...wasn’t surprised when many people had reviewed Sportstar whereas there was none to review Sportworld. The reason simple, Sportsworld is no more. So Guys, this is more of a tribute rather than a review.
It was almost 13 years back, I got to see this poor looking sportsmag in a friend’s place. Anyway read that as I had nothing else to read in his room other than the telephone directory. But to my surprise this was so interesting than the better looking Sportstar which I used to read regularly for many years. The big difference was Sportstar had better print quality but contained too much of statistics, whereas this poor cousin made up for the poor print quality with some excellent writing by a bunch of talented writers.
I subscribed to this magazine and used to get it through post as it was not available with the paper agent in my place. It used to come 2 or 3 days late. It was then, that I did a marketing campaign for the first time in my life to a few of my friends and to my surprise I succeeded!! or maybe the mag was too good that people fell for it’s charms. Anyway around 5 people became subscribers and the paper agent started selling Sportsworld and there ended the frustration of getting the mag 2 days late, than my fellow readers in other parts of the country.
Soon Sportsworld became the first all colour sportsmag in India. But again it was not the print quality or layout, it was writers like Pradeep Paul, Shelvin Sebastian, Andy O’brien, Rohit Brijnath and Mudar Pathreya who made it so interesting. Once the tennis writer Rohit wrote an article before India’s Davis cup tie against Switzerland, which had 2 players in the top 10. He finished the article by writing that he’d eat his words if India won the rubber. But to everyone’s surprise our boys won!! and the next issue had a photograph of Rohit being made to eat the paper he had written!!! Last heard that he joined INDIA TODAY as the chief sports editor.
The highlight of the mag was a column called ’’Freewheeling’’ on the last page which was more about the personal encounters of the writers with famous sportspersons. The best thing about the magazine was that it didn’t concentrate too much on cricket (might be the reason, the mag was not interesting to many Indians), and man they were brave too, they brought to light many a scandal in sports including the sexual abuse allegation against officials of the Swimming federation of India by Lorainne verghese as well as the case of sacking of hockey player R.P singh just because he refused to cut his long hair!!
Well, as time passes things change for the good or bad and after having been an avid fan of Sportworld for more than 5 years I lost interest in it, not becoz the mag became boring but becoz I was slowly losing interest in sports and things like movies and business became my new interests. Even then I used to read it once in a while till one fine day when I went to the bookstand to be told that Sportsworld had ceased to exist.
Even now I have a few copies of the mag with me for they have my name in it, they contain the letters I wrote to the editor and some contain my name as a participant in the contests they held. I never won those contests but they had the nice habit of publishing the names of even the losers.The joy of seeing ur name in print was great, a feeling which was so fulfilling, than the sight of seeing ur name in the electronic media.