Sports publications valuable asset for learning

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Sports publications valuable asset for learning

Wed, 05/05/2021 - 04:04
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While wandering through the grocery store the other day (seems like my wife and I make daily trips to buy groceries) I walked past the magazine rack. I’m not talking about the publications that are always beside the checkout lines, but rather the ones found deep in the store. I hadn’t checked out such a sales rack recently and I was curious what sport magazines I might find. There were plenty that dealt with the World of Sports, but none I readily recognized. I didn’t even find a current copy of Sports Illustrated, which surprised me a little. The store must have sold out of SIs.

It was almost as if I expected to find the magazines that were important to me as a youngster and got me to thinking back to those days when I started subscribing to a few magazines.

It all started when I was a fairly young age. My mother was buying magazines from a high schooler who lived down the street. The high school classes back in those years sold magazines and other items to raise money for a Senior Sneak. Mother wanted to help out this salesman as much as she could and when she heard that she got a special rate for buying six subscriptions she couldn’t resist. Saturday Evening Post was an automatic buy for her. She loved the Norman Rockwell pictures and the serials like Tugboat Annie that were regular staples of the Post. She liked the Grit newspaper, and that was another automatic as was the Readers Digest. I don’t remember what other magazine she got for herself, perhaps the Christian Herald, which I know came regularly to our house. But stumped as to Nos. 5 and 6, she asked me to look over the possibilities. My eyes jumped to Sport Magazine. I loved sports and I really loved reading about sports heroes. She looked over the list and seeing Argosy was about sports (mostly fishing and hunting), she ordered that for me. Turned out Argosy wasn’t a good choice for a youngster my age as it had some adult themes running through its pages. Mother was shocked when the first copy arrived and she made a point to beat me to the mail, so that my innocent mind wouldn’t be corrupted. I am sure that by today’s standards, the adult content of Argosy was pretty mild. It didn’t matter--I wasn’t permitted to see any copies of that magazine ever again.

But Sport was a great choice. I read each copy of that magazine over and over and over again. The color pages were very smeared and dog-eared and the print often would be smudged in places. I am sure I read while eating breakfast, and my hands were sometimes greasy.

What I really liked about Sport was its features on players. I read about Eddie Mathews, who was a star on the 1953 Braves in their first year in Milwaukee. It was because of Sport that I became a Mathews fan as well as my rooting for Milwaukee. I remember stories on Mickey Mantle, who I knew through baseball cards and Yogi Berra, who had become a favorite of just about everybody in my grade school class. There was something special about a guy named Yogi. My Dad introduced me to boxing, which was true of most sports. He was a fan of Joe Louis, and I became a Joe Louis fan. I remember a story on Joe Louis, and I learned of other boxers like Jersey Joe Walcott, Ezzard Charles, Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano. Marciano became heavyweight champion in 1952, which is about the time that I started taking Sport. I also remember a story about Willie Pep. I felt pretty smart when Dad said he’d never heard of Pep, who was Featherweight Champion for awhile. Pep fought in 241 bouts before his retirement, amounting to a lot of punishment.

Baseball was my main interest back in those years, but I kept up with basketball as well. The NBA wasn’t the big deal that it is today, but I do remember reading stories about George Mikan (of the Minneapolis Lakers), Dolph Schayes of the Syracuse Nationals and Paul Arizin of the Philadelphia Warriors. I don’t remember reading about college basketball much, but I vaguely remember a story on Tom Gola of LaSalle who was called the greatest of alltime. That was before Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).

And I was introduced to some sports about which my Dad knew very little. One was ice hockey. There were stories about Gordie Howe, Maurice Richard and Boom Boom Geoffrrion. Another was horse racing, which had great jockeys like Eddie Arcaro and Willie Shoemaker who were featured on the pages of my favorite magazine. Yet another was wrestling. I never was a fan of the big dollar wrestling events, but my Uncle Charlie Beaverson of York, Pa., introduced me to wrestling (my first experience ever with a television set was when I visited at his house). He pointed out Gorgeous George, who he said he hated because George was “a big sissy.” I think I later read about Gorgeous in the pages of Sport.

I was proud of my association with the magazine when it started giving out a Corvette to the most valuable player in a World Series. Johnny Podres won the first in 1955, Don Larsen won in 1956 and Lew Burdette won in 1957. I had guessed who would get the car before the winner was announced, another boost to my already enlarged ego.

I subscribed to Sport until I wandered off to college. Lots of my boyhood pastimes went by the boards at that time. It was then that I gave my Mother permission to toss away my collection of baseball cards, which was a decision that probably cost me a bundle of money.

But Sport wasn’t the only publication that I pored over as a youngster. I think my Dad brought home the first Street and Smith baseball magazine. I remember that Yogi Berra was on the cover and the book itself contained all the information someone who was as nerdy as I was about baseball could want. It had the rosters of all 16 teams, the full schedule of the American and National Leagues and the previous year’s stats. It had write ups about each team plus a section on the minor leagues. I could name the rosters of every team, I knew every one of the minor league teams in the American Association, the International League and the Pacific Coast League. That was possible because of the Street and Smith yearbook. Later I learned that Street and Smith also published a college football yearbook, which was the source of many hours of poring during the fall and winter months. I had a football board game and I would make up teams from the various leagues (like the Big 10, the Big 7 and the Pacific Coast Conference) and compete using the game. I later found Street and Smith magazines for basketball and the NFL, but I never got as excited over those as I had been with baseball and football.

I lost my collection of Sport Magazines when the basement of a house in which I lived as an adult flooded and the magazines and my high school yearbooks were damaged. I still have some of the Street and Smith magazines out in the garage.

Yet another favorite of mine was The Sporting News. I didn’t become aware of it until my high school years, but it was a treasure. Published weekly, it had box scores of all the games of the week, as well as stories about each major league team. It too had a minor league section and one could keep track of what was going on with every team all the way down to Class C and D.

I know Sport Magazine went out of publication in 2000, about a year before I moved to Ponca City. The Sporting News no longer exists, having published its last magazine in 2012. I haven’t seen one for a long time, but Google tells me that Street and Smith is still publishing its baseball and college football editions. I would like to go back to the good old days of poring over the printed word. I don’t seem to have that kind of patience these days.