The distinguished sportswriter Frank Deford was tall, lean, and sideburned, with a Clark Gable pencil mustache, well-tailored clothes, and often a frisson of purple silk at the neck or breast. He looked the way he wrote and spoke, combining the folksy, conversational idioms of classic Dempsey-age sportswriting with a sophisticated searching curiosity about what impels people—makes them the way they are. He began writing for Sports Illustrated in 1962, at age twenty-three, and his accounts of athletes such as the basketball player Bill Russell, with his wary, intelligent distance; the tennis star Jimmy Connors, who was unusually attached to his mother and grandmother; and the coach Bob Knight and the complexities of his rage changed Deford’s profession—made games into culture.
By the time I met him, in the late nineteen-eighties, Deford’s prose had brought him broad renown: he was now an urbane American figure who could be seen in beer advertisements and judging the Miss America pageant. He’d grown up in Baltimore and possessed the city’s reputation for charm, for being enthusiastic, approachable, humble, and open-minded. The last, especially, is a useful quality in sportswriting, where the reporter keeps getting older while the athletes stay forever young. It’s far from necessary for a busy and successful man to extend a similar attention and warmth to the young people he works with, but Deford was also that way.
Deford’s most celebrated pieces were all “bonuses,” the bonus being the coveted slot at the back of the Sports Illustrated reserved for the week’s long feature. Soon after I met him, Deford explained his theory of how to structure the bonus—a variation of Chekhov’s rifle. The Russian famously ordained that if in the first chapter (or act) a rifle is on the wall, before the end it must be brought down and fired. The man from Baltimore said that in a bonus, you began by telling the reader something that made him interested. Then, once the reader was completely engaged, you moved on to other matters, to the point where the reader forgot the first thing. Then, toward the end, you brought it up again. The act of forming, breaking, and reforming the chemical bond, he said, deepened the reading experience. I was in my early twenties at the time, and the notion that the magazine’s revered figure was sharing his sweetest science with me made me almost overwhelmed with gratitude. You could be good and also, well, good.
Several years later, we drove together in his car from New York City to his family’s home in Connecticut. Deford was as excited as I ever saw him, owing to something new. We would not need to stop, wait in a long line, and pay a toll at a booth along the highway, he said, because of a recent traffic innovation. There was now an electronic pass keyed to a collection sensor that enabled a driver to pay the toll by simply driving through the booth. It was hardly necessary even to slow down. I didn’t believe it? Just wait! Soon, he had me beyond excited in anticipation of such impossible, magical, laser-age technology.
Then he told me about a youthful job when he worked as a copy boy for the Baltimore Evening Sun. After the day’s work was done, Deford fell into the habit of going along with the newspaper’s typesetting and printing men to a workingman’s bar down by the docks. A regular at the bar was a woman, no longer so young, whom Deford called, in his breezy, vernacular way, “a lady of the evening.” She was, he said, an excellent storyteller. One day, the woman appeared in the bar looking crestfallen. It turned out that the mighty New York Yankees were in town to play Baltimore’s trudging Orioles. The woman had crossed paths with the Yankees’ star players, the slugging outfielder Mickey Mantle and the guileful pitcher Whitey Ford. One thing led to another and they’d spent the previous evening-into-morning together, drinking abundant spirits, with Mantle staying on for other indulgences. That afternoon, Ford would be pitching. As soon as the night was finally done, the woman hurried straight to her bookie and bet all of her earnings on the Orioles. Alas, the Yankees won, with Ford pitching a shutout and Mantle hitting a home run. The morals of the story, according to Deford, were two: whiskey and mediocre competition are no match for transcendent ability, and ladies of the evening never have any luck.
And then there we were, zooming through the toll gate at a clip, Deford laughing with “See that!” glee, head thrown back with such pleasure that, ever since, I think of him every time I go through E-ZPass and don’t stop to pay my toll.
Deford stopped this past weekend, dying at age seventy-eight, in Florida. As became clear to American listeners over the thirty-seven years that he was a weekly sports commentator for NPR, Deford was an old-fashioned gentleman with progressive views. He hated what football did to young people’s brains, he thought that big-time college athletes should be paid, and he advocated for gay rights and racial justice.
He also believed that, when it came to athletes, people maintained a special interior relationship with a skilled player who was their own age. The inevitable arc of a physical glory giving way to decline in the thirties, when most of us still consider ourselves young, both presages and helps prepare us for the mortal day that awaits us all. That’s what Deford was thinking about thirty years ago, when he wrote about Gus Johnson, Deford’s own preferred sporting coeval. Johnson was a charismatic, powerful forward for the Baltimore Bullets, who played and lived hard, and died in 1987, at forty-eight. Writing in Sports Illustrated, Deford described Johnson as people all over America today are now remembering Deford himself: “As flamboyant as he was, the simple community values of the team were never beneath him.”
