40 Years of Sportstar 40 Superstars

The first issue of Sportstar was published on July 15, 1978, and for four decades, the magazine has tirelessly covered all sports, Indian as well as global. From featuring Björn Borg on the cover of the first issue, the year he won the first of three consec utive French Open-Wimbledon doubles, to celebrating the feats of a young - and still little-known - Sachin Tendulkar during the Sportstar Trophy in 1987, the magazine has covered the biggest sportspersons in the world as well as the rising ones.

Sportstar is an offering from The Hindu Group, an institution with an innate interest in sports and which has been backing all athletic activity with whole-hearted zeal for more than a century through the sports pages of its flagship newspaper, The Hindu.

Growing up on the fringes of Calcutta - India was still not obsessed with renaming every city and town - in the early 1980s and '90s, Sportstar was my trusted friend that told me about the world of European football, the characters dominating tennis and the happenings around the Indian cricket team. With no cable television for company, yet, the magazine was our only source to go beyond the news reports that appeared in the dailies.

The features by the legendary R. Mohan and Nirmal Shekar and columnists like Brian Glanville and Sunil Gavaskar were perhaps my first introduction to quality writing. It was these fine words that got me hooked to reading, opening a whole new world of books and writers that, fortunately, remain my closest companions.

**Contents and Sample Pages**