Throwback Thursday time! Everybody remembers Bruce Jenner's iconic Sports Illustrated cover from 1976, but how many people had this gem in their collection? The former Olympian, now 65, posed shirtless for Playgirl in May 1982, gracing the cover with then-wife Linda Thompson, to whom he was married from 1981 to 1986.
"Bruce Jenner: The Fall and Rise of an American Hero," the headline touted. (Note the other cover lines, too: Anyone else curious about that "Perfect Man," who's "Part Redford, Reynolds, Reeve…"?)
The cover was shot six years after Jenner won gold in the decathlon at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada, and two years after he was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
At the time, he and Thompson had been married for just a little over a year, and had welcomed their first child, Brandon, 11 months earlier, in June 1981. They also had a second son, Brody, a year after the Playgirl shoot, in 1983.
The cover has resurfaced a few times over the years as Jenner's fame has grown, thanks in large part to his family's reality show Keeping Up With the Kardashians. His daughter Kendall Jenner — the older of his two kids with ex-wife Kris Jenner — even posted it to Instagram in 2012.
"#tbt," she captioned the pic, which got more than 148,000 likes. "my father on Playgirl lol."
