NEWSSTANDS around the country are featuring a bizarre collection of magazine covers this month.

Playboy's latest cover girl is heavy-weight boxer Mike Tyson. Meanwhile, prominent sports magazines display scantily-clad women prancing around on tropical shores.

It is not collegiate or international swimmers who appear in so many glossy photos this month, but models wearing suits with prices that vary inversely with surface area. Hockey, apparently, becomes dull after a few months. So Sports Illustrated, Inside Sport and Sport all sell out to quasiporn.

The problem with swimsuit issues is that they have nothing to do with sports. When major magazines devote most of an issue to beach photo sessions, they cheapen their real subject matter.

Swimsuit issues insult the admirable qualities of athletics that enable these magazines to survive in the first place. They equate the appeals of athletics with junior-high titillation.

Of course the human body is a thing of beauty and the inspiration for legitimate works of art. However, photos of Kathy Ireland rolling around in Mexican sand dunes are not art. Even if they were, they would not belong in a sports magazine.

Sports today is already suffering from an identity crisis and image problem. Because professional sports rely on gate receipts and television contracts, they often tread a thin line between athletics for athletics' sake and banal entertainment.

A variety of sports have also been damaged by recent drug scandals involving professional and amateur athletes, culminating in sprinter Ben Johnson's disqualification from the Seoul Olympics because of possible drug use.

Sports will not regain its integrity by embracing Ireland and the $80.00 Brazilian bikini.

BUT if this month's issues are irrelevant to sports, they are also irrelevant to swimsuits. These magazines have no deeply rooted interest in beach apparel, only in what they leave exposed. How soon are we likely to see the Sports Illustrated full-length evening gown issue?

Perhaps publishers really believe that a model carrying a surfboard sheds light on some vital aspect of either surfing or current beach fashion. But the more probable explanation for the wave of February cheesecake issues is money.

Yesterday's swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated attracted scores more pages of advertisements than did last week's coverage of the most dramatic Superbowl in years. And last year's issue attracted double the regular readership.

The overwhelming success of SI's swimsuit issue, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, has forced all other sports magazines on the stands to follow in this ludicrous trend.

The publicity is as huge as the issue itself. A giant poster of last year's SI cover girl Elle Macpherson has been hanging in the window of Out of Town News for the past week. The last issue to command such attention was not about the Olympics but featured Elle's 1988 photo session in Florida.

Inside Sport, may reap even more profit from its February swimsuit issue. Luckily its pictures of Dallas star Charlene Tilton have drawn the attention of a gossip tabloid, and a few trashy articles about an actress may be all that's necessary for Inside Sport to sell more copies than it has in years.

THE biggest losers of all in the swimsuit issue arena are women. Beach pictorials are about the most exposure women get in any single issue of magazines such as Sports Illustrated. The imbalance suggests that women are most newsworthy when they are passive sex symbols. This is a warped idea in an age when the United States' brightest Olympic star was not a man, but sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner.

That publishers find swimsuit issues so profitable is also a sad commentary on American males.

The men who will throng the news-stands this week want to look at women's bodies. So why don't they buy one of the many truly smutty magazines available? Surely they yield more satisfaction for the dollar.

The problem is these would-be Playboy readers need the respectability of a sports magazine. They cannot admit their real interests to themselves or others. So they weakly maintain that reading, or rather looking at, the February issue is essential to keeping up with the world of sports. Have a good workout.