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They had to be well written. Sports Illustrated had to be the best written, or one of the best written, magazines, and still is today. I have found myself reading all sorts of stories in Sports Illustrated about all sorts of subjects in which I have absolutely no interest, just because of the quality of the writing. So Andre did that.

It didn't solve the advertising problem, but we did find an answer to that. I think I may have even done that. Namely, their advertising promotion efforts were all directed at their immediate competition--Holiday, you know, Town and Country. All the fancy, relatively small magazines. If SI had gotten all of the pot it would just have broken even. It obviously wasn't going to get it, because it couldn't compete against a tennis magazine, or a yachting magazine, or Holiday, because each in its own area was better. So, I was sent down as a seventh doctor to the publishing arena of SI. I was sent down as the seventh doctor, and I mean literally seventh doctor because Linen had been down, one person after another had been in there to try to solve the sales problem of Sports Illustrated.

I came to the conclusion that I just mentioned--that they were competing against people who were not worth beating, because there just wasn't enough money in that part. I finally convinced them, and it was quite hard to sell themselves as the fourth news weekly. One can understand that this seemed like a rather wild and ambitious idea, but I said, “Look, the money is in the news weekly pot. The money isn't where you're trying to get it. You will never get it there. You have no choice but to go in the other direction. So now we've got to make all our promotion and all our selling plans based