Excerpt: How ESPN Magazine’s iconic Destiny’s Child Cover Came Together

NBA writer and radio personality/producer Alex Wong tackles what went into pulling off some of basketball’s most iconic magazine covers from 1984-2003 in his book Cover Story, which released in October.

Cover Story shares the results from 100-plus interviews conducted with writers, editors, publishers, photographers, creative directors, and the players themselves, to deliver insight on such pieces of NBA and pop culture history as: Michael Jordan’s relationship with Sports Illustrated, Shaquille O’Neal and the hip-hop generation’s impact on newsstands, and the birth of SLAM and the inside stories of their most iconic covers.

One chapter in the book details the perfect storm behind the iconic ESPN the Magazine cover in 2000 that helped put Destiny’s Child over.

The following excerpt from ‘Cover Story’’s “Destiny’s Child” chapter by Alex Wong is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or TriumphBooks.com/CoverStory:

The Golden State Warriors had a 1–13 record in 1997 when [coach] P.J. Carlesimo held a closed practice with his team. The head coach wasn’t thrilled with Sprewell’s effort during a passing drill and reportedly told him to “put a little mustard on those passes.” Neither has spoken about precisely what happened next, but when Carlesimo approached Sprewell, the Warriors guard responded by choking his head coach and was suspended for the remaining 68 games of the regular season. Sprewell hinted at the verbal spat between the two having crossed the line in a later interview, saying his family was disrespected in the exchange. 

“You have to be careful about who you step to and how you step to them,” Jackson said. “He stepped to Latrell in a very foul way. Especially as a Black human being, there’s a slave-owner dynamic that still exists in a lot of workplaces. I think what I heard was he had called Latrell a ‘boy.’ Like, yo. That’s it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the N-word. It was a situation where I’m not saying Latrell was right, but I understood.” 

The ESPN editors looked at each other and collectively said no to Jackson’s pitch to write a story supporting Sprewell’s actions in their magazine. 

What they didn’t know was Jackson already published the story.  

It was in Source Sports. 

“I said, ‘Alright, the meeting’s over,’” he recalled. “They were like, ‘What do you mean?’ I told them, ‘I have the freedom at other places to do that. Why would I leave my freedom to come to a place where I’ve got handcuffs on?’” 

Source Sports was a creative highpoint for Dave Mays and his editorial team. The magazine grew more ambitious with their feature ideas as their readership grew, organizing a roundtable discussion with Black NFL quarterbacks, and expanding their coverage to include wrestling, tennis, and major league baseball. Source Sports moved to a bi-monthly publishing schedule in 2000 and were on equal footing with SLAM and ESPN the Magazine when it came to their cultural footprint. They were engaging with a younger and hipper audience than traditional sports magazines. 

“Sports Illustrated was so boring and had no flavor. They were your dad’s magazine,” Mays said. “When ESPN the Magazine came along and marketed themselves as this younger and cooler sports magazine, it validated my vision for Source Sports.” 

A series of poor business decisions at The Source led to the magazine’s downfall just as they appeared primed to be ESPN the Magazine’s competitor for the next decade. Mays had taken out a $12 million loan in 1999 and invested a large amount of money into growing his company’s digital presence. 

“I was falling behind on my loan payments,” he explained. “I was a 19-year-old who started a business without any investors or bank loans. I bootstrapped The Source from a one-page newsletter to a business that was doing $30 million in revenue every year by the late 1990s. But my biggest mistake was betting the farm on the dot com boom. I put the company in debt. That was the beginning of the end.” 

Mays called an impromptu meeting with Wilder in 2001 as he was preparing ideas for the next issue of Source Sports. “He was standing right there with an exit package for me,” Wilder recalled. “He said, ‘I F****ed up, man. We have to shut down the magazine.’ I was fired. It was completely out of nowhere.” It was one thing for a magazine to shut down because it didn’t have an audience. The news was especially crushing to Wilder and the rest of the editorial staff because they knew Source Sports was just starting to grow. “I was devastated,” Wilder said. “We were working toward something.” 

ESPN the Magazine’s circulation grew to 2 million subscribers five years after their debut. Source Sports has been largely forgotten today.  

“It was just bad timing,” said Jackson. “Magazines are about three things: idea, execution, and timing. Source Sports was a great idea, and it was executed well. But you have to have all three. They only had two.” 

BEYONCÉ KNOWLES, MICHELLE WILLIAMS, and KELLY ROWLAND arrived at a Houston studio in the fall of 2000 for an ESPN the Magazine cover shoot. Bembry’s idea was approved after a follow-up pitch. He supervised the shoot with his 11-year-old daughter Ashley, who got to spend three hours in the dressing room hanging out with her favorite R&B group. “She was so happy,” Bembry recalled. “It was probably more amazing for her than it was for me.” 

When Francis finally arrived with teammate Cuttino Mobley, the photoshoot was delayed again. A Rockets team official had gotten lost on his way to the studio while bringing the jersey and shorts required for the cover photo. The Destiny’s Child members waited patiently. “No one was looking at their watch,” Bembry recalled. “Sometimes, at a photoshoot, the PR person will say, ‘Alright, our time is almost up.’ That never happened with them. Everybody was on the same page. This was also introducing them to a new audience, so I’m sure they were happy and willing to give us as much time as possible.” 

Photographer Marc Baptiste remembers seeing Francis’ larger-than-life personality shrink in the presence of his fellow cover subjects. “Steve was shy,” he recalled. “But you’re going to get a little shy whenever you’re around Beyoncé.” Baptiste brought the cover subjects on set and handed Francis a basketball to pose with when everyone was finally ready. “His body language just changed once I put it in his hands,” he said. “He was in his element. This was his world.” 

The vision for the cover photo was to portray Francis as a superhero and have Destiny’s Child as his heroines. 

Francis stood alongside Knowles, Williams, and Rowland on the cover of ESPN the Magazine’s 2000 NBA preview issue. The three R&B group members stood in matching white outfits with Francis as the standout in his Rockets jersey. The cover line, written in graffiti font, said DESTINY’S CHILD. 

Today it is remembered as one of ESPN the Magazine’s most iconic magazine covers. It required Bembry’s brilliant idea, Baptiste’s execution, and the wonderful timing of Beyoncé appearing as a secondary cover subject next to Francis before she would go on to become a pop culture icon. 

As they say: idea, execution, and timing.

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*Note: Forbes contributor Scott King is a senior publicist for IPG and overseeing publicity for ‘Neil Young on Neil Young’.