Chapter Eight

Could it come back Today?

It’s a tough question to answer, but I believe an all-sports daily newspaper could come back. If I were at the helm, I would try two things: first, I would put the newspaper out in the afternoon, aiming to sell the majority of copies by hand as alternative programs at sporting events. I can’t imagine that someone who paid upwards of $35 for a Major League Baseball game wouldn’t find a way to buy a smart newspaper that had today’s news and a preview of the upcoming game for a dollar. This is an expansion era where every major pro league in America has more than 30 teams. That means that there are close to 15 active stadiums every night during the baseball, basketball and hockey seasons, and three of the four major sports in America are setting attendance records. The stats and box scores from last night’s game could still be in the paper, and they would be just as interesting in the afternoon. A lot of the appeal, even today, of The National’s box scores is that they were smart, and if you were a savvy reader, you could interpret them and use them as a numeric preview for the upcoming game. The only thing that you would have to include with the “new” National, would be the starting pitchers’ stats. This would concede that people get their game scores these days from television and I would strive to make my newspaper better at telling stories than just listing stats. What is the pitcher thinking? What is the goalie thinking? What did tonight’s starting pitchers have for breakfast? Deford said that at the end, he did ask about switching the paper to afternoon distribution, but it was shot down quickly.

The other major change I would make is that I would sell the newspaper in highly-populated areas with just one major professional team. I mentioned Raleigh earlier, but there are other cities like this: Sacramento only has the Kings, San Antonio only has the Spurs, and Las Vegas, where The National surely would sell, has no major pro teams. The large population and the lack of major league teams means that local fans would look to The National for news of the Rockies or the Yankees before they would look to their local paper. I would exploit the hole in the market that today’s skinny sports sections have opened up – the displaced fan. Just look at the success Major League Baseball Advanced Media is having with its MLB.TV and the condensed game package. If I’m a Cleveland Indians fan in Arizona, it’s hard for me to follow Travis Hafner and Victor Martinez, but if I subscribe to the Internet video package, I can watch all of the key at-bats in less than an hour to stay up to date. Additionally, the migration from snowbelt to sunbelt came too late for The National. In just 15 years, I believe there are significantly more Boston Red Sox fans in the southern half of the United States than there were in 1990.

Finally, if I did have a chance to re-start The National, I know I would have no trouble finding a staff.

“At last, we were A1, we not C1 or D1. We were not the toy shop, we were the whole show. I didn’t really realize it coming in, because I’d worked on a sports magazine,” Deford said. “I didn’t have that feeling of inferiority. But indisputably, a lot of the workers really loved that. It was the lure, in a lot of ways, to come into the paper – we’re going to be the show, we’re not going to be the sideshow. We’re going to be in the big-time.”

And The National, despite its short life, was big-time, and it could be bigger today.

Chapter Seven

Fungo and The Skinny

Deford said he tried to guide the newspaper in the way a moderate current might cause a cruise ship to reach port a little faster, but McKenzie was really the engine that drove The National. However, he did admit to putting his fingerprints on two sections of the paper: “Fungo” and “The Skinny.”

“There wasn’t much of an editorial stamp I put on things, I spent so much time running around playing public relations man and spokesman and all that sort of thing. I never really got as much chance to be ‘editor’ as I would have liked. But ‘Fungo’ was mine. I just always loved that word. Some of the original ones, I said: ‘This is what we want to do,’ and I gave them those ideas. God, I haven’t heard that in a long time. That’s a happy memory,” Deford said.

The first “Fungo,” named after the long, skinny bat that baseball coaches use to hit fly balls to outfielders, was called “Three of a Kind,” and listed Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw and Ken Stabler. The three of them were listed because they had been to the Super Bowl and down the aisle three times each. Another Fungo was Alex Karras, Paul Blair and Arizona State, and the answer was: “The devil made Fungo do it. (Father Karras, Linda Blair and the Sun Devils.) And finally, another trio was: David Stern, Gerald Riggs, Brett Hull, and the answer was: “Fungo stets sail on a boat with a stern, a hull and some rigging.” Sometimes they were cheesy, but they were always fun to think about.

The other phrase Deford takes credit for bringing back into the common parlance is “the skinny.” In The National, “the skinny” was a short note that editors would attach to each team in the standings. In that first issue, “the skinny” wasn’t used. The less colorful “comment” was in its place. But it was soon replaced.

“When I first suggested it, two or three guys would say: ‘What the heck does that mean?’ And they said: ‘Well, we can’t run that,’ and I said: ‘Sure we can, we’ll bring it back.’ And we did, and now the skinny is everywhere,” Deford said.

Some of the comments/skinnies that day were: “Tough to beat Sixers on Wednesdays (10-2) but much easier on Tuesdays (1-4),” and “Warriors on scoring binge, have averaged 120.2 in last 14 games.”

Chapter Six

Take Me Out

One of the more critically-successful endeavors was The Main Event, a multi-page, many-thousand word feature story that ran two to three times per week and took on the kind of sports stories that many writers dreamed of writing on a regular basis, but couldn’t, because they had to cover their beat. At the same time The National was getting started, so was a book series called The Best American Sports Writing, published by Houghton Mifflin. The 1991 edition, which contained exemplary sports writing from 1990, included four stories from The National, all of them “Main Events;” but there could have been more. Peter Richmond was a regular writer of the “Main Event” and he got two stories into BASW, which set a record that stands today.

“Peter Richmond did a series that year on ballparks, it was really good and he was very nearly in there three times, and we sort of drew the line. And, in fact, it’s the only time somebody’s been in twice (in the same edition),” said Glenn Stout, who has edited the series since its inception, and feels that the death of The National has certainly made his job harder. “If you talked to anyone who worked for The National, that was dream job stuff. Here was this paper that was all of a sudden there, hiring people to do features, and that was exactly what newspapers were starting to get away from. And a lot of people took advantage of it.”

Pierce, Richmond and Howard’s stories made it into BASW that year, and they compare favorably to the BASW litmus test that the articles be primarily great writing and secondarily about sports. Howard wrote a compelling piece that could run in any magazine today about the transition of a young professional hockey player with goal-scoring aspirations into an enforcer. “The Making of a Goon” ran on Feb. 18, 1990 and detailed the mental and physical punishment that Joe Kocur, the Detroit Red Wings enforcer, went through over the course of an NHL season. Instead of assuming that Kocur was a meathead and thinking that he wasn’t worth a profile, Howard’s story was a conduit for the reader to gain a greater sense of what this player was like as a person. Charles P. Pierce wrote a smart story called “Thieves of Time” that was filled with cultural and literary allusions. In detailing the story of memorabilia thieves who stole Negro League baseball artifacts from an aged, sick and nearly blind “Cool Papa” Bell, Pierce referred to the Catholic Church selling “pieces of the cross” to parishioners many years after the death of Christ, Michael Milliken and his illicit commodity trading, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti. The first story by Richmond that made the BASW cut was “Death of a Cowboy,” a story about Lane Frost, the 1989 world bull riding champion, who died in the ring after being bucked off of a bull named Bad to the Bone. The story took a non-mainstream subject (especially for readers in The National’s target markets of New York, Chicago and L.A.) and made it accessible to readers of all kinds. The fact that Frost was a bull rider was secondary to the story of his death’s impact on the sport. One could imagine, if The National had been around a few years ago, that Richmond might have done an equally careful treatment of how Dale Earnhardt’s death affected NASCAR. Richmond’s other BASW-worthy story that year was “The Sports Fan,” his chronicle of a few days hanging out in Chicago and attending Cubs games with Bill Murray. The story featured Murray, who then was a hometown hero for his work in the Second City comedy troupe, Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters, hanging out with celebrities such as Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood-Mac, and yelling goofy one-liners at Cubs player Mark Grace while he was in the on-deck circle. Richmond’s story also revealed that Murray had a favorite beer vendor who always brought him the coldest Old Styles, he loved going to games with his family, and he was ultra-tolerant with fans who wanted a quick chat or an autograph, as long as it was between innings. The articles were smart and fun to read.

A commuter boarding a train from Greenwich, Conn. every morning has 50 minutes before he pulls into Grand Central Terminal, and definitely has 10 minutes to read a well-crafted feature story. This goes against the Media Week theory that The National was too smart for its readers.

“I always felt, and feel to this day, that there is room, it’s not primary, but every newspaper should have room for long takeouts and long features,” Deford said. “And most people aren’t going to read them, but if you start with the premise that nobody is going to read them, you’re wrong. But if you start with the premise that we can only do things which most people approve of, you’re wrong, too. We felt if it’s only 15-20 percent of the people who really like these things, well, that’s good enough, because we felt that that’s 15-20 percent of the people that are really going to like us, really going to appreciate us. Even Sports Illustrated has cut back on it in recent years, and I think it’s a mistake. I don’t know what the optimum length is, but I think there should be room for those kinds of pieces in all newspapers.

“And, I would go one step further, because sports lends itself to good writing, because you have such vivid characters, and extraordinary experiences, it’s even more to your favor to have good writing, to have simply good storytelling. So, we were never under any illusion that this was going to appeal to everybody. We always felt like the statistics were going to be more important (to most readers) but we always felt this was key to one fifth or one sixth of our potential audience.”

But the statistics were key. The premiere issue had expanded box scores for every NBA and NHL game from January 30, plus smaller score sheets for a number of big college basketball games.

“We had much more innovative box scores,” McKenzie said. “We had the last 10 games. You could see trends and season averages. It was like three box scores in one. With the hockey box score, ours was the first one you could make some sense out of, and nobody ever picked those up.”

The hockey box scores took up as much space as the game recaps, and showed shots, goals, assists, penalties, penalty minutes, goals, points and plus-minus for all skaters, along with shots faced, saves, save percentage, season wins-losses-ties and goals against average for goaltenders. They went on to show goals per period, shots per period, and listed each goal scorer and included a comment for what kind of goal it was, i.e. “power play, drive from point,” “tap in off rebound,” and “one-timed slap shot into slot.”

The basketball box scores were more traditional, but had extra details, such as: offensive-total rebounds, turnovers, steals, personal fouls, blocks and “points per minute.” The notes below the box scores listed lead changes, largest leads for each team and technical fouls. Every box score was a monster.

Chapter Five

Hanging with Chad

Along with Ostler’s introductory column, Johnette Howard, who went on to write for Sports Illustrated and Newsday, put together the first of her many intelligent feature stories called “The Main Event.” This one ran in the New York edition and focused on Patrick Ewing’s maturation into not only a dominating basketball player, but also a young man who was newly confident in his ideas and his ability to discuss his opinions with the media. The feature stretched from pages 35-38 and contained about 3,600 words along with four color photos.

Norman Chad, known now for announcing poker tournaments on ESPN, wrote a substantial column about a controversy between the NFL and WJLA, a local television station in Washington, D.C. The story was that WJLA had reported that the NFL drug offense policy was racially-biased, with white players less likely to be sent to treatment programs than black players who had committed similar offenses. It’s slightly ironic now that Chad, who chastised ESPN for glossing over the story in its pre-Super Bowl shows due to pressure from the NFL, is now working regularly for ESPN. Discovering Chad is something Deford is proud of.

“I took Norman Chad off the desk of the Washington Post, he was my Pygmalion,” Deford said of the former stand-up comedian. “George Solomon, one of the best sports editors in the country, what he was doing keeping him on the desk, that was beyond me…I’m a great admirer of George Solomon, but we all blow one every now and then.”

One thing for which The National should be applauded is that it gave readers all around the country a chance to experience writers like Ostler, Howard, Chad, Mike Lupica, Dave Kindred and John Feinstein a few years before the Internet made that so easy. Some employees were also the newspaper’s biggest fans. Ken Carpenter bought a copy every day before work, and still has every issue in storage near his home in Orlando.

“I used to try to get in there by about 2:30 and pick up a National. I spent my 50 cents and my 75 cents. Frank Deford said: ‘Never leave home without three quarters in your pocket.’ It was sort of our theme. I would buy a paper every day and sit there and have lunch,” Carpenter remembered.

The writer that Guidera read regularly was Chad.

“I remember the first couple of times I read Norman Chad. I still scour the Internet today looking for anything by him. I thought he was awesome. He was my favorite writer, he was the most entertaining, the funniest, not necessarily the best, but the most fun to read,” he said.

Chapter Four

A Critical Look

Would it sell today? No one really knows whether today’s reader would find The National appealing, what with all of the other publications, both online and off, available in today’s world, 15 years after The National printed its first issue. But it’s fun to think that it would be enticing, not just because it’s a kind thought toward the 150 editorial and 100 production staff who worked on the publication, but because a lot of the material in that first issue holds up. In fact, it’s not so hard to think that The National could sell better today, with the newspaper business in a downward transition and more and more sports sections being shortened. This bears out in careful consideration of the sports section in the Raleigh News&Observer, a newspaper that serves a metro area with over a million people. For a sports section aimed at that many people, the N&O comes up short. In fact, the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, a region with a huge collegiate athletics presence but a limited professional presence, might be the perfect market for a newspaper like The National. Sports fans in the area probably get enough college basketball coverage from the N&O, but with no major professional sports franchise in town, other than the locked-out Carolina Hurricanes of the NHL, readers who care about major league teams must feel slighted. Are there capsule recaps of each baseball or basketball game? Yes. But aside from 10-inches on a key game here or there, there’s nothing on the Atlanta Braves or the Cleveland Indians on a regular basis. What would the sports fan from Raleigh appreciate from The National each day? Let’s examine the premiere edition’s contents.

There’s a column by West Coast writer Ostler, who moved to The National to from the Los Angeles Times. While some of his one-liners don’t hold up so well today, (“The end of the world is near, but Sly Stallone will come up with a blockbuster sequel.”) many of his observations about the slightly twisted world of sports continue to be on target. Some notes from his first column, written in a folksy get-to-know you style:

* “Bo Jackson is spreading himself too thin, he should give up the guitar.” (Jackson suffered a career-ending hip injury during the 1990 football season.)

* “When man does perfect a time machine, it will mean we can watch sports events on live TV and skip over the commercials.” (TiVo and DVRs have made that possible.)

* “Man someday will cure cancer and stamp out hunger. Long before that, though, he will sell advertising in an athlete’s haircut.” (Haircuts have been done. Now temporary tattoos are being used on boxers’ backs for promotional purposes.)

One thing Ostler appreciated about the attitude at The National was that people weren’t afraid to do untraditional things. Controversy was sometimes appreciated.

“One thing I liked about it was the complete freedom, because Deford had ideas that are still way off of anybody’s charts now, in terms of what beat writers and columnists should do, which was basically: ‘Do whatever you want.’ Let it flow, let it go, have fun and put your heart into it,” Ostler said.

And he did just that. One of Ostler’s columns caused a bit of a rift in the New York newsroom later that year. But the ensuing battle, he said, was evidence of the kind of spirited debate that would go on in the office.

“It was small experience but kind of typical of The National,” Ostler said from his hotel room in San Antonio, where he was preparing to cover the opening game of the NBA Finals for the San Francisco Chronicle. “I decided to do a story on Andre Agassi, a column, because I had always ripped him, but a friend called and said: ‘He’s not a bad guy, you should meet him.’ So I said: ‘Okay, what the hell, I’ll set up an interview.’ And Andre called and invited me to spend a day in Las Vegas with him, he said: ‘Don’t just spend a half hour with me, why don’t you spend a day up here?’ And I wrote what was probably a glowing story about him, just when he was making the conversion from complete asshole to a decent guy. He was making what even now seems like an honest effort to shed that teenage bullshit: spitting at referees and stuff like that. And I thought we could be wrong, we can get fooled in this business, so I spent a whole day with him and I found him to be a charming guy, an engaging person, a real guy. I had a very positive experience. I wrote a very positive article, which was in part, a response to some of the attacks from John Feinstein and Lupica and one or two of the national tennis writers who had been ripping Agassi. Some of (what they wrote) was kind of gratuitous: they were ripping his brother’s wig. So it was a little bit of a response to them, saying: ‘Maybe this guy is not such a bad guy, you can’t necessarily believe all the things you read.’ So anyway, if Feinstein saw the story, I’m sure he didn’t like it, and there was somebody at The National that didn’t like it, and I think they were thinking about killing it. This guy Rob Fleder, who now works at Sports Illustrated, called me up and said: ‘You know, I read that thing and I thought it was sensational, and I talked them into running it.’ It was the kind of thing where at a regular newspaper, it’s the kind of thing that gets killed. But here there was a creative process going on. Somebody looked at it and said, okay, it’s different, but it’s a pretty good story and I think we should go with it. It was something that is still unusual in our business.”

Chapter Three

The Money Sucker

In the days before Internet startups blew through $30-million in half a year, no one could imagine that a newspaper, an actual product with actual customers who were tossing 50-cents into the pot every morning, could burn through $100-million in five years. That’s the thing worth getting your head around. If the newspaper was actually reaching 240,000 customers at its peak, that means it was taking in $600,000 a week on circulation alone, much better than fictitious Internet businesses of 1999. According to McKenzie, the paper spent $150-million in 23 months of production and start-up. What was the biggest money-sucker? Though he was on the phone, it was easy to imagine McKenzie shaking his head and rolling his eyes while talking about the satellite system which linked the newsroom in New York to printing sites in 16 cities. With one transmitter and 16 receivers that cost about $2-million each, The National spent more than $30-million just to transmit pages around the country. This, perhaps, is the expense that The National can most easily blame on bad timing. Take a moment to think back to the computer you were using in 1990. The hub of The National’s production system was a proprietary computer called MicroVax, which had 32 MB of internal memory (while the computer you want to get rid of today because it’s so slow cranks along at 512 MB) and had 400 MB of storage space (compared to today’s 25-times larger 10GB machines that feel useless to most users). Depending on the topic, 15 years doesn’t seem so long in the past. In fact, Guidera vividly remembers everyone in the newsroom, aside from a group of New York Rangers fans, being glued to televisions showing the opening moments of Desert Storm in 1991. But in computer and software terms, 15 years might be seven hardware and software generations. The National existed in an era when fast upload speeds were 56k. A full-color QuarkXpress page would have taken minutes, instead of seconds, to transmit. If you multiply that minute by a 40-page issue that needed to be sent, on deadline, every six minutes, to 15 cities, it’s easy to see why a satellite system was necessary.

“The satellite system was absolutely required. Otherwise we couldn’t have done it nationally. Everybody understood that going in,” Deford said. “I don’t know what the thing cost, maybe it could have been cheaper…we weren’t completely organized technically. In the beginning, we lost some readers who got pissed off at us (because they were subscribers who didn’t get their papers), but that had nothing to do with the ultimate failure a year later.”

When Deford speaks of losing readers early on, he’s referring to The National’s over promising its ability to deliver. Remember, a significant chunk of the audience that The National was targeting were luxury-car driving, NPR-listening readers who were used to getting what they wanted from vendors both in their personal and business lives. Along with buying radio time on sports-talk stations like WFAN in New York, The National was buying time on classical music stations. It’s difficult to argue against that tactic, since Deford, John Feinstein and Charlie Pierce are regular contributors to NPR these days. Those in charge of marketing felt they had identified an audience that appreciated quality and could afford to spend an extra half-dollar a day on a third newspaper. The problem is that those people lived in places like Montclair, N.J., Malibu, Calif., or Grosse Point, Mich. and it was hard to get a paper to their front doors by 6 a.m. In an effort to reach them, Price needed to negotiate space in printing presses near major cities – something that proved to be more difficult that he imagined, even with a distribution deal with Dow Jones. Printing negotiations resulted in the New York edition of The National printing 100 miles away at the Hartford Courant’s plant in central Connecticut.

“While we could acquire a strong distributor who went to all these places, we had to get to their distribution points and go find a printer near their distribution center. Most newspapers own their own plants, and have those plants adjacent to the center or (in the) center of their major circulation (areas). We, as a startup, couldn’t own printing plants. We wouldn’t have known what to do with them most of the time. So we had to go find printing facilities that would not only print on a very tight timetable to meet those trucks for Dow Jones, but in quality color which was very important for us. We had to find quality newspaper plants, and then getting them to do business with us (wasn’t easy),” Price said. “If you’re going to Miami, for example, since South Florida is a very important sports market, and you ask the Miami Herald or the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel to print your paper, and you’re coming to town proposing to be the best sports paper, and they know that most of their male readership reads sports before anything else in their newspaper, they don’t welcome you in their vicinity. And they certainly aren’t going to print you in their plant. And if they’re using a commercial plant, they might find some reasons to find this (to be) interference with the distribution of their paper, and you can interpret what that might mean.”

While Price spoke about the logistics problems hypothetically, columnist Scott Ostler found out about the distribution first hand, when he was covering the Final Four.

“Somebody called me from the circulation department and asked: ‘Would you mind if we deliver a big bundle of newspapers to the hotel, would you mind taking it out to the arena tonight?’ And I said: ‘That would be cool, I don’t mind that,’ so I was the newspaper guy that night. I took a big huge bundle of newspapers and dropped them off in the press room” he said.

So, distribution was a serious roadblock, which Deford said was the most important reason why The National folded. If they had envisioned the problem in advance, Price and Azcarraga might not have gone ahead with the newspaper.

“The reason that it failed, nobody anticipated, including us, by the way. But everybody who said, in the beginning, that it would fail, said so because (they thought) there weren’t enough people who would be interested in it, or you wouldn’t draw enough advertising,” Deford said. “Nobody that I can remember said you’re going to have trouble distributing it. I don’t remember anybody saying that, and we certainly didn’t talk about that in any detail. Again, I’m on the editorial side, so a lot of this went on along a parallel track from me, and it became obvious early on, that we had real problems delivering the newspaper. And ultimately, that was it, that’s what killed us. There wasn’t anything else that killed us. I was there, and by the end I was much more involved in the business side of things, and we did everything to figure out how we could have more-efficiently delivered the newspaper…But that was it, there was nothing else that sank The National.”

Even if you believe that spending 30-percent of the of the 5-year nest-egg on a satellite-networked computer system was a necessity, The National’s spending was still legendary. Guidera’s column, after the gentle beginning, went on to recount some of the paper’s more sensational expenses: the office at 666 5^th Ave. was on the world’s second-most expensive block of real-estate; an advertising department staff meeting in Bermuda, where one dinner check was $4,600; a $6,000 ticket on the Concorde for a reporter to come home from covering the French Open to console a despondent kitty; the $130,000 brass eagle, a replica of the newspaper’s logo that was supposed to be prominently displayed in the lobby, that couldn’t fit in the freight elevator and required a crew with a crane and the removal of a window – for another $12,000 to do the job; the $10,000 place-settings in the executive dining room; the portrait photographer (and her assistant) who were sent from New York to Los Angeles and put up in a fancy Santa Monica hotel to take mug shots of Scott Ostler and Steven Clow; the numerous 35-inch Mitsubishi televisions installed in the office; the building-wide cable wiring job that was required so that those televisions could actually receive sporting events, the $980 fantasy football draft party at a bar around the corner; the fleet of cars that no one shared, that would whisk staffers home to New Jersey or Westchester County if they left the office after public transportation had shut down for the night; the special elevator that was put in on the corner of the building so The National’s address could be next door to New York’s famed 21 Club. The list goes on. Carpenter and Lee Gordon, who ran the statistics desk, had worked out that they would need four, maybe five fax machines so that they could receive all of their score updates from stringers in arenas and stadiums around the country. Presenting this in detail to McKenzie, “Van immediately turned to the business manager and said: ‘We’ll take six.’ And these were $2200 a piece. That little snippet told the story. Everything they did, they did in excess. There was no restraint, there was no need to worry about anything,” Carpenter said. “It was crazy, it was spending like crazy, and everything was New York prices.”

Deford admitted that all those stories, as outrageous as the may sound, were true, but 15 years later, he didn’t hesitate to defend the expenses.

“Could we have saved a little money here and there? Yes. But remember, Mr. Azcarraga lost $150-million, and the only reason he quit, it wasn’t because he was $150-million down, he had a billion more or two to go, he quit because we couldn’t see any way out. That’s the reason he quit at the end,” Deford said. “It was impossible. We had investigated all the areas. The last thing we investigated was a possibility of getting our own trucks, and when Jaime Davila, who was then the boss, ran the numbers on it, we saw we couldn’t do it. It would be that much more expensive. It would lose even more money. So, what did Manhattan cost? Maybe a million dollars more than if we had been in New Jersey? 500-thousand dollars more? It had nothing to do in the long run with anything.”

By the time the losses started mounting, some of the little things changed. Deford said he was beginning to think that the end was near as soon as Azcarraga replaced Price with Jaime Davila, his Mexican business manager, in the fall of 1990. But the newspaper kept on ticking, at one point raising its price to 75-cents in an effort to inch toward the black. As outrageous as the spending was in the early days, when things began to look bleak, equally strange cost cutting practices began. Ostler said the Los Angeles office suite, which had a dozen offices, of which only half were occupied, had a hot and cold water cooler that was subbed out for cold only once things started getting tough.

“That’s when I knew things were starting to go bad financially,” Ostler said. “They said they could save six dollars a month or something. So they went from one extreme to the other.”

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