You don’t make it to 70 by blindly following every piece of advice you get, even if it comes from one of the great media visionaries of the 20th century. In early 1954, Henry Luce, the magazine magnate who founded Time, Life and Fortune, addressed a group of editors who had built a prototype for a weekly sports magazine. Luce was no jock, but he had commissioned the start-up because he recognized the increasingly prominent role sports, leisure and fandom were playing in postwar America.
Luce had just returned from Rome, where he had watched the Harlem Globetrotters play. (Or the “Globemasters,” as he called them.) He didn’t exactly fall in love with the sport. “I am impressed with what you all have done and I’m impressed with the concept of the magazine,” Luce told the group. “But let there be not a word in it about that game basketball.”
