Inside Inside Sports: The Oral History

THERE ONCE was a magazine called Inside Sports, an ordinary name for what turned out to be a star across the night sky of magazines. It was at its best, its most memorable, for perhaps 28 issues before flameout and penury set in. Of course, there was nothing surprising about that in the ‘70s and ‘80s when journalism burned brightly with passion projects. For every Rolling Stone that endured, there was a New York Times or a MORE or another of the myriad rock-and-roll rags that sought to make sense of In a Gadda Da Vida.
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Everyone who was hired on at Inside Sports understood the risks sooner or later. They plowed ahead anyway for the adventure and the creative freedom, convinced that this was going to be a sports magazine unlike any that had come before it. Sports Illustrated was all right – if you could tolerate what your father fell asleep reading on the sofa every week. But Inside Sports was going to become all things on a slant, funny like National Lampoon, smart and nuanced like Esquire and Texas Monthly. Better yet, at least from a business perspective, it was going to be bankrolled by Newsweek—Pepsi to Time magazine’s Coke—where the culture in the late Seventies was like Mad Men ten years on: mainly white, male, and full of the trimmings, including fat expense accounts, first class travel, four star restaurants and bureaus across the map.
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Newsweek was owned by the Washington Post company. In the wake of their explosive coverage of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, The Washington Post went from a regional newspaper to a national powerhouse in less than a decade. It also became famous, thanks in part to the movie version of All the President’s Men; the Post even gave free tours of the newsroom to admiring tourists. Led by Katharine Graham, the Washington Post Company was receptive when Newsweek President Peter Derow suggested the Post look to expand its empire. Time Inc. had launched two successful magazines in the Seventies—People and Money—and Derow believed the Post company could do more. After all, magazine publishing was still in its heyday and as difficult as it was to start a new title, it was easier—and cheaper—to start a title than buy an existing one.
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If anyone was poised to create something touched with magic it was at the Post Company. And so they launched Inside Sports, a monthly sports magazine, concentrating on the four major sports, which introduced the magazine public to the feature writing talents of Pete Dexter, Gary Smith, Tom Boswell, and Tony Kornheiser and offered a haven for literary-minded writers who were also sports fans—David Halberstam, Willie Morris, Mordecai Richler, and Richard Ford. Caught between decades, Inside Sports’ features had the downbeat vibe of a Hal Ashby or Robert Altman ’70s movie, but the columns and departments suggested the data-packed pop sensibility of the Eighties.

The debut issue hit the newsstands just a few days after an obscure all sports Cable TV network—an even more cockamamie proposition than a monthly sports magazine—named ESPN first aired. And even though it lived a short, bright life under the Post, the creative team behind IS understood, along with the folks at ESPN, America’s obsession was with sports culture, not just box scores. And so IS covered the industry of sports—TV, gambling, analytics, media, fandom. This was before USA Today delivered daily box scores and statistics, decades before the Internet. Free agency was in its infancy and while the big money had yet to start pouring into sports from cable TV, Americans’ interest in sports, their desire for information—more, faster—seemed bottomless. It was a magazine slightly ahead of its time and yet steeped in what had come before it.