Player, 77, puts body on line

He may be 77 but legendary South African golfer Gary Player wasn’t afraid to reveal all for the 2013 ESPN Body Issue which hit newsstands in the US yesterday.

The nine-time Grand Slam winner is the oldest sports-person to ever appear in the publication, but Player said his mission was clear: to try and send a message out about the benefits of healthy eating and the dangers of obesity.

Player didn’t look out of place besides the 19 other male and female athletes chosen for this year’s issue and he was one of the eight cover stars whittled down by editors to front the campaign.

ESPN’s small battalion of imaginative photographers created a stunning array of pictures that caused the usual stir, despite the low profile of many of the subjects.

Kerri Walsh Jennings, a beach volleyball superstar in the US who won her third of three consecutive Olympic gold medals in London last year with Misty May-Treanor, was a powerful choice; she was nine months pregnant for her first shoot and her new baby girl joined her for the follow-up three months later.

Walsh Jennings told ESPN that she was nervous about the prospect, saying, “these are strong, empowered people who are at the peak of their fitness and then look at me, I’m pregnant”.

Player, meanwhile, was supremely confident about his appearance on the front cover.

“Very few people do what I’m doing at my age,” said the Johannesburg native whose Mr Fitness nickname reflected in his photographs.

“I want to show the world how fit you can be at this age and not just accept being old. I still work on my ranch, I represent a lot of companies, I do golf course design, I’m travelling seven months a year. You’ve got to keep moving. If you sit and watch TV on your backside all day, you’re going to die.

“Posing in the magazine is just part of my plan. My big dream now is to help people become healthy. Obesity, as far as I’m concerned, is the greatest problem facing the planet at the moment. What worries me is there is nothing worse than when you see children getting all of these diseases now.

“Look at our foods; our foods have steroids in them, antibiotics. People are overeating and eating all kinds of fatty foods and high sugars and junk. We have a massive challenge. It’s actually easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle than to get the average man to worry about diet and exercise.”

Player told ESPN he was “ridiculed” in his early golfing days for his workout routine, but it never bothered him.

“It’s the reason I won 18 championships! I’m the only man who won the career Grand Slam on the regular tour and the Grand Slam on the senior tour. The only reason I did that was my fitness.”

Another front cover star was Colin Kaepernick, the young quarterback who almost single-handedly took the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl last season. As his profile grew, a couple of traditionally-minded NFL observers criticised his elaborately tattooed physique, with one particularly regrettable column comparing him to a convict.

“I didn’t just walk into a tattoo shop and say, ‘hey, I want that thing on the wall’. All my tattoos were planned more than a year before I got them. I think if people knew what tattoos mean to people, they wouldn’t feel the same way about them.

“Kissing my biceps started from the whole tattoo controversy. I’d kiss ‘Faith’ on my right bicep. That was my way of showing that I love my tattoos, and regardless of what anyone else thinks, they mean something to me.”