Mexican-born model Elsa Benitez graced the cover of
Sports Illustrated's
famous swimsuit issue in 2001. Her career seemed off to a promising
start, but she took a break from the fast-paced fashion world to study
acting and become a mother. She and her husband, former Miami Heat
player Rony Seikaly, became parents to daughter Mila in 2003.
Born
in 1977, Benitez is a native of Hermosillo, capital city of the
northwest Mexican state of Sonora, about an hour's drive from the Gulf
of California. Hermosillo, which lies on the Sonora River, is home to a
Ford Motor Company manufacturing plant where the Escort model was once
made, and is a thriving agricultural center as well. Growing up, Benitez
idolized one of the top models of the 1980s, Linda Evangelista. As a
young woman, she reached five feet, ten inches in height, and won a
model-search contest in Costa Rica in 1995. She soon began finding work
in Latin America, and then signed with Elite Model Management, the
agency founded by John Casablancas and later run by Evangelista's
husband, Gerald Marie.
Benitez first came to international
attention modeling in Europe, and her nascent career was boosted
immensely when influential photographer Steven Meisel began working with
her. In 1996 she appeared on three covers of Italian
Vogue. She
also became a favorite of Italian designers Dolce e Gabbana, and
appeared in their spring/summer collections shown in Milan in October of
1996. Stefano Gabbana told a writer for London's
Observer
newspaper, Roger Tredre, that he and Domenico Dolce felt that Benitez
"embodies the Mediterranean woman," Gabbana enthused. "Her beauty
reminds us of the actresses of the neo-realist Italian cinema, like Anna
Magnani." At the time of the interview, Benitez still spoke just
rudimentary English.
Benitez went on to work for designers Oscar
de la Renta, Valentino, and Rena Lange; she has appeared in ad campaigns
for Episode, J. Crew, and Nine West. Her biggest career coup, however,
came early in 2001 when she appeared on the cover of
Sports Illustrated's
annual swimsuit issue. Under the heading "Goddesses of the
Mediterranean," the model's sultry photo was captioned, "Elsa Benitez
Heats Up Tunisia." The issue—a February tradition—is centered around an
immense promotional blitz, and sales ordinarily hit the $50-million
mark. Some of the world's top models had graced the
SI cover
before Benitez, among them Heidi Klum, Tyra Banks, Elle MacPherson,
Christie Brinkley, and Cheryl Tiegs. Launched in 1964 as a way to lure
readers during a slow sports-story month, the swimsuit issue grew racier
over the years, and the exotic locales of its shoots are usually kept
top-secret. "No matter where the magazine drapes its models, though, the
issue manages to do one thing no other feature can: it gathers sports
fans of every stripe beneath a single umbrella," noted a
Financial Times
report. "With the swimsuit issue in hand, no one complains that
baseball lacks action, that hockey is too violent, that football is for
those too fat or too dumb to play hockey."
Benitez's
career for the rest of the year seemed promising: she became the
spokesperson for Budweiser and Bud Light, and also appeared in ads for
the Taco Bell fast-food chain and its new stuffed burrito menu item. One
television commercial for the product featured a dream sequence of her
walking past two men, who are enamored of the burrito she is carrying,
not her. "Agency creatives said the Mexican-born Benitez will help the
product earn quick recognition with fickle fast-food customers," wrote
Justin M. Norton in
AD-WEEK Western Edition. A representative of
the San Francisco-based advertising agency involved, Tom O'Keefe, told
the trade journal that Benitez "is the ideal spokesperson, because she
perfectly embodies the essence of the product."
Benitez appeared again in the 2002
SI swimsuit issue. The
New York Post reported in March of 2002 that
Sports Illustrated had struck a deal with the Playboy magazine empire to publish some of the other photos from the shoot in the German edition of
Playboy.
Some of the models—Klum and Eva Herzigova among them—objected to the
deal, claiming that the models had not been consulted, and had not
signed waivers allowing the publication of outtakes from the shoot in
which they were nude in some cases.
Benitez seemed to drop out
of the public eye afterward, however. She wed Rony Seikaly, whom she
had met in 1997, and was dividing her time between their homes in Miami
and New York City. The basketball player, who retired from the New
Jersey Nets in 2000, was the first Lebanese player in NBA history, and
stands at an impressive six feet, eleven inches. Seikaly was nonplussed
by the attention his wife usually received in public. "I've always said
I'm the luckiest guy in the world, not because she's beautiful on the
outside, but because she's beautiful on the inside, too," Seikaly once
told the
New York Post. Benitez gave birth to daughter Mila in
February of 2003. She has begun taking acting lessons and harbors an
ambition for a film career, in both Spanish- and English-language
productions.
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