“I have survived so long because I’ve been blessed with talented and gracious colleagues and with a top brass who let me choose my topics every week and then allowed me to express opinions that were not always popular. Well, someone had to stand up to the yackety-yak soccer cult.”
― Frank Deford
“Thank you for listening. Thank you for abiding me. And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I bid you goodbye and take my leave.”
― Frank Deford
“When I was covering games, and this is back in the ’60s, you’d go into the manager’s office. I can still visualize Earl Weaver from the Baltimore Orioles. I can just see Earl now in his underwear… with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, holding court. And that was the way it was done then.”
― Frank Deford
“Every now and then, I get a free ticket from someone, and I look at the price, and it says $800, and I’m thinking, ‘A thousand dollars to see,’ I said, ‘There’s no ballgame in the world worth that kind of money,’ and yet the attendance for sports is more than it ever has been.”
― Frank Deford
“So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren’t educated so much as they are just kept eligible.”
― Frank Deford
“In days of yore, Opening Day of the baseball season was special, signifying that spring had come at last. Today, however, Opening Day sort of dribbles into existence, and the spiritual start of spring now belongs to the Masters golf tournament, where the azaleas and magnolias and dogwood bloom.”
― Frank Deford
“I get very envious of my general news colleagues who are always being handed sexy new stuff like global warming, China, and Donald Trump, while my sports colleagues and I must be eternally satisfied with the same old home-court advantage, soccer, and momentum.”
― Frank Deford
“It’s interesting too, that the coach of that Georgia Tech team who led his valiant warriors to those 222 points was none other than John Heisman. Yes, he whom the Heisman trophy is named for, an award that honors that college player who best exemplifies excellence and integrity.”
― Frank Deford
“She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.”
― Frank Deford
“Remember when John Roberts was seeking confirmation of the Supreme Court, and he said judges should be just like umpires, just calling balls and strikes? Well, turnabout is fair play. What baseball needs behind the plate are umpires like those judges who are called strict constructionists, which means you follow subtle law to the letter.”
― Frank Deford
“The year after Russell retired, in the famous seventh game of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, Willis Reed, the New York Knicks center, limped onto the court against the Los Angeles Lakers, inspiring his team and freezing Chamberlain into a benign perplexity.”
― Frank Deford
“Before the Colts arrived in 1947, the best athlete in town was a woman duckpin bowler named Toots Barger. Football? The biggest games in Baltimore had been when Johns Hopkins took on Susquehanna or Franklin & Marshall at homecoming.”
― Frank Deford
“Johnny U was an American original, a piece of work like none other, excepting maybe Paul Bunyan and Horatio Alger.”
― Frank Deford
“I think we have enough trouble finding community in this country, and sport does provide that. It is a mediocrisy, the greatest mediocrisy. If you’re the best, it shows in sports. Nobody can say, ‘Well, he’s only there because of his connections,’ or whatever. In that sense, I suppose it upholds democracy and the best in us.”
― Frank Deford
“Nowadays, of course, flesh peddlers and scouting services identify the best athletes when they are still in junior high. Prospects are not allowed to sneak up on us.”
― Frank Deford
“Football teams represent cities and colleges and schools. The people have built great stadiums, and the game is culturally intertwined with our calendar. We don’t go back to college for the college. We go back for a football game, and, yes, we even call that ‘homecoming.’”
― Frank Deford
“You have to do what the market requires of you… You either keep swimming, or you sink.”
― Frank Deford
“’Good Morning America’ is television to a fare-thee-well.”
― Frank Deford
“There were a lot of places, including Los Angeles, that didn’t have major league baseball. There were other really large cities that had no major league teams, but at least they had college football.”
― Frank Deford
“I had gone to work for ‘Newsweek’, left ‘Newsweek’ and went to work for ‘Vanity Fair,’ and then went back to ‘Newsweek’. I came back to ‘SI’ as a contract writer.”
― Frank Deford
“If you’re a father of a child who dies, it’s an experience that never leaves you. It scars you forever and ever and ever. And so when I do any kind of story with somebody who’s in the same position as my daughter was, there’s no question that something comes out of me and embraces that story in a way that only a father who lost a child could.”
― Frank Deford
“What we accepted as great art – whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony – is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.”
― Frank Deford
“You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.”
― Frank Deford
“That’s the greatest compliment I can get: when somebody from Key West says, ‘Hey, Bubba.’ That means I’m in!”
― Frank Deford
“I am something of a ham. Yeah, I’d always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn’t as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.”
― Frank Deford
“If I come on three days after the Super Bowl and say pretty much what everybody else has said, what’s the point? That was the tricky thing… coming up with a new angle every time – or most times, because you couldn’t bat a thousand.”
― Frank Deford
“If I’d grown up in Sao Paulo, I’m sure I would’ve been a great soccer fan.”
― Frank Deford
“I don’t think there are many kids who sit around and want to be actors. I don’t think there are many kids who want to sit around and want to be senators. But so many of us want to be athletes, so we’re envious of them, and we put them up on that pedestal.”
― Frank Deford
“I remember, when I was growing up in Baltimore, we’d get on a streetcar and go down to see the Orioles, and for a couple of bucks, you could get a pretty good seat. Kids can’t do that anymore. So I think that changes the whole nature of sports.”
― Frank Deford
“By coincidence, this particular tiny show on earth that consists entirely of me talking about sports on NPR is also folding its tent flaps this May of 2017. Yes, this is my swansong, my farewell, my last hurrah. Adieu, adios, arrivederci, auf wiedersehen.”
― Frank Deford
“I’ve been delivering these little homilies since 1980 – that’s 37 years – and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries – and I trust you’ve hung onto every word.”
― Frank Deford
“I never saw war, so that is still my vision of manhood: Unitas standing courageously in the pocket, his left arm flung out in a diagonal to the upper deck, his right cocked for the business of passing, down amidst the mortals. Lock and load.”
― Frank Deford
“I think I would die if I couldn’t get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.”
― Frank Deford
“I think the best thing I’ve written is a story called ‘The Boxer and the Blonde.’ It’s a piece about Billy Conn, the white would-be heavyweight champion of the world, who lived in Pittsburgh.”
― Frank Deford
“ESPN is all meat and potatoes. It’s pretty much scouting reports. There isn’t a great deal of humor, and when there is, it’s pretty sophomoric.”
― Frank Deford
“There are some books that get huge numbers of positive reviews, but reading them satiates people. They say, ‘I’ve read enough now’.”
― Frank Deford
“I’ll forever be grateful to NPR that they gave me such extraordinary freedom… It was 37 years of a fond relationship.”
― Frank Deford
“Nothing made me happier than to hear from literally hundreds of listeners who would tell me how much the commentaries revealed about a subject they otherwise had never cared much for.”
― Frank Deford
“Sport is an art: it has incredible appeal everywhere on this earth, and it fills so many human hearts with passion that it’s impossible to dismiss.”
― Frank Deford
“The wonderful thing about delivering sports commentary on NPR was that because it has such a broad audience, I was able to reach people who otherwise had little or no interest in sport – especially as an important part of our human culture.”
― Frank Deford
“The dollar is a winner. The euro is a tie. Get off the dime, Europe, and play to win.”
― Frank Deford
“The hardest thing in the world is to write something critical about someone and then show up the next day in the locker room. I mean, that is not fun, and that takes an awful lot of guts. And I never enjoyed that.”
― Frank Deford
“I remember one time I wrote something very, very critical about Wilt Chamberlain. The next time I saw him – and Wilt was not a man, as huge as he was – he was not a man of confrontation. And we were in the Lakers locker room. And he sent Jerry West over, and he said, ‘Frank, Wilt would like you to leave.’”
― Frank Deford
“How did females become ‘guys?’ How did everyone become ‘guys?’ Remember, too, that a male guy was something of a scoundrel. And a wise guy was a fresh kid, a whippersnapper. In its most other famous evocation, men in Brooklyn said ‘youse guys.’ Damon Runyon referred to hustlers, gamblers, and other nefarious types as guys.”
― Frank Deford
“NPR allowed me to treat sports seriously, as another branch on the tree of culture.”
― Frank Deford
“You’re writing about young, vibrant people; there are wins and losses. In other words, it’s great drama.”
― Frank Deford
“I think, in accepting the amount of money that athletes make, I think that fans accept that now. It’s the nature of the beast; that’s the way it is, so they understand it. All, I think, fans have changed – because the price of tickets has gone up so much – that they feel a certain sense of entitlement when they go to a game.”
― Frank Deford
“To write long pieces – or not even long pieces – to write stuff like the columns of Red Smith and people like that – they’re different then what it is today. Everything today is based on x’s and o’s. Inside baseball, it’s all, ‘Who’s gonna win?’ or you’re comparing things – it’s not as thoughtful as it used to be.”
― Frank Deford
“To compare writing an article for ‘Sports Illustrated’ to doing a piece for ‘Real Sports’, the article, it was all me. You know, I’m out there by myself with my pad and pencil. ‘Real Sports,’ I’ve got a producer, an assistant producer, and cameramen. It’s an individual game versus a team game.”
― Frank Deford
“The Masters is not greedy. You wanna buy a Masters souvenir logo shirt? Sure, let’s go over to the nearest Ralph Lauren boutique. Oops, you can only purchase Masters memorabilia at the Masters, this one week of the year.”
― Frank Deford
“Once again it is peaceful at Augusta National Golf Club, after some rather ugly stand-offs in recent years, when the club balked at changing its all-white, all-male membership tradition. African-Americans and female Americans are on the club manifest now along with other golf-Americans, and all is serene once again.”
― Frank Deford
“Yes, the Masters is too stylish to be an American icon. It’s as out of character for Uncle Sam as a McDonald’s is for France.”
― Frank Deford
“Despite the fact that every sport this side of badminton worries about concussions that result in brain damage, CTE, the National Hockey League refuses to accept the overwhelming medical science. Good grief – the NHL still permits fights.”
― Frank Deford
“The strike zone should be what the rule book says it is and not a personal idiosyncrasy.”
― Frank Deford
“If there ever was an ‘America’s team,’ it would be itty-bitty, little Green Bay, stuck way up there somewhere, owned by the salt-of-the-Earth citizens themselves.”
― Frank Deford
“The Cowboys were never America’s team any more than Anthony Weiner was America’s congressman.”
― Frank Deford
“It’s still the tradition for various football powerhouses to pay guarantees to schools with cream-puff teams to come on over to our place and submit to massacre.”
― Frank Deford
“As it happens, Cumberland was on the verge of bankruptcy and had to give up football. But the villainous Heisman made it play a game that had been scheduled when Cumberland still had a team, or Heisman threatened to demand a $3,000 forfeiture fee that could well have put the school out of existence.”
― Frank Deford
“Since too few Americans go to the polls, I say what this country needs is a bobblehead election, where voters will get free bobblehead dolls of their choice when they show up and vote for president.”
― Frank Deford
“I think the four major leagues ought to set up a joint commission – say, of retired judges – to rule on athletes who are accused of doing bad things away from the game. Then each league would retain its independence in determining what penalties their players should get for infractions committed within the sport.”
― Frank Deford
“All sorts of famous sports people have been suspended for extended periods.”
― Frank Deford
“In the television era, the second week of the Olympics is reserved for what is considered the marquee event: track and field.”
― Frank Deford
“While swimming was always a spotlight sport, I was, if you will, sort of present at the creation when gymnastics became the new star lead-off hitter.”
― Frank Deford
“Statues of sports stars are all the rage – especially in baseball.”
― Frank Deford
“Pete Rose may not make the Hall of Fame, but a statue of him is going to be erected outside the Cincinnati Reds ballpark.”
― Frank Deford
“On Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., there are statues of five Confederate luminaries and then, incongruously in this company, one of Arthur Ashe.”
― Frank Deford
“It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that whereas so many of our statues have been of military leaders, now it may well be sports stars who are the ones more likely to be so honored.”
― Frank Deford
“Does each of us need to suffer agony to understand how brutal our gridiron entertainment is? Surely, seeing is believing enough. So, what is football doing to us as a people? How do we explain an America that alone in the world so loves this savage sport?”
― Frank Deford
“Majesty is a thing of beauty to behold, whatever the particular enterprise.”
― Frank Deford
“Don’t dismiss Auriemma and UConn just because their excellence shines on the female side of the coin.”
― Frank Deford
“We exalted that Michael Phelps-consecrated water. Rose petals were strewn in Peyton Manning’s path when he retired. But hey, that’s natural. As we should, we admire those in any craft, no less so in sports, who appear out of nowhere to achieve remarkable feats.”
― Frank Deford
“It was not that long ago when the accepted wisdom in football was that the running game had to be established – that was always the obligatory verb: established – before passes could become effective. My, we know how that has changed. Now the pass is established from the get-go, and running is an afterthought.”
― Frank Deford
“At all levels – with men and women – the 3-point shot has utterly transformed the way the game is played. More and more, the players are spread out, looking to pop behind the 3-point arc.”
― Frank Deford
“More and more teams are, in the vernacular, ‘going small,’ with only one big man down deep. Good grief, the position of power forward is in the process of going the way of short shorts.”
― Frank Deford
“Owners own teams so that they might move them to another municipality with better luxury boxes.”
― Frank Deford
“The Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons are there today as sure as they were when what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Would you rather have a basketball team, or would you rather be Detroit?”
― Frank Deford
“I do honestly believe that, in the 21st century, sport is the most significant cultural element in this imperfect world. It calls for serious attention.”
― Frank Deford
“When Juan Antonio Samaranch said the Olympics are more important than the Catholic Church, I just couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, ‘Don’t let your expression show that he has just made a total ass of himself. Be cool, and just keep right on talking.’”
― Frank Deford
“I think every time I can find a story that touches that human nerve, and even sometimes makes you cry, I think that I’ve found something that I’ll like very much.”
― Frank Deford
“Because I lost a daughter, eight years old, to cystic fibrosis, I think that anytime that I’m dealing with people who, like Andrea Yeager, are trying to help those sick children, I identify very much with them.”
― Frank Deford
“You can stand at a bar and scream all you want about who was the greatest athlete and which was the greatest sports dynasty, and you can shout out your precious statistics, and maybe you’re right, and maybe the red-faced guy down the bar – the one with the foam on his beer and the fancy computer rankings – is right, but nobody really knows.”
― Frank Deford
“The only thing we know for sure about superiority in sports in the United States of America in the 20th century is that Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics teams he led stand alone as the ultimate winners.”
― Frank Deford
“Bill Russell was the pivot on which the whole sport turned.”
― Frank Deford
“First and foremost, Howard Cosell is sports. There are all these people, these fans, who claim that when Cosell does a game on television, they turn off the sound on the TV and listen to the radio broadcast. Oh, sure. You probably know critics in your neighborhood who vow the same thing. Well, too bad for them.”
― Frank Deford
“Dan Rather pulling on a sweater and thereby winning a whole new chunk of the populace: That’s television. President Reagan’s press conferences: That’s television. Keith Jackson is television. So are Kermit the Frog, instant replay, and the Fiesta Bowl.”
― Frank Deford
“Quickness and momentum. You take the whole last generation of sports, listening to them, even reading about them, watching the games, analyzing them, arguing about them, instant-replaying them, second-guessing them, and all you’ll distill from them is quickness and momentum.”
― Frank Deford
“The stories that are most unfamiliar, the ones that seem to come out of the blue about people that aren’t well known, usually come from producers that have really done a lot of homework and looked around. Other stories come from the correspondents.”
― Frank Deford
“I’m a writer. I’m moonlighting on television. I never made any pretensions to that. As much as I like being on ‘Real Sports,’ I have been a writer since I was a little boy, and that’s still my first love.”
― Frank Deford
“People often lump radio and television together because they are both broadcast mediums. But radio, anyway, and the radio I do for NPR, is much closer to writing than it is to television.”
― Frank Deford
“It costs a lot of money to deliver newsprint. It’s so much easier to do it through the air, Internet, radio, television. The second easiest thing is to do it through the mail. But when you have to take something heavy and put it on someone’s doorstep, that costs a lot of money.”
― Frank Deford
“I can remember going to see the minor league Orioles. Until I was 15 years old, we’d go down with 3,000 people to watch them play the Syracuse Chiefs or the Jersey City Little Giants. That’s what passed for Baltimore sports.”
― Frank Deford
“It’s almost impossible to explain how little the NBA amounted to when I started covering it in 1963. It wasn’t fair to call it bush, although everybody did. It was simply small – only nine teams – and insignificant.”
― Frank Deford
“In the summer of 1963, my second with ‘Sports Illustrated,’ Jerry Tax, the basketball editor, got the Celtics’ Frank Ramsey, the NBA’s first famous sixth man, to do a piece for the magazine revealing some of the devious little tricks of his trade. Things like surreptitiously holding an opponent’s shorts – nickel-and-dime stuff.”
― Frank Deford
“Several NBA teams got their best gates every season when they scheduled a doubleheader and booked the Globetrotters and their stooges for the opening game.”
― Frank Deford
“The NBA Schedule was made up by one man, Eddie Gottlieb, who had owned the Philadelphia Warriors. Eddie had a Buddha-like body and a crinkly smile, and because he had also been an owner in baseball’s old Negro leagues, he was known as the Mogul.”
― Frank Deford
“Hard as it is to believe, there were three magazines fighting over me. ‘Newsweek’ wanted to keep me, ‘ESPN The Magazine’ was coming into existence and wanted me, and ‘SI’ wanted to bring me back. Isn’t that amazing? I had a choice, like a free agent.”
― Frank Deford
“’SI’ came to me and said, ‘We want you to do a story on Russell as the greatest team player,’ which I certainly agreed with.”
― Frank Deford
“I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that’s largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory – the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls ‘the arc.’”
― Frank Deford
“We start 2016 with a command: that the subject of Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame is over, finis, kaput forever and ever. As sure as we will no longer discuss whether Lindsey Graham or George Pataki can be president.”
― Frank Deford
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