Yelich will appear naked in ESPN's 'Body Issue'
Milwaukee Brewers MVP slugger Christian Yelich will take part in an unusual tradition when he appears in ESPN the Magazine's Body Issue, set to go live online Sept. 4. ESPN announced its roster for the showcase of elite-athlete physique, featuring several (carefully posed) pictures of the athletes naked.
Early portions of the feature, spotlighting golfer Brooks Koepka, are already online.
Yelich talked Monday afternoon about doing the photo shoot in late July, which he said was staged in a warehouse in downtown Milwaukee and took four hours to complete.
"They did some really cool things," Yelich said. "I had a great time.
"They asked me if I wanted to do it. Somebody brought it up as a possibility in the offseason and I kind of forgot about it. Then, it came back up at some point. Hey, 'You can do it if you want to.' I took a few days to think about it and I talked to my buddies about it. I decided to go through with it and I'm actually really happy that I did.
"It's probably my favorite shoot I've ever done. I had that good of a time. It was really fun. It was probably 20-25 people on the set."
What made Yelich decide now was the time to do it?
"I'm at a position in my life where I felt it was something that I wanted to do. I was not really worried about the whole 'being naked' thing. I was kind of 'whatever' about that, surprisingly. I didn't really know how I was going to be with that. I didn't know if I would be nervous or not but I was super comfortable with it, and had a great time. The crew was super professional with it."
You will recall that former Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder participated in the feature in 2014. Speaking of athletes on the heftier side baring it all, Milwaukee native Brandon Brooks will also participate in the 2019 feature with other members of the Philadelphia Eagles offensive line.
Brooks, a Milwaukee Riverside graduate who played college football at Miami University in Ohio, won a Super Bowl ring with the Eagles two seasons ago.
Yelich said he had no idea which photos of him will be used in the magazine, which has final say in that regard.
"I don't get to choose which ones they use," he said. "It was about a four-hour shoot, so there are a lot of pictures. I don't know how that works. A lot of different things I ended up doing. They've been doing this such a long time, you know they're going to do a good job."
Yelich said some of the photos included using "kind of a slip-and-slide thing they built. There's some hitting ones, some fielding ones. It was really cool."
Asked tongue-in-cheek if Brewers fans are going to see a different side of him, Yelich smiled and said, 'Yeah, basically everything.'"
"You go into it knowing a lot of people are going to see these pictures," he added. "You can't really be shy. You have to be confident in yourself. It's not necessarily something I would have done a few years ago. I feel like I've come a long way as a person.”
The magazine hits newsstands Sept. 6, its final appearance in print after 21 years. ESPN announced in April the magazine would continue online with the same types of stories.