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What: Sport Magazine’s “new look”

Price: $3.50.

It can be a sad sight, watching a venerable sporting publication grapple with the throes of midlife crisis.

What to call this latest redesign of Sport Magazine, born in 1946 and made over more than a half-dozen times since?

How about “51 Going On 15”?

One part “Slam,” one part “Blitz,” one part “SI For Kids” and one slender lifeline left for its longtime readers to clutch, the new Sport is a curious jumble of Skittles and Jack Daniels ads, “Kournikova Undressed” cover teasers and travel pieces on the Costa del Sol, site of the just-completed 1997 Ryder Cup.

(“Kournikova Undressed?” Settle down, PlayStation junkies. Anna Kournikova, the 16-year old Russian tennis star featured on page 30, in full color . . . and fully clothed in regular tennis attire, her game dissected from racquet type to shoe to Adidas apparel. Undressed--get it? For shame, for shame.)

Turn a few more pages and you will find a photo illustration of Steve Young, John Elway and Dan Marino waging tug-of-war against Mark Brunell, Brett Favre and Drew Bledsoe.

“Team Baby Boomers vs. Team Gen X.”

Is that the October cover story . . . or the editorial meeting that produced the new Sport look?

Elsewhere, Sport’s new target audience can read the “wily” observations of a cartoon crow named Cooper (“Hey, Pete Sampras. You rule, man”); check out such hot new technotoys as the Music Powerphone (“make your insults heard from up to 300 feet away”); and study the “10 Ways To Be Like Tiger Woods.”

In trumpeting the makeover, editor-in-chief Cam Benty promises the magazine will continue to deliver “hard-hitting” stories, the “kind of stuff Sport is known for.” Such as that “Celebrity Interview” on page 42 with Arliss and Barry Bonds.