This is only peripherally about North Carolina, but the recent death of Jack LaLanne reminded me of his visit to Charlotte in 1981. He was promoting both his chain of fitness centers and his belief in intense physical exercise.
The latest issue of Sports Illustrated had profiled him, showing him posing with a statue of himself. The headline read, “Look, Mom, I’m an Institution.” He was 67 years old.
LaLanne had almost made the SI cover, he told me. “It was nip and tuck. They ended up putting that football coach on the cover. Yeah, Bear Bryant. I’m glad. They say when somebody gets his picture on the cover of Sports Illustrated, he goes downhill.”
Barely a year later Bryant was dead of a heart attack at age 69.
LaLanne lived to be 96.
I guess Michael Jordan was one of the few who escaped the “Sports Illustrated” cover jinx. Unless you count that baseball cover on March 14, 1993.
As a dulcimer musician, I don’t have to worry about being on their cover. I wonder if the Rolling Stone cover would have the same result? Playing my mountain dulcimer bores my audience to death. Dulcimers and death should not be in the same sentence. We miss Bear Bryant.
Zither man, Michael
Michael, you mean Shel Silverstein didnt have dulcimer players in mind when he wrote
We got all the friends that money can buy
So we never have to be alone
And we keep gettin’ richer but we can’t get our picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone….