Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx

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The Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx is a myth that states that individuals or teams who appear on the cover of the Sports Illustrated magazine will experience bad luck at varying lengths into the future.

When Major League Baseball player Eddie Mathews, pictured on the cover of Volume 1, Issue 1, suffered a hand injury a week later that forced him to miss seven games, the "Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx" — also known as "The Dreaded SI Cover Jinx" — was born, as some noted that bad things seemed to happen to people and teams soon after they appeared on the magazine's cover.

While the list of "examples" of the jinx may be extensive, an individual record 49 cover appearances by Michael Jordan did not hinder his success. ^[1]

SI addressed their own cover jinx in a 2002 issue that featured a black cat on the cover.

[edit] Explanation

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The most common explanation for the perceived effect is the observation that only an athlete who was at the pinnacle of his career would be featured on the cover, and that his career could only go downhill from that point. This subsequent decline in performance would then be perceived as being related to, or even possibly caused by, his appearance on the magazine cover. This perceived correlation would be present for a statistically significant number of featured athletes.

This explanation does not, of course, apply to rookies who are prominent enough to be featured relatively early in their careers. Such athletes could be perceived as being unaffected by, or even "immune" to, the jinx.

This explanation also assumes that athletes are featured only after they have achieved a fairly high level of fame, which has taken at least half of the total timespan of their careers to attain, before being considered as a cover subject.