Three cheers for the Sportstar • 03.28.09
It’s been two years since I started blogging and it’s time for a special post. No, I am not going to bore you to death by reminiscing, how blogging on ACommonFan has been a life changing experience or thank everyone – right from the person who invented the first blogging platform to the every family member or friend who I have discussed sports with.
Instead I will pay a little homage to The Sportstar – the sports magazine which made millions of sports fans in this country, including me.

What would I have been without you
I say sports fans because The Sportstar stood for more than just cricket. At a time when there was no cable and no internet and other than the Doordarshan’s telecast of the Olympics, the tennis grand slams and the football and hockey World Cups, there was absolutely no other way of knowing what else was going on in the international sports world, I looked forward to the weekly dose of The Sportstar like a drug-addict waiting for his next shot of cocaine. People who grew up in the nineties can never appreciate what this magazine meant in the 80’s. They covered a wide of sports in detail and brought to us some of the finest reporting and writing from the world of sports.
It was because of them that we came to know the players that we had glimpsed on television and understood the nuances of various sport and developed an appreciation for their history.
If not for them, we would have not known for the longest time about the NBA and about the various football leagues in Europe.
And they weren’t just covering different sports. They brought to us the finest works of the likes of Brian Glanville and Paul Fein – a breed of sportswriters that I didn’t even know existed – any die-hard football or tennis fan will tell you that these two are to the world of sports writing what Sachin Tendulkar is to the world of batting. Any article by these guys used to be read slowly and thoughtfully as if I was savouring the finest dessert in the world.
In a country where sports isn’t really part of popular culture or our daily lives, and reading is largely limited to the morning newspaper, it was testimony to their quality of content that they stood the test of time while many others fell by the wayside.
The internet made life really difficult for magazines like The Sportstar. Circulation fell and it was difficult to pack enough into a magazine to compete with the wealth of free content available on the World Wide Web.
They responded by reducing the cost of the magazine and coming out with a paid online format. However, the cost cuts haven’t led to any drop in the quality of the content. The works of Glanville and Fein still figure prominently and die-hards like me continue to do their bit for the circulation.
ACommonFan would have been reduced to just ACricketFan if not for the sustenance that the Sportstar provided for many years.
Thank you Sportstar for making me a sports fan and for making this blog a sports blog.

