A New Daily for Sports Nuts

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When USA Today first appeared in 1982, many customers eagerly seized the paper's statistics-laden sports section and chucked the rest into the trash. Within the past year, after losing some $800 million, the Gannett daily finally became profitable. But starting this week it will face competition for the sports nut: the National, the first U.S. all-sports daily. The paper, to be published every day but Saturday, will feature 32 to 48 pages of news, opinion and gossip, with up to half the pages in color. Satellites will enable the National to cover late games, while Dow Jones, parent of the Wall Street Journal, will provide a proven distribution system.

The National will be overseen by Frank Deford, a former SPORTS ILLUSTRATED writer and NBC commentator who was six times named sportswriter of the year. Deford, who has not edited a publication since his days at Princeton, says he will write a column after the start-up, and regards managing editor Van McKenzie as day-to-day chief.

Deford is far from the paper's only celebrity writer: by dangling salaries reportedly ranging up to $250,000, the National has gathered a 130-member editorial staff that includes columnists Mike Lupica from the New York Daily News and Dave Kindred from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as well as editors from the Boston Globe and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Boasts Deford: "We will offer the finest collection of writers ever assembled at one daily."

Despite the literary aspirations of those big names, the trend in sports coverage almost everywhere is away from elegant prose and toward number crunching: in sports, there is a statistic for practically everything. The message has not been lost on the National. Says columnist Kindred: "We hope to have pretty writing. We also hope to have every ugly box score you have ever seen." The paper will offer localized editions wherever it is sold -- for starters in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. After a gradual five-year expansion, seemingly modeled on that of USA Today, it plans to publish a separate edition in every city with a major league franchise for baseball, basketball, football or hockey.

While sports dailies thrive in other nations, including France and Italy, they tend to stress facts and figures rather than slick writing. The National, on the other hand, presents itself as a literate journal aiming at young, well-off college graduates, presumably male. Some 1,200 pages of ads have been sold for the first year, 20% above initial projections, thanks in large part to Deford's credibility, which he has exploited by pitching to potential advertisers in person. Says Drew Marcus, an analyst at Kidder Peabody: "The paper is going after a very narrow niche, but one with a possibility of success."

The National is financed by Mexican media tycoon Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, who dominates his country's TV production. He also counts a pro soccer team among an estimated $1 billion in holdings. The new daily's publisher, Peter Price, erstwhile publisher of the New York Post, says the start-up cost $25 million and predicts losses of only $100 million more during the expansion. Price says the paper should break even, at a circulation of 750,000 a day, within two years. USA Today president Tom Curley is skeptical. Says he: "$100 million doesn't square with our experience."

The paper's fate depends on two unpredictable factors. One is whether early issues are lively and error-free; hard-core fans are notoriously unforgiving. The other is whether enough people really want all that coverage every day from all those fancy columnists and feature writers. Onlookers offer scenarios aplenty but admit that the National is hard to assess because it is unprecedented -- one might say, a whole new ball game.

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York (