The life and times of a sidelines sports legend

When Calhoun Master William Sledge introduced Frank Deford as the world's greatest living sportswriter at a Calhoun Master's Tea on Wed., Oct. 11, Deford bowed his head and chuckled, as if embarrassed by the lofty designation. But few would deny that Deford, a 1962 Princeton graduate in his fifth decade at Sports Illustrated (SI), has written about the most fascinating figures in 20th-century sports with inimitable grace and style.

KATIE ALDRICH/YH 'Sports Illustrated' reporter Frank Deford talks with students.

He described his philosophy of sportswriting as an attempt "to push the real world through the pipe of sports, and to connect other things with sports." Deford does this in a variety of forums—in addition to writing for SI, he also has a weekly radio commentary on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, has served as a commentator for NBC and ESPN, and is a correspondent for HBO's Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel.

Though he's been writing stories for SI since the 1960s, one of Deford's most controversial pieces ran in the magazine just this past June—a cover story on Anna Kournikova. Deford defends his decision to profile the Russian beauty even though many contend that she did not deserve such extensive coverage. "I thou-ght she was an important cultural figure in sports," he said in an exclusive interview after the tea. "What she represents tells us a lot about ourselves. People don't want to hear it, but I'm the messenger for that. I went through an enormous amount to get to talk to her. I finally was given an hour with her, and after 35 minutes, I didn't have anything else to ask her. She's a child...I couldn't bring myself to ask an 18-year-old girl about her love life. First, I didn't care, and second, that wasn't the point. I knew I had a couple quotes and that's all I wanted."

Situations such as these led Deford to wonder if he would have started out as a sportswriter in today's world. "The problem in sports today is that you're writing about children," he said at the tea. "There's nothing more boring than most of the players. Nothing's happened to them other than people have given them things all their lives. There's an antipathy toward reporters, and most of the players only read things when they hear something bad has been written about them. Back when I started out, players didn't make enough money that they were set for life—they had to work in the real world in the off-season. This made them quite normal. People were astounded that Bill Russell and I were great friends. That wasn't uncommon in those days. Players understood us, and they weren't making that much more money than us."

Deford talked to the Herald about some of the highlights of his career. He noted that his own favorite story was "The Boxer and the Blonde," on Billy Conn, a 1930s heavyweight boxer. "The story had all the ingredients. He was a fascinating guy, the story had history, which I love, culture, which I love, drama, and a love story. It has more to it than any other piece I've written." He said that profiles are his favorite type of article to write. "I love to figure out people."

Arthur Ashe was Deford's favorite athletic figure to work with. "Arthur was my closest friend," he told the Herald. "I went to South Africa with him when he broke the color line and we actually lived together. Maybe if Arthur had never gone through everything he did I wouldn't have felt this way about him. But he did, and that made me love him even more."

Deford named Wilt Chamberlain as the athlete who was the most difficult to work with. "Chamberlain, of all the great athletes I've known, was the one who was least happy. Scoring points and winning games did not make him happy. He was a much more contented person after he finished playing." The two reconciled their differences when Deford wrote a story on Chamberlain when the retired basketball player turned 50.

He admitted that he has a harder time finding interesting subjects to write about these days than in the past. "It's not as much fun as it used to be," he said at the tea. "There used to be so many wonderful characters—now sports is dominated by highlights and homeruns being hit. Now everybody is pretty much stamped out of the same mold. All the managers sit in the dugout and look at the same computer printouts. Today, characters like Billy Martin and Earl Weaver would be considered too unstable to manage. It's just not as picturesque as it used to be."

If athletic figures aren't as intriguing as they used to be, at least sportswriters have come up a bit in the world. "Sportswriting was a dubious profession when I was in college," Deford. "It was not something a serious person went into. Though there were a few good writers, it was a pretty low-class profession. I thought it was something I was only going to do for a little while, but I woke up one morning and realized that this was what I was—I was a lifer...after I'd been doing it for a while, I realized, `It's okay Frank, you're not just one step up from being a hooker.'" Deford was hired as a reporter at SI right out of college—and the rest was history.

Deford finished by fielding questions from the audience at the tea on his views on sports today, saying that "as a fan, I think a good baseball game is probably the best thing there is." He admitted that, even as a Baltimore native who hates the Yankees, he was hoping for a Subway Series in baseball this season. As a writer, he pointed out, "the more people you get on the field the harder it is to write about," noting that in light of this, boxing has traditionally been a favorite subject of the best sportswriters.

He said that he thought Tiger Woods was the most interesting figure in sports these days, simply by virtue of how much better he is than the rest of his competitors. He also called former Indiana head basketball coach Bobby Knight "the most intriguing guy I've ever met in sports." He discussed his view that basketball and football players at "big-time schools" should be paid for their efforts. "They're essentially indentured servants," he said.

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