer Matches. It was sort of fun to read, but nothing was so startling that you couldn't have lived without it. It was all childish HYPE! "A", naturally was taken up by America, and they took a whole page to tell us where we stand in the game. Every letter after that had a paragraph about an international player, a coach or and aspect of the game, like "G" for Gambling and "H" for Hair, which talked about the various "dos" the players sport on their heads.

We go everything from a frizzy blonde Afro of Columbia's Carlos Valderama to a picture of West Nigeria's Taribo West, who (it was said) dyed his braids mint green and white and then tied them up in pigtails. Well, I got news for ya . . . this dude's wearing "nylon" attachments.

I went so far as to call a black friend and ask him about it. He said, "No way is that real hair." So you can take it from an old display queen who spotted that one. It's fake hair all the way and whoever wrote that for the magazine doesn't know what they're talking about. And, they weren't pigtails, either . . . they were more like two lumps of braids in tied up in ponytails.

Some of the stuff is serious but on the whole information (and pictures) of the Dutch team in drag and other assorted modes of undress was more than I really wanted to see. Oh, I forgot, heterosexual people think that when straight men get dressed up as women that it's supposed to be funny. Wrong again! The editors of this rag even managed to get a dig in at the teams of Iran, Iraq and North Korea by calling them "V" for Villains and "The Axis of Evil," but that's too "Shrub-esque" for me.

The closing double page ads were for cell phones, big honkin' supercharged cars and trucks, the ugliest spread of Father's Day ties I've ever seen and some bourbon-flavored Copenhagen snuff that will assure that some youngster will end up with oral cancer before his life is over.

You can subscribe for $78 for 26 issues, but I found a special offer at http://store.yahoo.com/48321/espnmagazine.html for $14.97, a saving of $63. What's the message there, not enough business?

The writing wasn't that great except for the quick copy designed to catch your eye. The big articles were tedious to read and didn't hold my interest. All in all, I thought it was a huge waste of money, but maybe the neophyte sportz addicts will think it's great.

I went back for one more look at "Z" for Zinedine (Z-don) Zidane, a seriously hunky French soccer star, and quickly put the magazines back where I got them. No one needs to really wonder if I'll make the big effort look at them again. Well, maybe . . . come mid-winter and I'm truly bored or next spring when I have cabin fever and I'm tired of walking up and down the four flights of stairs in the building to get my daily exercise.

One final thought: I do hope the recent flap that's been going on in Books, Magazines & Newspapers about exactly how many issues or how much of an authority a person has to be on a subject before they can review a specialty magazine is over. I do have legitimate reason for looking at sports magazines and knowing about sports even if I don't participate; I like looking at the hunky bodies.

? Ed Grover 2002