"SPORT" magazine, March 1971, a review. Mavarich cover. 50 cents.

Inside Sports might have been a Sport knockoff, but The Good Doctor column was worth the price of admission. I laughed and laughed and laughed at that every single month.

Didn't Sport buy Inside Sports for its subscription base and then immediately shut it down in the mid-to-late '90s? Sport was pretty terrible by the end. Just like TSN, it tried to be hip and everything to everyone and failed miserably.

I better be careful, there are some thin-skinned TSN vets here.

 

Who was that TSN guy who left here in a huff over some criticism of a coach. I think his handle was TSN Mike .

 

Sport had a sad demise. There was a time when someone was pushing Steve Garvey as the front man for it. I believe BYH is correct that there was some merger/buyout with Inside Sports, then they were both gone.

If you're looking for something to collect, get the original issues of Inside Sports, before Century bought it. I believe WaPost/Newsweek owned it then. Kick-ass stuff.

 

Those were some awful issues. Steve would "write" a letter from the editor that inevitably came off as condescending. I remember one month he asked a trivia question and said he'd send a Sport pin to anyone who got it right. (I do not believe it was "Name the supposed God squadder who fathered half of California's babies from 1970 through 1987") OK Steve I'm running to the post office right now to mail my answer to you.

 

SPORT was a great place to work/write for in the 80s. Pay was fantastic and you could actually get into a national magazine with local stuff -- that's how i started there, then eventually got some freelance research gigs from them until ascending to heaven (for me, anyhow) of writing the NHL previews.

 

Great thing about Basketball Digest was back when I covered an NBA team, every now and then they'd pick up and run a copy of one of my stories from my paper and -- voila! -- a check would show up in my mailbox.

 

Back to the topic, I recall Sport as a much better read than SI back in the early and mid-70s, but SI was weekly, Sport was monthly. In those days of the young teen years, my brother and I subscribed to SI, Sport and TSN and read them all cover-to-cover. Great memories. I kind of theorize that kids who get into in sports at a young age end up doing well in life because they read any sports stuff they can get their hands on. They read voraciously, which pays off huge dividends in later life. Also, I pretty much learned many of my math tables because of sports (7s and 3 because of football, 3s and 9s because of baseball, 2s because of hoops).

 

"You know, reading about sports, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do English homework and you figure out a way to learn your math tables, you can do well. If you don't, you become a whining liberal."



The only math assist I ever got from sports was memorizing all possible winning percentages for NFL teams at an extremely young age.

That's an interesting theory about sports fans growing up to be voracious readers. I know folks on both sides of the aisle...fans who read voraciously and fans who don't.

Anyone here remember Baseball Bulletin? It was a tabloid that came out quarterly. Got a subscription through one of those school magazine drives. Loved the mag.