Sports Illustrated organizer relives its birth at Myrtle Beach

MYRTLE BEACH -- Myrtle Beach, and more specifically Pine Lakes Country Club, has long proclaimed itself the birthplace of Sports Illustrated.

The area has a right to make that assertion - sort of.

So says John Marin, and he would know.

Marin, 83, was a 27-year-old Time Inc. sales executive in 1954 when he was assigned to host and organize three days of meetings in April of that year at Pine Lakes to discuss the nation's first color weekly sports magazine.

Is Myrtle Beach the birthplace? It all depends on whether you consider a magazine's birth to be its conception or its formulation.

Marin said the idea of the weekly sports magazine was conceived prior to the meeting largely by Time Inc. patriarch Henry Luce and inaugural SI managing editor Sidney James, but it fully took shape during three days of meetings in Myrtle Beach.

"My guess is the concept was designed by several people over quite a long period of time," said Marin, who was in town to attend an SI commemorative dinner at Pine Lakes on Wednesday. "... This meeting was to see, how do we do it? Who is going to do what? It was to delineate responsibility,probably to give the final OK."

The business trip to Pine Lakes was solely to discuss Time Inc.'s new proposed sports division and weekly magazine. There were morning meetings, afternoon tee times at Pine Lakes and The Dunes Golf and Beach Club, and evening dinners and cocktail parties.

There were about 60 attendees. Invited were candidates for new responsibilities with the magazine, and successful department heads who weren't going to work in the sports division but could share their wisdom on how to make it successful. Invited speakers likely included sports figures, renowned sports writers and successful businessmen, though Marin can't recall for certain.

Marin said Time Inc. meetings at the time were generally meant to educate, instill enthusiasm and give employees a sense they were part of a special group and project. Oh, and to provide a great time.

"Time Inc. was a wonderful, friendly, courteous, convivial, fraternal place to work," Marin said. "Many, many people hoped to spend their whole careers there. The meetings were one reason. The one at Myrtle Beach wasn't a poor boy meeting. We ate well, we probably had good wines, we probably had other good things in bottles."

After discussing things such as possible editorial content, paper costs, circulation methods, and marketing and sales techniques, the question still remained: Could a color sports weekly succeed? Not everyone was so sure.

"There were many people who thought the risk financially was too great," Marin said. "It was an investment of many, many millions of dollars and something untested, unproven and new. It sounds great and it was, but nobody knew that. The inventor of the new machine hopes it works when he plugs it in."

How did Marin, who has graduate and undergraduate degrees from Stanford, become involved in the project after about a year in marketing for Life magazine? Well it all started at a urinal in an old office building in Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.

Marin was joined in adjoining stalls by a pair of august Time Inc. men: Harry Phillips, the first publisher of SI, and Stephen Kelly, later president of the Magazine Publishers Association.

"They stood on either side of me, and one of them said, 'There's one,' referring to me in the middle," Marin said. "The other said, 'I wonder if he'd like to go to work for us.' And the other said, 'On our new sports magazine.'

"We washed our hands, we shook hands, and they said, 'You're on.' Everybody who had ambition and liked sports at all would like to have had a new sports magazine assignment."

Marin was excited about his new position, though he didn't necessarily know what it was, as he quickly learned in a conversation with his wife. "I said, 'Well, I have a new job,'" Marin said. "And she said, 'What is it?' Then she said, 'Honey, when do you start?' And then she said, 'I hate to ask you this, but are they paying you anything?' That's how I was first employed [for SI]."

About six months later, he was running the meeting at Pine Lakes.

First, Marin was sent on a reconnaissance mission to Myrtle Beach in his 1953 red convertible MG TD sports car to survey the area and its facilities. He met with politicians and chamber of commerce representatives.

"The people I met were so very helpful," Marin said. "They were hopeful as well that a great big company, which we probably relatively were, would pick Myrtle Beach. They were genuinely decent. They looked you dead in the eye and said, 'What can we do to help?' And you need people like that."

The hospitality helped overcome any facility and infrastructure shortcomings the area had. With limited hotel rooms, Marin said he organized accommodations at a military school dormitory.

"The facilities [in Myrtle Beach] were barely, barely sufficient," Marin said.

In the end, Marin believes Time Inc. chose the appropriate place to launch the magazine.

The first edition featuring baseball player Eddie Matthews on the cover was dated Aug. 16, 1954.

"I don't know how Myrtle Beach was precisely selected, but it was the right place because it, too, was just beginning to burgeon," Marin said. "This was a great place to have begun."

Marin is pretty sure he knows why he was invited to Wednesday's commemorative dinner, and why he's considered the authority on the creation of SI.

"Maybe I'm the only one left from the original group who is still literate," Marin said.

"I have become [the authority] because of the fact I still breathe."