The year was 1946 and young Dave Anderson was in a country store somewhere in Vermont when he noticed a strange new magazine in the rack.

"I looked through it and said, ‘What is this?' " Anderson recalls. "I had never seen anything like this before."

It was SPORT magazine.

Anderson, whose distinguished career would include winning a Pulitzer Prize for sport commentary in The New York Times, and, yes, writing articles for SPORT magazine, was onto something. America had really not seen anything like it. But the country was clearly ready for an all-encompassing magazine devoted to sport. America was ready for a lively, well-written monthly publication that would put the reader in touch with baseball, football, boxing, horse racing, basketball, tennis, golf, track and field, outdoor sports and even such passionate regional pursuits as power boat racing. America was ready for a magazine that provided profiles of athletes and coaches, explored serious sports issues, investigated history, entertained with quizzes and some of the best sports cartoons ever printed in this country, took care of sport housekeeping matters such as providing Fan Club information, provided industry gossip in its wonderful "SPORTalk" section, topping it all off with superb photography.

SPORT magazine responded to a need. The awful war was over and America was once again ready to play. Organized sport had certainly not died during WWII. It had, in fact, provided Americans with desperately needed heroes such as Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, better known as "Mr. Inside" and "Mr. Outside." Baseball, then America's unquestioned "National Pastime," had plodded along with its 4-Fs and teenagers (such as 15-year-old southpaw Joe Nuxhall and 16-year-old infielder Tommy Brown) and too-olds and too-fats, bolstered by FDR's famous "Green Light" letter to commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. College basketball provided the likes of George Mikan, Bob Kurland and Ernie Calverley.

But there was a sense that now that the war was over serious attention could be focused on sport, and that is where SPORT came in. Those were the embryonic days of television, when the only way Americans could get a grasp of sport in a larger sense was through radio broadcasts and newsreels. Something was needed to tie it all together, and that something was the enticing magazine calling out to young Dave Anderson from the magazine rack of that country store in rustic Vermont, a state as far away from the mainstream of whatever was happening in the Great Beyond as there was.

From the start, the artistic bar was raised very high. SPORT attracted the best writers, and they weren't about to dumb down their game.

Formerly restricted in their free-lance activities to general-interest publications such as Look, Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, America's premier sports journalists now had a new outlet. In the next three decades pretty much Everybody who was Anybody in the world of sports journalism would write for SPORT, and they, in turn, would inspire others to take up sportswriting as a profession. In its 1950s and 1960s glory days, SPORT magazine would be the passport for countless young American readers into the sports world at large, and many of them would become as enamored of the messengers as they were of the subjects. "I remember the first piece I ever did for SPORT," says Bill Madden, New York Daily News baseball writer and author. "It was on (high jumper) Dwight Stones, and I thought I had arrived."

The first issue of SPORT was in September of 1946, and to it editor Ernest V. Heyn attracted the likes of Grantland Rice, H.G. Salsinger, Tom Meany and Jack Sher, all names guaranteed to impress. Giants' manager and Hall of Famer Mel Ott contributed a remembrance of John McGraw, establishing right then and there SPORT's ability to reach the high and mighty of sport. First person, "As Told To" stories from major sport celebrities would long be a staple of SPORT, and the readership never seemed to tire of them. The first issue also contained the college football "Crystal Ball All-American," a practice SPORT maintained for many years in both college football and basketball.

For a cover subject, who but the ultimate American sporting prince of the mid-40s, Joe DiMaggio? Joe posed with five-year old Joe, Jr. on top of the Yankee dugout. You think that didn't get the attention of a sport-loving America?

Heyn and Co. had concocted a winning formula, one that was copied and refined over the next three decades by successors Ed Fitzgerald, Al Silverman and Dick Schaap, each of whom had written for SPORT before becoming its chief and two of whom are represented in this anthology (Fitzgerald came very, very close with a 1953 portrait of Rocky Marciano). From the start, SPORT was in touch with its constituency. SPORT knew which subjects people wanted to read about in detail and SPORT knew which tidbits would fascinate a curious public. If all SPORT ever did was publish its tantalizing front-of-the-magazine compendium entitled "SPORTalk" in pamphlet form, it would have been an invaluable public service.

No previous sports publication had ever touched as many journalistic bases as SPORT. To paraphrase Voltaire on the subject of the Deity, yes, it was necessary to invent SPORT. The wonder is how a sports-loving society such as ours had survived without it.

Consider what was contained in any given year's worth of SPORT:

• SPORTalk, a lively, clever combination of short pieces, notes, Fan Club news and gossip, plus an ever-popular "Campus Queen" contest (look, it was a different era, OK?) to start off every issue.
• Feature articles, ten or more in each issue, of quite sufficient length on a wide range of sports topics, featuring, but by no means restricting itself to, the meat-and-potatoes sports of baseball, boxing and college football ('40s), later latching onto such growth pursuits as the NFL and the NBA.
• SPORT Visits, in which a photographer and writer went to the home of a sports celebrity.
• Statistics Tell The Story (self-explanatory, and far ahead of its time).
• Dressed For SPORT, in which celebrity athletes posed for a SPORT photographer in a fashion shoot.
• SPORT Quiz (How about one submitted in 1959 by a Miami sportscaster named Larry King?)
• SPORT Bookshelf, a look at the latest sports books on the market.
• Ongoing features such as SPORT's Greatest Teams, or Lester Bromberg's classic "Boxing's Gallery of Champions."
• Cartoons, and not just pedestrian ones but many absolute classics.
• The SPORT Special, cornerstone pieces anchoring each issue, written on major subjects by top-shelf writers. Many of the pieces you will read here were SPORT Specials.
• Superb photography and original illustrations.

Long before another ambitious sports magazine tacked the word "Illustrated" to its title (having been frustrated in its attempt to purchase the good name of SPORT outright), SPORT recognized the value of photography–especially color photography–and the ensuing product was so good that the prose often became a casualty in the hands of scissors-wielding youth. I speak from experience. I hacked away at the milestone 10th anniversary issue in September of 1956 in order to get the photos, and in so doing, mangled one of the most historically valuable SPORT issues of them all. And I wasn't alone.

"I cut many pictures out with razor blades," says Bill Madden. "I mounted them on color paper. My room was covered with color photographs from Ozzie Sweet," the latter a legendary sports photographer who had a lot to do with making SPORT what it was.

Reading any old issue of SPORT would put a reader in touch with both the present and the past seamlessly. Finally, each issue was topped off with an editorial, many of them quite strident and fiery. And all, in its heyday, for a quarter.

It is important to understand that SPORT did not specialize in what could be called "puff pieces." SPORT recognized that sport, and its principals, were often complex. Many SPORT magazine pieces explored why someone was under fire, or misunderstood, or perhaps too well understood. SPORT loved to delve into deteriorating franchises or controversial college situations. SPORT always had something to say about the sham amateurism of the forties and fifties in such sports as track and field and tennis. SPORT's world was not always 100 percent happy. But it was never mean or vicious, and it always tried to be fair.

Most of all, SPORT cared about the racial inequities of America.

From the start, SPORT wrote about what were then termed "Negro" athletes and "Negro" issues. If SPORT were concerned about offending readers and potential advertisers in Jim Crow states, it never let on. The first "SPORT Special" was a Jack Sher piece about reigning heavyweight champion Joe Louis. Sher profiled Jackie Robinson in 1948. Sugar Ray Robinson was a favorite SPORT subject right into the sixties.

Race was a volatile issue in the south well into the seventies, but SPORT never shied away. In May of 1956 Furman Bisher, represented here with a prescient 1958 piece on Bear Bryant taking over at Alabama, weighed in with "What About The Negro Athlete In The South?" A year later future baseball Hall of Famer Monte Irvin wrote "This Is Where The Negro Athlete Stands Today." Three years later Fitzgerald edited a special issue entitled "The Negro In American Sport." In July of 1961 Alex Haley, before he gave the world "Roots," wrote "Baseball In A Segregated Town," a piece about spring training in St. Petersburg.

Tough-minded athletes of color always had a forum in SPORT. This began with Jackie Robinson, of course, and continued with provocative pieces on such forthright athletes as Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Bob Gibson, Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson. In each case it is conceivable that the American public learned more about these men, and what really made them tick, in the pages of SPORT than in any other journalistic vehicle. It took a special writer to command the respect of such powerful men, and SPORT always had platoons of them in its stable.

Take one year, 1959. Ed Fitzgerald was SPORT's editor, and he had a writer's All-Star team at his disposal. Among the people whose bylines appeared in his magazine during that calendar year were Ed Linn, Dick Young, Tom Meany, Frank Graham, Frank Graham, Jr., Barney Nagler, Dick Schaap, Jimmy Breslin, Jack Orr, Hal Lebovitz, Bill Libby, Stan Fischler, Al Stump, Irv Goodman, Al Silverman, Bill Furlong, Leonard Schecter and Myron Cope. With a comparable lineup, a baseball team would have gone 162-0.

SPORT was erudite, dignified and sober, but it was never, ever high-falutin', which is a difficult balance to strike. SPORT always knew who it was and who its constituents were, unlike Sports Illustrated, which spent much of its first ten years trying to figure out who might actually be reading it, or, more to the point, who should be reading it.

Fitzgerald was the SPORT editor when SI came on the scene in 1954, and he spent more time laughing at SI in the fifties than worrying about it. SI had the Time, Inc. bankroll, but it had no sports soul. "It was too elite," Fitzgerald once told me. "It was sort of a hybrid of Vogue, Town and Country and the New Yorker, something to put on your coffee table. Red Smith used to call it ‘The Bird Watcher's Manual.'

"I'll tell you the difference between SPORT and Sports Illustrated," Fitzgerald continued. "One year we each dispatched a special writer to cover the Kentucky Derby. We sent (legendary jockey) Conn McCreary. They sent William Faulkner."

In those days, SPORT had it all. SPORT knew what it wanted and how to get it. SPORT knew what would titillate its fans. Men of a certain age who profess to be SPORT magazine aficionados invariably recall a pair of 1957 Dick Young classics: "Six Trades That Ought To Be Made (e.g. Ted Kluszewski for Robin Roberts)" and "To Hell With The L.A. Dodgers." And perhaps the most famous of all uncategorizeable SPORT stories appeared in September of 1957.

Somehow I doubt that you could get away with Gussie Moran's immortal "Baseball's Ten Handsomest Men" today.

SPORT lasted until August 2000 and it's safe to say that it lost its fastball as the '80s turned into the '90s. It was, after all, a monthly and in a rat-a-tat world it was difficult for a sports monthly to stay relevant. Times change, and SPORT's time had clearly come and gone.

But in those golden first three decades, SPORT was an irreplaceable part of the American sports experience. It began when television was a novelty and, in that pre-ESPN, pre-Internet world, SPORT put a fan from Caribou, Maine on an equal footing with one from midtown Manhattan. SPORT got to the gut of the American sports fan as no publication has, before or since.

SPORT was not an expenditure. SPORT was an investment. And thanks to this anthology, these 24 pieces by some of the greatest sportswriters of the 20th century, SPORT continues to pay dividends right here in the 21st.

© SPORT Media Publishing. / Read more about SPORT magazine.