50 years of Sports Illustrated

Each week, the Browser features some pop-culture places on the World Wide Web offering the coolest in free interactive sounds and action.

Sports Illustrated magazine has created an online archive of its incredible coverage from the past 50 years and is offering it free to online visitors.

The SI Vault (https://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com) is an overwhelming treasure chest for the sports junkie and sets a welcome — albeit slightly unsettling — benchmark for the free flow of information from a publisher’s archived content. Unsettling, that is, for other publishers who now must reconfigure their profit models to compete against the Vault.

Visitors who can get past the unassuming and bland opening screen and just start clicking on navigation menus or images will dive almost blindly into sports moments entrenched in the thrill of victory and agony of defeat.

Sections such as Articles, Photos, Galleries, Video and Covers lead visitors on a historical journey through professional and amateur competitions told and photographed by some of the industry leaders of sports journalism.

Offering 150,000 stories, 2,800 covers and 500,000 photographs from the pages of the magazine, the site’s best navigation feature is a large search box and drop-down menu that breaks content into 11 sport possibilities, including NFL, NBA, MLB, High School, NASCAR, Tennis, Golf and College Basketball.

Just type in “Michael Jordan,” for example, and find more than 1,768 pieces. The results include a compilation of a 1991 NBA Finals game (pulled from YouTube), a photo gallery devoted to the all-time greatest dunkers and a 1989 article by Jack McCallum quizzing Mr. Jordan on his statistics.

How can anyone not revel in this type of fun?

Or, look up former NBA star Bill Walton. He graced the cover of Sports Illustrated 13 times, and visitors get to see every one, as well as learn about his years at the University of California, Los Angeles in the article, “Bill Loves to Eat ’Em Up,” by William F. Reed from March 6, 1972.

Most impressive is the ability to look at many complete, scanned issues. A slick pop-up reader completely delivers each of the issues’ pages so visitors can zoom into articles or quickly move, through thumbnails, the pages to pull up and enjoy the content.

Want to read the March 17, 1958, article, “Sal Maglie and the Art of Pitching?” How about a World Series preview from Oct. 2, 1961, with a cover of the New York Yankees’ Roger Maris swinging for the fence? Every page is brought back from a dusty attic to a computer screen.

The back-in-the-day ads from that 1961 issue also will deliver a nostalgia trip and maybe a chuckle. Check out the Don Drysdale Vitalis hair tonic ad on page 8; it is classic.

In addition to all the media, the SI Wiki section — the community contribution element to the site — has tapped into the ArmchairGM (www.armchair gm.com) encyclopedia to offer a Wikipedia-type experience for armchair experts to add their two cents to an ever-expanding resource.

If nonexpert visitors are willing to trust the facts presented (reliability in the free-for-all world of contributed information is always an adventure), they will devour, or possibly add to, such entries as the starting lineup for the Chicago Cubs from 1874 to 1909 or a biography of famed Yankees’ catcher Thurmon Munson.

One last piece of the site definitely worth a mention is access to the legendary swimsuit issues of Sports Illustrated (https://sports illustrated.cnn.com/swimsuit/ collection), broken into galleries featuring more than 100 of the models and all of the covers.

The entire SI Vault package is pretty much a dream come true for the sports fan in the family.

Have a cool site for the online multimedia masses? Write to Joseph Szadkowski at the Browser, The Washington Times, 3600 New York Ave. NE, Washington, DC 20002; call 202/636-3016; or send e-mail to jszadkowski@washington times.com).