Chapter Two

Warning, for Adult use Only

The National was published for almost 17 months, but the planning began much earlier. All told, many people were involved with the newspaper for two years, some, like Deford, for almost three. One might expect that those employees, who tied their hopes and dreams to a ship that ultimately sank, would feel bitter that a project they believed in so strongly didn’t succeed. But of the 10 people interviewed for this story, all of them said they would be thrilled to try it again. That’s the party line, but is it the truth? On first blush, many of the people I tracked down were happy to talk about their time at The National. It was as if “The National” was the password for entrance into a prohibition-era speakeasy. I called photographers Chris Covatta and Brad Mangin in the midst of their assignments – and they both immediately dropped their guard and talked with me – Mangin over the roar of the crowd at Pac Bell Park in San Francisco. A quick e-mail sent during a weekend elicited a Monday afternoon phone call from Van McKenzie, the paper’s managing editor, who promptly spent an hour telling me about his great experience at The National. Digging a little deeper, one memory leads to another and some of The National staffers let their guard down. While none said they wished they hadn’t been involved in the project, it became clear that the memories are still raw and painful.

“Anybody that we spoke to, anyone that I hired or somebody else hired, we always said: ‘You understand this is a gamble, it’s risky.’ It was almost like when you sell a stock, you have to put that on the front. ‘This is not approved by the SEC.’ We made sure that everybody understood that this was a very romantic adventure, but like a lot of romantic adventures, there was a good chance it wasn’t going to work. Which sadly turned out to be true,” Deford said in the poetic style he’s known for. “It was quixotic, lovely, romantic and I think everybody thinks it was worth the two years, because among other things, just about everybody moved on to better things when it folded. Some of them took a little longer than others, but it was a good mark against your name that you’d served on The National, and it turned out that even though we lost the battle, a lot of these guys won the war in their own careers. But I think they really loved it, too. (It was) a little bit like going to war.”

Most conversations about The National start in a sterile fashion, but by the end of the discussion, memories become more vivid and emotions bubble up to the surface. Once Scott Ostler, The National’s West Coast columnist; Reid Laymance, a senior editor; Tim Guidera and Ken Carpenter, who were statistics editors; and Deford get rolling, mentally traveling back in time to June 1991, they remember the days when 150 journalists got together every afternoon at 4 o’clock to create a fresh newspaper for sports fans. They had access to all of the designers and photographers they needed; there was no fighting with the news department for resources. As Ostler wrote in his first column: “Before, sports was the caboose. Starting today, it’s the whole freight train.”

Ostler couldn’t have known, however, that the train was a runaway. Once it left the station on the last day of January, it couldn’t be stopped. Millions of dollars had already been spent, calendars had been filled with sporting events for weeks to come, photo assignments had been made, but the first time a full edition The National Sports Daily came off the presses was also the first time it hit the newsstand. There was no dress rehearsal. You might think that a newspaper that covered sports the way the Wall Street Journal covered business - a newspaper without a natural predator - couldn’t have been late. You might think that American sports fans, who had been waiting more than 100 years for a sports daily, could wait another six months. But The National was on Azcarraga time, and for him, the paper couldn’t start publishing soon enough. While he was thrilled to finally see a hard copy of the paper on January 31, (So thrilled that he gave all 300 employees a gold coin worth $500.) he was disappointed that it hadn’t come out weeks or months sooner. But he was especially disappointed that it missed a hopeful deadline by two days. He would have been much happier if the paper had hit the market the Monday after Super Bowl XXIV. (San Francisco’s 55-10 drubbing of the Denver Broncos.) And why not? He had spent thousands of dollars to send 10 reporters to cover the event.

“Not only did he want to get to market, he wanted to get to market immediately, and not because it was a particular sports season, it was because he wanted to get the show on the road. We should be in the marketplace, get out there and swim and not just talk about it,” said Price, who is now the president of NATAS.

When all the work was done, all the articles written and edited, and the newspaper did come out for the first time, there was great celebration, but at the same time, there was the question of whether they could get the paper out on the second day.

“I remember getting the first issue out,” Deford said from his home in Connecticut. “Do you know, we never put an issue out before we put the first one out, isn’t that amazing? It was absolutely amazing. It was insane, just absolutely insane. Talk about walking a tight rope. I remember (Van) McKenzie and I just about cried for joy when the thing actually came out, and then we turned to each other and asked, how are we gonna do it tomorrow? Because we had been able to bank a lot ahead of time, get a lot done ahead of time, and then we had to get it out the next day.”

Both McKenzie, who had been the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s sports editor, and Deford remember it that way, but one editor said that the newspaper had been in practice mode for weeks, demonstrated by its sending 10 writers to cover the Super Bowl.

“We covered that game and put out an issue as if we were live, and we weren’t.” said Ken Carpenter, who had moved from Cleveland to join Lee Gordon, his sports editor at The Plain Dealer, at The National. “That’s the kind of money they were spending. I don’t remember exactly how many prototypes we did toward the end of January, but we did a bunch.”

They did get one scoop however. Laymance remembers that football writer Chris Mortensen got some exclusive information about a college player who was going to turn pro, but without a paper, they offered the story to the Associated Press, on the condition that they would credit The National. And they took it. It was good advertising and a signal that the writers end editors weren’t goofing around.

The first issue reached customers in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Each issue featured the town’s reigning basketball hero on the cover, Patrick Ewing (New York), Michael Jordan (Chicago) and Magic Johnson (Los Angeles).

From what people say 15 years later, that first issue triggered a part of the business plan that wasn’t well thought out – the secondary city rollout schedule. An Inc. magazine story about the extraordinary start-up, published a few months after the first issue, noted that the plan was to hit 12 new cities by the end of 1990. From his office within the Orlando Sentinel, McKenzie bristles at the memory.

“We were off to the races that first day, the expansion happened too quickly, which compounded whatever problems we were having. We wound up in 16 markets publishing on a daily basis,” he said.

Chapter One

By Dan Friedell

Capstone Thesis

14 June, 2005

By now, there’s no mystery as to why The National Sports Daily folded. In fact, Peter Price, who published the New York Post before moving on to The National, famously told Emilio Azacarraga, the Mexican billionaire who financed the venture, why it would never make it, almost a year before the first employee was hired. Azacarraga pushed on despite his warnings, which makes one think, 15 years later, that the paper may have been destined to fail. If you agree with that thinking, you might agree that it was folly to start the presses late that night on Jan. 30, 1990. But if you agree with that thinking, you probably don’t care that in 16 months, the newspaper took American sports journalism to a different level. One sports editor at a major American newspaper said he often looks back on his personal archive of The National for ideas on how to cover sports today. While the business backbone of the newspaper may have failed, it’s impossible to suggest that, as the athletes say, the editorial staff “left anything out on the field.”

CSI: 5^th Avenue

The 14 years since America’s first and only modern all-sports daily newspaper closed its doors have allowed for a thorough post-mortem and dulled some of the pain of the failure, but under the surface, everyone involved in the venture still is passionate about their work and still feels the pain of The National’s loss. The emotion came through in the way Frank Deford, the paper’s editor, spoke about telling his staff that Azcarraga was pulling the plug.

“I can remember standing up on a desk in the newsroom, and telling people that we had folded, and I never had to do anything like that before,” Deford said. “Then having to face newspapers and television…it’s not easy to say: ‘we failed.’ I remember sitting out back reading the Sunday (New York) Times two or three days later – and the editorial page had a tribute to us that just about made me cry.”

The feeling came through in way Tim Guidera, then a statistics editor at The National, and now a columnist at the Savannah (Ga.) Morning News, so tenderly wrote about the newspaper a few years ago. He started his column by writing:

“She would have been 12 now. And there still isn't a day that somebody somewhere doesn't wonder what she would have been like today, whether she would have fulfilled the beauty we all saw in her if we hadn't lost her 10 years ago.

If that sounds sad, it is, although not as sad as another kind of story that might start that way. Here the "we" is only sports fans, not family. The "she" is only an entity -- not a someone, but still a something you can love.”

I was 15 in 1991 when I picked up my first copy of The National to check on the status of the players on my first rotisserie baseball team, and a few weeks later, the paper went out of business. So it didn’t make a big impact on me, but like a 1991 curveball from Bruce Hurst, the dynamic story did lure just about everyone who covered sports or the media into taking a swing at explaining why the newspaper folded. The Associated Press said it was a combination of a too-high cover price (when faced with a growing deficit, the cover price was raised a quarter to 75-cents in early 1991) and a fragile distribution network; the Wall Street Journal proposed that the paper’s failing, ironically, was that it only covered sports, alienating a huge number of potential readers; Media Week wrote that illiteracy was on the rise in 1990, which doomed a too-erudite publication, and the Washington Journalism Review (now known as the American Journalism Review) noted that a post-Reagan (and what we now know to be a pre-Internet boom) lull in advertising spending prevented the paper from treading water long enough to work out its kinks. The sad thing about it, for fans of good journalism (and not just sports journalism), is that all of those theories, except maybe for the Wall Street Journal’s jab, were on target. So why did the newspaper even open the doors of its pricey office on Fifth Ave. and 52^nd St. in New York? Because Azcarraga wanted to give an American all-sports daily newspaper a shot. Coming on the heels of the USA Today’s expensive launch, (most say the Gannett endeavor lost $500 million in its first eight years) both Price and Deford warned Azcarraga that the paper might lose upwards of $100-million before it started to reverse the trend. They also pleaded with Azcarraga for more time to refine an industry-first paperless production system and a quirky delivery network, but as Price said, Azcarraga wanted the paper up and running “yesterday.” Risking ten percent of your net worth might seem reckless to a person with $40,000 in savings, but it didn’t seem so daunting to a man with a history of success who had built his $1-billion plus wealth by taking chances with money. With the backing of one of the richest Mexicans, The National was a newspaper that was taking on some of America’s most storied journalism institutions on their turf, and doing it by flashing big money in an industry that’s notoriously fearful of spending. Whether The National was going to succeed or fail, it was clear that it would do it brilliantly, and that attracted a lot of attention.

“ “Anybody who bitches that we spent too much money here and there missed the point,” Deford said. “The point was that we were going to go first class. It was almost more important to show that a sports paper could be first class than a regular paper. Because sports is usually looked down upon as déclassé.”

The First Post

All --

I just learned about Van McKenzie, the great sports editor, and his failing health. He spent a couple of hours on the phone with me one morning in the summer of 2005, helping with information about The National for a paper I was writing in an effort to complete my master's degree in journalism from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Inspired by that, I'm creating this blog so that I can showcase the paper that I wrote and hopefully allow people to learn about the late, great, daily sports newspaper.

Thanks for reading,

Dan Friedell