Forgotten Treasures: SPORT Magazine and Mike García

Sometime in the very early 1980s, my parents got a subscription to SPORT magazine for me and my older brother, and I remember being vaguely disappointed.

Actually, I was very disappointed.

To me it was sort of like when your mom came back from the grocery store with a package of Hydrox cookies instead of Oreos, or like when you really wanted a new pair of Levi’s for the start of school but what you got were Plain Pockets from JCPenney. They were fine, they did the job, but they weren’t exactly what you had in mind.

What we had in mind for a sports magazine, of course, was Sports Illustrated. I mean, it was 1981 or so, and my brother and I were teenage boys, and Christie Brinkley had been on the cover of the swimsuit issue three straight years. Of course that’s what we would have preferred. But SPORT? What the hell was SPORT magazine? And why was it in all caps?

Like Hydrox and Plain Pockets, we viewed SPORT as a knockoff, a lesser version of whatever the best available was. It was a Matchbox car instead of a Hot Wheels, an Atari 7800 instead of Nintendo. It was Vess Soda instead of Coke. All of which we were familiar with in our house. My parents were of modest means, and had five kids to support. Getting the top of the line of anything around our house was rare. We didn’t want for anything, there was always food in the fridge, and new school clothes, and books, and toys, and so on. But yeah, come baseball season you were getting whatever cleats were on sale at Sears instead of the Nikes you wanted from Foot Locker.