NYT shutters Play

I'm saddened as well.

The main problems, I thought, were:
(1) People never knew when it was coming out. Issue dates were all over the map.
(2) There was very little "out of the box" in that magazine. Great writers, but it had the same limited scope of the sports world that SI does now. It tended to cover the same 4-5 pro sports that every other media rams down our throat. Honestly, did we need MORE stories about Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Steve Nash, Bill Parcells?

It would have done better if it was even MORE out-of-the-box.

The best issue was the first one. It was the most unique, and therefore, the most compelling.

 

SPORT magazine resides there as well.

 

Sport was more meat-and-potatoes, not having the pretensions the other three did.

 

True. But they were the inspiration for the use of all caps in BLOGS

 

I never, ever want to see a publication shut down.

But Sport--or SPORT--was such a shell of its former self at the end that it was almost a mercy killing.

I will say it did bounce back, ever so slightly, from the days of Steve Garvey as the Managing Editor or Publisher or some hideously terrible thing.

 

Mr Hecht,

Actually, Sport, back in the late 60s and particularly early 70s, was a great read, very smart. I loved Paul Hemphill's America column but there was lots of excellent writing and a prevailing sense of humour--it reached the 18-35 group better than SI, what you graduated to from comic books (okay, that was me).

o-<

 

Undertstand. Liked the magazine fine, and stuck with it for fifteen years from the late '50's, onward. And one of its charms was that
it didn't feel the need to maintain the pretentions inherent in IS, TN, or P.

 

Mr Hecht

Yeah, all true. Sport was smart without having to remind you about it all the time. Play hit you over the head with it. IS, in its original turn, best struck the balance.

o-<

 

Any mag willing to regularly run stuff by Ed Linn was an object of my affection.