to be third

Jesse Marinoff Reyes:

I AM THIRD
Penguin Books, 2001
Photograph: archival (via Bettman/Corbis)
Design: Jesse Marinoff Reyes
Art Director: Paul Buckley

Happy Birthday to the “Kansas Comet,” Gale Sayers (b. 1943)!

---The best part of Paul's involvement in this cover was he let me do my thing. He knew (from experience) when to sit back and enjoy the show. There are art directors who can't do that.---JMR

I AM THIRD refers to 1) God, 2) Family, then 3) himself. The NFL Hall-of-Famer and all-time great running back, before knee injuries forced him from the game prematurely—easier fixed today, but maybe it’s just as well knowing what we do now about continuous head injuries in football—has gone on to become one of the country’s top executives (his profile on Bloomberg Businessweek is phenomenally impressive).

This edition of I AM THIRD was done for the occasion of its 30th anniversary, and for the broadcast of a new teleplay of Brian’s Song—based on Sayer’s account in I AM THIRD of his friendship with a white teammate, Brian Piccolo, who was suffering from terminal cancer. The original broadcast in 1971 starred James Caan as Piccolo and Billy Dee Williams as Sayers (the new version featured Sean Maher as Piccolo and Mekhi Phifer as Sayers), and is considered the finest teleplay ever made. Notable because of its depiction of Sayers’ friendship with Piccolo and its effect on race relations in the turbulent aftermath of the 1960s. The (first) film was made in the wake of escalating racial tensions fueled by the Martin Luther King assassination and the race riots that ignited across the country in those years. That Sayers and Piccolo were devoted friends who were deeply respectful of one other, even closer than brothers—Piccolo helped Sayers through rehabilitation after injury, and Sayers was by Piccolo’s side throughout his illness—was a powerful endorsement of humanity over racism, ignorance, and fear. In the age when the network viewing audience could be counted in the tens of millions, on both sides of the racial divide, it was a remarkable presentation to the entire country.


But how to repackage it 30 years later? Both the original hardcover and the first paperback editions followed the norms of the day for sports biographies and/or successful TV tie-ins. The first edition jacket sported one of Leroy Neiman’s colorful, impressionistic paintings of Sayers in game action (“sports biography”). The subsequent Bantam paperback was illustrated in a more realistic style reminiscent of a movie poster montage, with Sayers and Piccolo juxtaposed prominently (“TV tie-in,” almost, but no actors). So the “sports biography” and the derived teleplay are by this point, entwined as one. My choice was to take it back to the late-1960s-early-1970s, in graphic terms. Almost like reimagining it as if it were an actual movie poster from that time. Teleplays tend not to have posters, but what if it had been released in theaters? It was certainly excellent enough to have been (not your average “made for TV” bit of pablum). Sports, in the ESPN-era of today, are much more a part of our general pop culture than it had been even in Sayer’s day. This was an opportunity to use that sensibility—try something more graphic and hip—than would have been done back then, but could have been (imagine that last bit in italics).

Football is really a big, action movie after all. Why not approach it in those terms? What would be hard hitting enough? What would be cool enough—what would someone of Sayer’s generation have thought would be cool enough? I thought of the so-called “Blaxploitation” movies like Shaft, Superfly, and The Mac. Say what you will of the range of cinematic quality of those films, but what they all had in common were extremely cool, graphic posters—that made the most dramatic use of the typographic stylizations of the time, whether post-psychedelic (as for Superfly) or just big, powerful, masculine typography that were both hip and macho. Incidentally, this was not too far off from the way the NFL promoted itself in those years (before they became the nation’s go-to sport of choice, while baseball was still America’s pastime and boxing could command the big money, the NFL hired the best graphic artists to design programs, posters, and promotional books to promote itself). Then it was a matter of treating the image.

I knew immediately that I wanted to use the classic, NFL-style promo shots that were done for the era’s stars, with poses that harkened to the Heisman Trophy’s straight-arm block, that sort of thing, but not as a “straight” photo reproduction. It needed to be graphic, again like movie posters. Broadening my scope, I looked at the breadth of action movie poster images from the latter ’60s through the early ’70s, in particular looking at the graphic treatment of photography. The next model of inspiration became Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (using a treatment that was common during those years).

With the help of a colleague of mine at the time, the excellent Jae Song, who figured out how to do in Photoshop what had been so easy to do back in the day when I could shoot


a stat camera. Breaking the photo down into a highlights, mid-tones, and high contrast line—then applying a color to each. Very common in 1971. A pain in the you-know-what in 2001 with #&@$# software that wasn’t meant to be used quite that way. So Dirty Harry gave us the image stylization to work with, Shaft inspired the typography.

Luckily for me, Gale Sayers thought it was pretty cool.

——————————-

Yes, Endless Summer was also an influence! It’s what used to be called “posterization” (now nobody knows what’s meant by that). Wish I could design like this all the time, party like it’s 1971…I quote my friend and mentor Art Chantry, with words I now live by: “Every time technology takes a step forward, I take two steps back just to keep up.”…

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