“I was merely an observer,” Jennifer Wulff said when I called. “It was not me!”
Some of this is a little foggy because it has been 22 years since it all went down. For example, Wulff couldn’t remember who was on the cover of the “Sexiest Man Alive” issue that year, but when reminded that it was actually Harrison Ford, she burst out laughing. “Oooh, that was a bad choice, too!” she said. “It was already doomed.”
Wulff was only in her second or third year at People, but she knew how things worked. Every year the magazine put out a “Sexiest Man” issue, so every year the staff writers and correspondents at People had to select not only their pick for the overall Sexiest Man Alive — the guy who would smile on the cover — but also their picks for Sexiest Men in roughly a dozen assorted categories:
Sexiest Rock Star. Sexiest Politician. Sexiest Survivor.
Best as Wulff can remember, all the People staffers and correspondents were on a conference call when someone, somewhere blurted out, “The Kansas City quarterback is really hot.” It was eventually decided that, yes, the Kansas City quarterback would be that year’s Sexiest Athlete Alive.
“Somehow,” she said, laughing more now, “the photos came back and the interview came back,” (even more laughter), “and we were like, ‘What the hell? This is not …'” (a cascade of laughs).
According to Wulff, the photo editors called in the staff to look at the pictures that would run in the magazine, and it didn’t take long for everyone in the room to realize that something had gone wrong. “One of the editors said, ‘This is the guy?’ Then we were looking it up and figured out that it was the other quarterback.”
As in Gannon, Grbac’s backup.
“And then it was too late,” Wulff said. “They felt so bad. We couldn’t cancel it at that point. It would be so mean.”
