Sport magazine turning the page
I grew up with Sport magazine. I was given a subscription when I was 9 years old, and it was the best $3.00 my parents could have spent that year (it did escalate to 35 cents a copy in due time).
Founded in 1946, when a war-weary America was eager to delve into sports as a pleasant escape, it was an immediate success, and in the ’50s and ’60s, it had become an absolute must-read in a world that did not include sports talk radio, sports talking heads on TV, and, most importantly, a steady diet of televised sports events on a daily basis.
You followed sports with radio play-by-play (if applicable), the newspapers, and, yes, devouring Sport, the one reliable publication that connected everyone from Walla Walla to West Palm Beach with what was going on in mainstream American sport.
Sport’s time had expired by 2000, and the assets were picked up by a Canadian entity known as Sport Media Collection in 2001. Now honchos Wayne Parrish and Marc Appleman are willing to divest themselves of Sport’s vast, incomparable assets, which number 150,000 physical images. Among them are 62,000 35mm color transparencies; more than 14,000 other transparency formats; more than 73,000 negatives and videos; more than 4,000 actual prints; and more than 12,000 articles.
Messrs. Parrish and Appleman enlisted Blackhawk Technologies LLC as a broker for the sale and it, in turn, has reached out to New England Sports Museum curator Richard Johnson as a, well, I guess you’d say salesman. “I’m just helping the owner find a suitable buyer,” he says.
“The Sport archives comprise the DNA of our sports culture,” maintains Johnson. “Sport was the home of American ‘meat and potatoes’ sports, including the Olympics.”
It is Johnson’s fervent wish that a buyer will be found who will want the entire collection, but he is wise enough to know that it may have to be broken up.
Full disclosure: Neither Richard Johnson nor Bob Ryan is a neutral observer in this saga. Johnson owns every issue of Sport ever published. I can only lay claim to 136 issues, stretching from 1954 to the 1990s. I once reread every story in every 1959 issue in order to write a story on Sport in these very pages, and I was honored to be the editor of a 2003 anthology, “The Best of Sport,” and what a tough job that was! I mean, I had so much great stuff to peruse.
That’s because from the beginning Sport featured the work of the highest-caliber writers. The inaugural issue contained pieces from H.G. Salsinger, Tom Meany, Jack Sher, and — how’s this for a Seal of Approval? — Grantland Rice.
A standard vintage issue would include:
● 10 or more feature articles
● The back-of-the-issue Sport Special, a deep profile of an individual
● Sport Visits to the home of a star
● Sport Quiz
● Sport Bookshelf
● Cartoons (always excellent)
● Sport Talk (notes, gossip, and Fan Club news, which was very big in the ’50s and ’60s)
“The Sport Specials,” says Johnson, “were the equivalent of the New Yorker profiles.”
There also were firstperson articles galore.
“An idea way ahead of its time,” says Appleman. “It was the Players’ Tribune before the Players’ Tribune.”
I also should mention that Sport always had a strong social conscience. Sport was an immediate champion of the Black athlete.
But the big prize for any investors may be the photos, especially the treasure trove left behind by Ozzie Sweet, who, according to Johnson, “is right there with Ansel Adams or Edward Weston.”
In the best of all worlds, Richard Johnson would buy the archives himself. They could be in no better hands. If only there were a few more zeroes in his bank account . . .
“As a curator, there are 10 years’ worth of exhibits I could produce myself,” he laments.
I can see the hand in the back of the room. “What about Sports Illustrated?” Is that what you’re saying?
SI was hatched by Time magazine chief Henry Luce in 1954, but it was not certain what it was supposed to be.
“I think it was trying to be the sporting version of Holiday magazine,” says Johnson.
And it’s no secret it took a good 10 years before an astute editor named André Laguerre found SI a winning formula.
Sport never had that problem. Sport got to the gut of the true American sports fan from Day One. It is an important legacy and it is imperative that a buyer with the right intentions be found.
“The key is to take what had been and try to make it relevant now,” explains Appleman.
“Someone will recognize the significance of the assets,” stresses Johnson.
After all this talk, I think I’ll pull out one of those 136 for some bedtime reading.