Being Frank About Deford

By Scott Benjamin

Sitting in the back yard of his home in the Greens Farms section of Westport, Frank Deford, who was at the height of his popularity at Sports Illustrated, said a prime problem with sports-writing was that columnists would too often focus on how sports is a business.

“Well of course it’s a business, but you don’t have to remind us of that in so many columns,” he said on that September 1986 evening. “There is a tremendous fantasy element to sports that doesn’t get covered enough.”

Deford, who died at age 78 this week, wrote about the human dimensions of sports during a long career at Sports Illustrated and in his National Public Radio commentaries. He also sought to convey those emotions through The National, the short-lived daily sports newspaper, where he served as the editor in chief.

Despite his concerns about an overemphasis on the business aspects of sports, he said that at most newspapers he thought the best writing was in the sports section.

In fact, he was a staunch critic of the Pulitzer Prize selections, noting that sports made up a large portion of any newspaper and yet there was not a specific category for sports-writing. Yet, almost every year since the Pultizer began, there had been a prize awarded for editorial cartooning when there are only about 250 editorial cartoonists in the United States.

In 1988, he said if that late Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times sports columnist who grew up in Hartford, had been writing about something other than sports, the Pulitzer committees “would have been falling over him 20 years ago.”

Two years later Murray, who had been named national sportswriter of the year 14 times, won a Pulitzer in Commentary, one of a handful of sportswriters to ever get that award.

"One of the worst things you can do in sports-writing is to try to be the expert," Deford said. "What you should try to do is look at a subject from different angles and use your knowledge from sports and other subjects to paint a portrait of them."

Surprisingly, he never met the late Red Smith, the legend who won the Putlizer in Commentary in 1976 while at The New York Times. But, he recalled that Smith had said publicly that, "If you follow the logic that only former athletes should cover sports, then it only reasons that only former politicians should write about government. And to continue that logic, then the only people who should be writing obituaries are dead people."

Deford said that in his Sports Illustrated bonus pieces, he regularly tried to answer the question: “Who is this person? Where did he or she come from?”

He said to help accomplish this, he recognized that interviewing “is a very flirtatious process. As a writer, you’re looking for a story, but let’s not be coy. The person you are going to write about is usually figuring out how this story my make them feel better or what endorsement possibilities might be available.”

Just a short time earlier, he had written a profile on NBA Hall–of-Famer Wilt Chamberlain, which had appeared in Sports Illustrated the week of his 50^th birthday.

“I had covered Wilt when he was in the NBA, so we were already at the point where we were holding hands,” Deford said with a smile. “I said, ‘Wilt, this is what I want. Will you do it.’ “

He said he spent days with Chamberlain, but very little of it was interview.

“The key on those assignments is to use your eyes and see what people are doing and also use your ears to listen to how they react to situations and comments that come their way.”

Deford said when he landed at Sports Illustrated in 1962 out of Princeton University he thought he would be there for five years and then attempt to write the great American novel.

When he arrived, there were executives at Time Inc. that wanted to fold Sports Illustrated, which after being launched in 1954, was considered “a bomb” financially.

“There were people in the company that complained about how Sports Illustrated was killing our profit-sharing.”

However, Andre Laguerre, who had become the managing editor in 1960, took the magazine on a different course in which it focused more on Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League and the college sports and less on the leisurely sports.

“You couldn’t write a story about food and convince the reader that it was actually about sports,” Deford said.

The magazine became an industry leader and Deford was named national sportswriter of the year six times.

Most years his assignments included at least one of the tennis grand slam events, which was a sports that he didn’t consider to be a forte in the early 1960s when his prime responsibility was to write the weekly “Baseball Week” column.

However, one winter, knowing that Deford would be leaving soon for Spring Training, one of the senior editors at Sports Illustrated wondered if he would do a profile on a teen-age tennis prodigy who live in Florida.

The senior editor said, ‘ “You know all about tennis, don’t you.”

Deford replied, “Oh, yeah.”

Year later, he explained, “ I had seen tennis matches on PBS, I knew how you scored in tennis. But I had never attended a tennis match. But they liked the profile and that led to me become a regular in their tennis coverage.”

He had the distinctions of being both in a Miller Lite television commercial and serving as a judge at the Miss America pageant.

Deford was noted for being an extremely polite person.

He said that, in part, he acquired that trait from his father, who would walk across their hometown of Baltimore to return a dollar that someone had loaned him.

I’m grateful for the courtesy that he demonstrated during the three stories that I wrote on him, and in an additional phone interview that we did on his recollections of covering Newtown’s Caitlyn Jenner in the decathlon at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics.

Classy guys usually act in a classy way.