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Overview
Frank Deford joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, and over the following decades became one of the most beloved figures in sports journalism—renowned for everything from his NPR commentaries to his status as a Lite Beer All Star.
From the Mad Men-like days of SI in the sixties, to the early NBA, to Deford’s visit to apartheid South Africa with Arthur Ashe, Over Time is packed with intriguing people and stories. Interwoven through his personal history, Deford lovingly traces the entire arc of American sportswriting from the lurid early days of the Police Gazette, through Grantland Rice and Red Smith and on up to ESPN, in a “wildly entertaining” memoir (Booklist, starred review).
“Equal doses of self-deprecating humor and anecdotal history of American sports journalism.” —Chicago Tribune
“Insightful remembrances of stars like Wilt Chamberlain and Billie Jean King . . . [Deford is] sports writing’s Sinatra.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Endearing . . . imparts a sense of a life well lived and fully enjoyed.” —The New York Times
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802194565 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 228,354 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Deford’s 1981 novel Everybody’s All-American was named one of Sports Illustrated’s Top 25 Sports Books of All Time and was later made into a movie directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Dennis Quaid. His memoir Alex: The Life of a Child, chronicling his daughter’s life and battle with cystic fibrosis, was made into a movie starring Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia in 1986.
In 2012 President Obama honored Deford with the National Humanities Medal for “transforming how we think about sports,” making Deford the first person primarily associated with sports to earn recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was also awarded the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sportswriting, the W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award, and the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award, and was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters of America Hall of Fame. GQ has called him, simply, “the world’s greatest sportswriter.”
Frank Deford (1938–2017) was an author, commentator, and senior contributor to Sports Illustrated. In addition, he was a correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and a regular Wednesday commentator for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. He won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his broadcasting.
Deford’s 1981 novel Everybody’s All-American was named one of Sports Illustrated’s Top 25 Sports Books of All Time and was later made into a movie directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Dennis Quaid. His memoir Alex: The Life of a Child, chronicling his daughter’s life and battle with cystic fibrosis, was made into a movie starring Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia in 1986.
In 2012 President Obama honored Deford with the National Humanities Medal for “transforming how we think about sports,” making Deford the first person primarily associated with sports to earn recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was also awarded the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sportswriting, the W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award, and the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award, and was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters of America Hall of Fame. GQ has called him, simply, “the world’s greatest sportswriter.”
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A NOT VERY BRIGHT BOY
I was still enough of a child to think that anger could best be expressed with perversity.
An American Summer, 2002
After my junior year at Princeton, it another desultory academic lay-by, I decided I might as well go into the army and get it over with. In those days of the draft a healthy enough American boy had to do that for at least six months. I chose the least. This was during that peaceful lull separating Korea from Vietnam, though, so I was but a tweener, passing through when nothing much was going on in a martial way.
My military highlight, such as it was, came when the sergeant said to me: "DeFord, you wanna be the guide-on?" I had no idea what that was, but it sounded OK, so I said, yes, I'd like that. Good answer. The guide-on, I discovered, is the guy who carries the flag that the other soldiers follow after. Guide-on would not have been a good job, say, on Pickett's Charge in 1863, but at Fort Dix in 1961, when no one was firing live rounds, it was an excellent vocation.
It wasn't even that I had earned the job of guide-on. It was just that I was the tallest man in my company, so for most of my military tenure I played retirement ceremonies, just holding a flag and standing tall, which I can do perfectly well. I was no better a soldier than I was a student. In fact, in some respects I've never grown up. Primarily, I don't think I've ever learned to do anything new since I was about nine years old, when I first discovered that I had some facility for writing and speaking. Well, I did learn about sex later on. But that's instinctive, so I don't think it can necessarily be counted as another arrow in my quiver.
Anyway, as a "returning serviceman," I put mufti back on and reconnoitered Princeton for one last year, there to officially conclude my education and contemplate my future. The main thing was, I wanted to go to New York, which is where I knew writers went to write and live life large. Prefiguring LeBron James, you might say, I decided to take my talents to midtown. But while Gotham beckoned me, I was not the sort of virtuous artiste who was willing to live in a garret and wait tables while I wrote the Great American Something. At a minimum, I needed a comfortable roof over my head and some walking-around money.
Fortuitously, one day I saw a notice that Time Incorporated would be interviewing on campus. The company's celebrated, respectable magazines — Time, Life, and Fortune — were not, I thought, the right sort of showcase for my presumed ability, but I'd been a reader of Sports Illustrated and very much admired the writing in the magazine. Whereas it had a lot of yummy stuff about yachts and show dogs and what tweeds to wear when tailgating at the Yale Bowl, there was, in counterpoint, some awfully good writing in it. I also figured that, as a starter course, a magazine would be a better fit for me than would a newspaper, as I imagined that the larger canvas was better suited for my more expansive, embroidered style.
I bundled up my choice clippings and went to see the interviewer. He was a Mr. Titman — a name Dickens had somehow missed. At first Titman told me that he really wasn't interviewing people who wrote, that he was just after business types — information I found a little disconcerting, coming from a publishing company's talent scout — but as I was about to scoop up my clips and depart, something crossed his mind. Titman was a Princeton man himself, and he recognized me from articles I'd written for the alumni magazine, and so, as a loyal Tiger, he very nicely said he'd go the extra mile and look into getting me an interview. So, there: thanks to Titman, now I was an official cog in the celebrated Old-Boy Network. My vaunted Princeton education — uh, affiliation — had already paid off.
Of course, understand: in 1962 it was hard for someone like me, an Ivy League Wasp, not to move to the head of the line, for certain rather prominent subgroups — notably the female gender and all racial and ethnic minorities — were not taken seriously at that time. Diversity was not yet a concept. In many distinguished places of business in New York then, what passed as diversity meant making sure not to hire too many Andover graduates at the expense of Exeter. Plus, I was born at the right time; I was that rare specimen, a Depression Baby. Better yet, I had been conceived early in 1938, at a time when there was a recession in the middle of the Depression. Except for my dear parents, almost nobody in America with any sense was having babies around the time I was born. So when I got out of college, there were only a handful of us coming onto the job market in the United States of America. It was actuarial affirmative action. While all those subsequent oodles of War Babies and Baby Boomers would have to go all-out Darwinian all their lives, we Depression Babies got a pass.
Because of this demographic serendipity, it was a seller's market extraordinaire, and I could approach job interviews with aplomb. So it was, on my appointed day, that I took the train into New York and boldly presented myself at the Time Incorporated personnel office. There, I was handed two things. First, a list of the editors I was scheduled to see. Second, a folder with my name on it: Frank DeFord. I was advised to hand the folder to each big-shot Timeink editor that I met. Now, nobody told me not to look inside the folder, but even if anyone had, I would've had to be inhumanly incurious not to. So, first chance I got, I sneaked a peek. Samples of my writing were in there, but on top was sort of an assessment of who this particular Depression Baby candidate might be, and here were the very first words typed there to sum me up:
"Not very bright ..."
Now, fair's fair: if it was strictly based on my (ahem, gentleman's) grades at Princeton, this was a perfectly reasonable assessment. Still, talk about carrying your own cross. Sure, the offensive introduction was followed by something like "... but perhaps may have a passable way with words ..." But still: I walk into an office and hand over the folder to Mr. High-and-Mighty Editor behind the desk, and the first thing he sees is "Not very bright ..." Then he would look up at me, surprised that at least I wasn't drooling.
I remember the man in a backwater Timeink position, he being in command of the company newspaper — which was little more than a mimeographed wraparound for classified ads from one Timeinker to another. After seeing that analysis of my intellect he then allowed, well, maybe if I got some experience out in the hinterlands, maybe ... maybe there could be a place for me there as an intern in a couple of years, reporting to him on things such as the Timeink blood drive.
Well, let me tell you: there's only so much a Depression Baby will take!
So, rather nicely but firmly, I advised all the editors I met (who didn't want a dummy like me anyway) that I didn't want anything to do with them, either, that I was merely humoring them because the only magazine where I wanted to work in the whole lousy company was Sports Illustrated.
This was heresy! Here was this snotty young apostate who actually was giving Time and Life and Fortune, not to mention the crappy company newsletter, the back of his hand. Nobody had ever dared do such a thing in the Time-Life Building.
But, although I certainly wasn't smart enough to have cannily plotted this strategy, this blasphemy made me immensely attractive in the one right place, for somehow this information lasered back to the twentieth floor, to Sports Illustrated HQ, and there I became an instant hero. You see, at this point, in the hallowed halls of Timeink, SI not only was considered déclassé for its sweaty content but was losing money as well. As a consequence, rude members of the other, fancy-schmancy magazines would, on the elevators, mutter aspersions at random Sports Illustrated employees for damaging their profit sharing.
But, one man's meat ...
So, ipso facto, I suddenly found myself invited up to the elite company dining room for cocktails and lunch with Sports Illustrated editors. Moving right ahead at warp speed: I was escorted down to the magazine domain itself, and rushed toward the inner sanctum, the very office of the managing editor, Andre Laguerre, himself. I felt like one of those quarterbacks that the NFL and AFL were fighting over at the time.
I didn't know enough to be nervous. I had no idea that the "managing" editor was the boss editor, that this was the guy. I had no idea that Laguerre was an icon who put the fear of God into all and sundry. No, by now, I was just rockin' and rollin'. Watch my smoke. Hey, as Chuck Berry sang: "Yeah 'n' I'm doin' all right in school. /They ain't said I broke no rule. /I ain't never been in dutch. / I don't browse around too much. ... Anyway, I'm almost grown." I was more interested in chatting up Laguerre's pretty secretary, when the great man interrupted my patter, asked me in, and told me he'd heard so much about me and was so pleased to meet me.
Hey, not very bright, my ass.
There was an opening as a researcher in the baseball department, because, of all things, I learned later, on the night during spring training when Laguerre had taken the incumbent researcher out to dinner, the witless lunkhead had written down on his expense account that he had himself entertained some ballplayers. Even at Timeink, where a liberal amount of expense-account fairy taling was accepted, this was beyond the pale. Creativity was one thing, stupidity another. They fired the guy. Hence, a spot on the roster had miraculously opened up. When could I start? Hell, I was ready to roll up my sleeves and pitch in right there, but there was this nasty little detail about finishing certain statutory requirements in order for me to get that precious Princeton diploma. Well, all right, they would hold the job for me till I could go through the motions and take my final exams.
I popped up to the Time-Life Building as soon as my last exam was finished, and while that meant I had to miss my graduation, nobody missed me either. And so it was that I got ahead of the curve and was gainfully employed, on my way to becoming a bona fide sportswriter. "I don't run around with no mob. /Got myself a little job. ... /Don't bother me, leave me alone. /Anyway, I'm almost grown."
CHAPTER 2SOMETHING OF A VOTE OF CONFIDENCE
The whole point of man, the essence of us all, is contradictions.
Love and Infamy, 1993
But enough about me.
I have always believed that, ideally, your memoirs should be filled with anecdotes about other, more attractive people so that you might improve on the necessarily duller parts of the narrative, i.e., yourself. David Niven, for example, wrote memoir after memoir, because he knew all the stylish folk in the world, and wherever they were together, in the Hamptons or Gstaad or on yachts in the Mediterranean, they all had big names and they absolutely adored lunches, so they ate and drank long, languid midday repasts and threw off priceless bons mots, one after the other, for Mr. Niven to dress up his own memoirs with. Alas, although it was not my life's intention at the time when I chanced to become a sportswriter, I have thereafter mostly remained a sportswriter; and I'm afraid athletes don't traffic in bons mots, whether or not I am in their presence with a notepad.
Also, I have read dreadful memoir-like remembrances of times past by sportswriters, who go after the Great Man in History of Sports, retelling profiles of stars who never said die and had no quit in them. A little of that goes a long way, let alone to read, and certainly to write.
I mentioned this to my wife, Carol. We've been married for forty-six years, after a whirlwind courtship. She was a model, absolutely alabaster gorgeous, but fragile to the naked eye because models had to be frightfully skinny then in order to sell clothes no other women could possibly fit into. My mother made the mistake of reading too much into that. "She's very nice," she said, "but I don't think she looks like she's able to be tough enough on you."
Mothers should know not to judge a book by its cover. Carol has done just fine in the toughness line, thank you. We lost our daughter, Alexandra, to cystic fibrosis, and Carol was the one who was so much better at handling that than I. And she was the one who was smart enough then to say that we had to move ahead and adopt another daughter and get on with it. That turned out to be Scarlet, and she was a gem, and we did get on with it.
Yet for all Carol's innate savvy and sweetness, there are two postnuptial agreements vis-à-vis my work that have kept the marriage intact for these many moons.
1. Whenever I write something, I do not show a word of it to her until it is set in print. It absolutely amazes me when I read how writers explain on page ii of the preface or foreword how they could not have done this work without the support of their dear, supportive, etc., wife, who advised and typed and proofread and consoled and did God knows what all else. The reason I never show Carol anything I write is that if I do, then:
a. If she says she likes it, I immediately assume she's just saying that to be nice, and I sulk and dislike her for patronizing me. Or:
b. If she says she doesn't like it, I hate her and there go forty-six mostly good years down the drain. Maybe that's — what? Active-passive? Passive-inactive? I don't know. But lose-lose for sure.
Isn't marriage tenuous enough without begging for trouble?
2. Carol never has to attend an event where I am speaking, especially if it involves a head table. From her point of view, that's probably more important than item 1.
The only codicil to this will is that when I'm invited to speak on a luxury cruise ship, a package deal which includes her, then Carol must attend my speeches because she dresses up the crowd, and because otherwise the cruise director might say, "Even his wife didn't come to hear him speak" — thereby ruining any chance that I (and, hence, she) will be invited for a return engagement on another luxury cruise.
So, when I told her I didn't plan to accept the offer to write a memoir, she said, "Aw no, you can put in all those things you always say in your speeches." And, she added, ruefully, eyes rolling: "All those stories I've heard you tell guys over drinks."
So, that pushed me over the top, and here we go.
CHAPTER 3IN WHICH I FIRST ENCOUNTER FASTER GUNS
High schools are our commonest common denominator. Good Lord, they even all smell the same, that stale institutional odor that can be disturbed only by another ringing bell. The children fall out into the corridors, moving with a special rhythm, at a pace they will never again employ in life. Nothing else in the human experience resembles the break between classes.
"When All the World Was Young, Lad," Sports Illustrated, 1977
Besides prefaces counting their pages in Roman numerals, the other thing about books that always confounds me is that we authors go on and on, tediously, with acknowledgments (see page 353), but we usually make a mystery of our dedication. So, here is who this book is dedicated to: my high school adviser and my high school basketball coach.
You see, since much of this book is about writing and sports, it is especially appropriate to dedicate it to them.
Jerry Downs not only was my adviser but he taught me English, and (although I could've done without the Thomas Hardy) he showed me how to appreciate great writing — Shakespeare in particular, of course — and he wonderfully encouraged my own writing and helped me improve it without ever being pedantic. He also directed me in school plays (struggling mightily with me when I was in my James Dean period), where I believe I learned to appreciate actors more than athletes. He was everything good that a high school teacher should be, and he was a wonderful influence on me, but, of course I was a teenager then and therefore I didn't let him know that I thought that.
Nemo Robinson — square name: John — was my varsity basketball coach. I had no idea, until forty years later, that he had been a certified hero at the Battle of the Bulge. That was revealed to me only when the History Channel devoted a whole program to a re-creation of his incredible courage, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star with valor. In deep snow, out in the open, Lieutenant Robinson led an assault on an entrenched, well-fortified German position, then crawled back and forth under the enemy machine-gun fire to rescue several of his wounded men, dragging them to safety — even as he suffered a hernia for these extraordinary exertions.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Over Time"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Frank Deford.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. A Not Very Bright Boy,
2. Something of a Vote of Confidence,
3. In Which I First Encounter Faster Guns,
4. Roamer,
5. Granny,
6. Walking in Place,
7. Old-Timers,
8. The Vietnam War Is Finally Over,
9. Push On,
10. The Best Advice I Ever Got in My Whole Life,
11. Scribes for the Cranks and the Fancy,
12. El Tigre,
13. In Which I Finally Discover the Difference Between Winning and Losing,
14. Bawlmer, Merlin, My Hametown,
15. Gee Whiz,
16. Beauty and the Beasts,
17. This Just In: Writing Can Be Fun,
18. In Which I Happen Upon an Eye-Opener,
19. Kingsley,
20. My Damn Name,
21. It Happens to the Best of Us,
22. The Way It Was. Really,
23. The Kid,
24. Andre,
25. Mr. King Will See You Now,
26. Hobey and Danny and Bill,
27. The Most Amazing Feat in Sport in the Twentieth Century,
28. Hub Tales,
29. My Man,
30. Anglophile,
31. Remember "Consciousness-Raising"?,
32. Fun in the Sun,
33. Summer Songs,
34. Roadie,
35. With Ease or Angst,
36. Lost in Translation,
37. The Anchor Leg,
38. The Sweetest Thing I Ever Saw an Athlete Do for a Member of the Fourth Estate,
39. You Won't Believe This,
40. The Most Amazing Thing I Ever Saw an Athlete Do,
41. Red,
42. The Amateur Voice,
43. The Best I Ever Was Fired,
44. Naked Slept the Commissioner,
45. Taboo,
46. Last Call,
Acknowledgments,
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