NEW YORK – Disney-owned ESPN the Magazine plans to give readers more than they might have expected of their favorite athletes in the publication’s first “Body Issue,” slated to hit newsstands Oct. 19.

According to editor in chief Gary Belsky, the issue will expose everything about some prominent male and female athletes when it presents them nude, albeit artfully positioned. Belsky said the responses from professional, amateur and Olympic athletes the magazine has approached so far have been “enthusiastic.”

“We’re toying with the idea of making it a no-clothes issue,” Belsky told USA Today. The biggest challenge he foresees is figuring out a way to “use equipment and pads and bats and goalposts and soccer nets and pucks and helmets to obscure body parts that we still can’t quite go to in a magazine that’s part of a company owned by [Disney].”

Belsky said the athletes themselves are helping editors choose who should appear in the issue.

“If you ask athletes who has the best bodies in basketball, they’ll have opinions,” he told USA Today.

The October issue won’t be ESPN’s first foray into the artful au naturel. The Jan. 19, 2004, issue included photographs of Winter X Games athletes sans cover. Snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler perched on the edge of a hot tub, snowboarder Marc Frank Montoya masqueraded as a buff room-service waiter in the buff, and skier Aleisha Cline participated in her favorite event wearing nothing but hat, gloves and boots.

Belsky said ESPN hopes the “Body Issue” challenges rival Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue. The 11-year-old bi-weekly seems to believe the iconic 55-year-old’s approach to sexuality and sports is becoming a bit long in the tooth. Still, the whippersnapper has quite a way to go to catch the grizzled veteran: ESPN’s circulation, at just 2.1 million, is about one-third that of SI’s 3.2 million. The swimsuit issue generates about 8-9 percent of SI’s annual revenue, according to spokesman Scott Novak.