Changing His Stripes

Reporting this week's Tiger Woods cover story, John Garrity trailed the world's top-ranked golfer for six months and more than 30,000 air miles, playing six holes with Woods in Hawaii, following him to Dubai (where Woods is designing his first course) and sitting down with him in Los Angeles. What Garrity found was not the kid who's been fist-pumping his way through golf for the last decade but a man entering a new phase of life--advancing on Jack Nicklaus's record of 18 majors with a baby on the way, a new job, a new business, a controversial new tournament and without his father. It's a story that's as nuanced as its subject and easier to read--especially approaching the 2007 Masters Tournament, at which Tiger is going for his third straight major win.

Also in anticipation of the Masters, the SI Golf Group has reinvented GOLF.com, combining the resources of SI Golf Plus and Golf Magazine to serve fans and avid players with news, instruction, equipment reviews, travel guides and handicap tracking. Add videos from Golf's Top 100 Teachers and multimedia features like David Feherty's regular video commentary, "Fly on the Ball," and you have the most complete golf site online. All free.

The magazine received nearly 800 letters about the cover story on global warming (Going, Going Green, March 12)--most of them taking issue with the subject matter and suggesting that SI stick to sports and pay more attention to business as usual. In fact, aggressive coverage of environmental issues is part of the magazine's DNA. In its first full year, 1955, SI ran a piece by Wallace Stegner on the increasing stress on national parks. In 1960 the magazine supported a new science called "social conservation" and noted, "Today it is man himself who is in danger of becoming a victim of the industrial civilization he has spread so vigorously across the land." Throughout the rest of the century SI writers and photographers covered oil spills, endangered species, water and air pollution, acid rain, habitat loss, strip-mining and numerous environmental land-use battles from the Everglades to Alaska. In the 1987 story Forecast for Disaster, Robert H. Boyle explained the increasingly disturbing prospect of global warming and the then newly minted "greenhouse effect." With climate modeling, Boyle even constructed a mock weather report from the year 2030 that, he said, read like a Weekend Update from Saturday Night Live but was in fact possible. Reading it today--with its descriptions of devastating hurricanes, rising seas, flooding and drought--is chilling.

These stories were always controversial. This time some readers suggested they didn't want Al Gore running the magazine. Chicken Little was also mentioned. Other letters pointed out that Mars is warming, and one contained a lefthanded reference to the earth's being flat: "Why are you buying into that stuff? There's no more 'scientific consensus' on global warming than there is that the earth is flat." The temptation, of course, was to run a correction that read, "The earth is flat. SI regrets the error."

Instead, SI will continue to cover environmental issues and their impact on sports.