 Mickey Mantle
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Mickey Mantle retires
On March 1, 1969, Mickey Mantle announced his retirement. One of the most legendary baseball players of all time, Mantle was written about countless times by SPORT magazine, and appeared on the cover 18 times. This feature is an early one, from April 1953, when Mantle was still an open book, allowing a respected reporter to see into his private life back in Commerce, Oklahoma.
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SPORT magazine research
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SPORT magazine
SPORT magazine chronicled the lives and careers of North America's biggest stars, and now this treasure of sports history is available to the public. We have every article ever to appear in
SPORT, and can provide research and reprints. For pricing and further information, please
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SPORT magazine
At its launch in 1946,
SPORT magazine was America's first significant general interest sports magazine. By the time of its closing 54 years later,
SPORT was an American institution.
Fondly remembered today as pure Americana,
SPORT was the brainchild of a small New York publisher, MacFadden Publications Inc, and became a triumph from the day its first issue hit the street with a color image of Joe DiMaggio and his son Joe, Jr. on the cover. That inaugural edition included eight full color plates -- unheard of at the time -- and almost immediately
SPORT rose to over a million in circulation and became half bible, half guru to a generation of men coming of age in post-war America.
MacFadden seized an unappreciated subject like sports and took it mainstream. The formula was simple: combine terrific editorial features written by the greatest writers of the time with generous presentations of photography, particularly full-page color imagery. It was born as a novel idea and grew into a cultural icon.
In its early years,
SPORT had the market for magazine-style sports journalism virtually to itself and, under founding editor Ernest Heyn, pioneered a brand of behind-the-scenes glimpses of the heroes of the day not previously attempted. The emphasis was not on the games or the teams, but on the elements of human drama that lay beneath.
SPORT was an icon in the league of
Life and
Look and the
Saturday Evening Post.
Insightful essays as long as 5,000 words focused on the personalities and human drama of sport. Each month
SPORT was filled with evocative writing from its own stable of staff writers, plus submissions from the likes of Grantland Rice, Jimmy Breslin, David Halberstam, William F. Buckley and Dick Schaap.
But it was
SPORT's groundbreaking use of color photography, particularly during its first 30 years, which captivated a generation of sports fans, many of whom wallpapered their bedrooms with the exquisite full-page photos that were the magazine's signature item.
SPORT used many of the nation's top shooters of the post-war era, combining photography from staffers such as Martin Blumenthal, George Heyer and Kevin Fitzgerald with freelancers such as the incomparable Ozzie Sweet, Hy Peskin and Neil Leifer.
