This week, I have been thinking about great magazine covers of the past that pushed the boundaries of good taste and sense. Unless you have been sleeping in a cave or playing golf in Nepal, you know that Kelly Tilghman of the Golf Channel made an insensitive on-air comment that PGA tour players might consider lynching Tiger Woods in a back alley as the only way to keep him from winning. After understandable outrage, Golf Channel suspended Ms. Tilghman for two weeks. It should be noted that Tiger, who is a friend of Tilghman's, left word that it was no big deal as far as he was concerned. Tiger was the only winner of the
week.
GolfWeek Editor Dave Seanor and his staff figured that a noose on the cover of their magazine would get attention and capture, in a most graphic way, the gist of the story. Seanor must have missed the class on being careful what you wish for. His skittish bosses fired him, sending a message that squirting a little kerosene on a fire is a more punishable offense than setting it in the first place.
The controversy about the GolfWeek cover sent me back decades. The two best magazine covers in my lifetime were both politically incorrect, if not racially insensitive. One, for the now defunct National Lampoon in 1973, showed the face of a cute dog with a gun pointed at its head. The tagline read: "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll shoot this dog." Rabid dog owners hated it, but no one was fired. Such excess was expected of a magazine with "lampoon" in its name ("GolfWeek" doesn't have that same edgy ring.)
The other memorable cover was a photograph in a 1968 Esquire magazine showing 
Muhammad Ali, who had refused induction into the military weeks earlier, pierced by six arrows and in the pose of the martyred St. Sebastian, the patron saint of athletes. A noose around his neck might have made a similar point, but the Esquire editors chose wisely and well.
Two years ago, the American Society of Magazine Editors included these two images on its list of 40 most memorable covers of all time. Most of the covers are edgy and politically incorrect. There isn't a noose among them, but the next time ASME compiles a memorable list, there will be.