But SI, long the standard-bearer of American fandom, didn’t always feel that way. This was something I knew vaguely, having perused old-timey back issues as a kid, but I never tried to quantify it until today.

At its 1954 inception, Sports Illustrated recognized that getting out and interacting with nature could be sport—in fact, it represented some of our most hallowed sports traditions. That first year, three of the magazine’s 20 issues featured outdoor activities on the cover, including two wildlife-only covers (for our purposes, I counted anything involving hunting, fishing, hiking, birdwatching and general wilderness exploration as an ‘outdoors’ cover. Skiing, sailboat racing, bike racing and the like were left out since they do sometimes rate significant media coverage nowadays and are more structured…and because it’s my admittedly arbitrary system).

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