This week's cover story on Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees marks the goth time that a figure in the sports world has been on the cover of TIME. The first athlete to appear was a hard-jawed, 28-year-old mauler by the name of Jack Dempsey. That was in September 1923. Two weeks later, he fought his famous match with Luis Angel ("Bull") Firpo, at which boxing fans paid a total of $1,888,822 to see Dempsey retain his world heavyweight championship in 3 minutes, 57 seconds of furious fighting.

In telling the sport news of the 30 years since then, TIME'S covers have ranged from boxing to jai alai, including stories on baseball, football, crew racing, chess, tennis, polo, ice hockey and skiing. Sport Editor Douglas Kennedy wrote this week's cover story, the seventh he has written since he came to TIME in '1950. Subjects of Kennedy's other cover stories: Sugar Ray Robinson, Dick Savitt, Princeton's Dick Kazmaier, Andrea Mead Lawrence, Eddie ("The Brat") Stanky, and Olympic Decathlon Champion Bob Mathias.

In 1923, when the TIME story on Dempsey appeared, Kennedy was a husky four-year-old punching his way through nursery school in Worcester, Mass. At Loomis prep school he resigned from the tennis team to organize a golf team. (He now shoots in the high 705 and feels that an ideal vacation is 36 holes of golf every day of the week.) After graduating from Brown University, he joined the Navy as an apprentice seaman, started his training as a "90day wonder," and elected to fight the war in small boats. He got his wish: skipper of a PT boat in the South Pacific, where he participated in the rescue of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, who had been adrift on a raft for 21 days. Later, Kennedy's squadron also rescued Lieut. John Kennedy (no kin, now the junior Senator from Massachusetts), whose boat had been rammed and sunk by a Jap destroyer.

Kennedy's next" assignment was Newport, R.I., as instructor to a group of Russian naval officers, teaching tactics and maintenance of PT boats to be delivered under Lend-Lease. Shortly after the Normandy invasion, he was nicked in the knee by a piece of German shrapnel. The next day in Cherbourg he met Ann Newdick, a Red Cross worker whom he married two months later in Paris.

After the war Kennedy went to work for his home-town paper, the Worcester, Mass. Telegram and Evening Gazette, and then joined the New York Herald Tribune as a sports writer. Says he: "My beat was so wide that I soon' became known as the decathlon man." Among his many titles: ski editor. That title and the experience came in handy when TIME'S editors picked the cover subject for the issue of Jan. 21, 1952. The subject: Andrea Mead Lawrence, a swivel-hipped girl of grace and speed, captain of the U.S. women's Olympic ski team.

Kennedy describes himself as a "fair but ardent" skier, who began in 1936 on Hill 70 in the Laurentians, site of one of the first ski tows to be erected in Canada. Since then he has covered the ski areas in the U.S. from Maine to California and most of those in Switzerland. In February 1950 he watched Andy Mead at Aspen, Colo. "She didn't do as well as expected," says Ken nedy, "but the next year she was winning all the big races in Europe and looked like a world beater." The same year, on a working vacation, Kennedy visited Switzerland and skied the Grindelwald slope where Andy was to compete in the Swiss championships.

Back in New York, when he sat down to write his cover story, Kennedy could draw on a firsthand memory of the breath-taking dive down the Grindelwald slalom course. Last month Kennedy's story on Andy Mead was reprinted in Best Sport Stories, 1953 (Dutton & Co.) as the best magazine sports story of the year.

Preparing for the Mantle story, Kennedy could rely on some other firsthand experiences. At Yankee Stadium last month he watched Outfielder Mantle in action through the longest nine-inning baseball game in history (3 hours, 52 minutes). Kennedy's patience was finally rewarded when Mantle stepped up to the plate and stolidly clouted his sixth homer of the season.

Cordially yours,

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