Quote of the Day (Frank Deford, on Echoes of Glory Days)

“[S]o many grown American men are walking around all the rest of their lives, playing those glory days over, still hearing the cheers in their inner ear. A lot of them lie about how good they were, and I think after a while, they come to believe their own lies. Some of them never get it out of their system, no matter how long they live or what they do for a living, because in this country, when you're so damn young and impressionable, it's especially exhilarating, playing for your school, with pretty cheerleaders jumping up and down and fans yelling for you. ... [A]ll your life, you might never beat that.” —Frank Deford, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter (2012)

Frank Deford, who passed away on Sunday at age 78, sensed that sports was more than a mere matter of box scores, but also involved matters such as physical perfection and the ache of losing it. It was evident in one of his most famous pieces, “The Boxer and the Blonde,” on heavyweight contender Billy Conn and his wife, and a novel of his adapted into a Dennis Quaid-Jessica Lange movie, Everybody’s All-American.

Standing 6 ft. 4 in. himself, with a pencil-thin moustache, Deford radiated enough charisma to be described as “the Clark Gable of sportswriting” by a onetime associate, Norman Chad. His own elegant prose embodied that combination of humor, earthiness and heart.

The long profile, the form that Deford perfected at Sports Illustrated, can feel like a relic from the pre-digital age, impossible to emulate at a point when people have little time for anything beyond a tweet.

Consider his retrospective on Johnny Unitas, “The Best There Ever Was,” which depicted how this quarterback brought pride to Baltimore and transformed the very concept of his position:

“They didn't have coaches with headphones and Polaroids and fax machines then, sitting on high, telling quarterbacks what plays to call. In those halcyon days, quarterbacks were field generals, not field lieutenants. And there was Unitas after he called a play (and probably checked off and called another play when he saw what the ruffians across the line were up to), shuffling back into the pocket, unfazed by the violent turbulence all around him, standing there in his hightops, waiting, looking, poised. 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.”

In the middle of his career, Deford gambled by leaving his longtime perch at Sports Illustrated to become the founding editor of The National, America's first and only all-sports daily newspaper. It contained a Murderers’ Row of great sportswriters—Mike Lupica, Dave Kindred, Scott Ostler, John Feinstein—but, coming out amid an economic downturn, it flopped within two years. Nevertheless, it became the object of adoration as what sportscaster Tony Kornheiser called “the great and noble experiment of sports writing in America.”

Well into his career, Deford learned how to adapt his words for the mass media of radio and television, appearing as senior correspondent on HBO’s Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel and as a commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition. His prose became shorter and punchier without deviating from his longtime convictions, as in this explanation of how performance-enhancing drugs destroys fans’ faith in their sports:

“Visual entertainment certainly doesn't need to be real. Magicians have always performed what they frankly call ‘tricks.’ The movies now live by what are advertised as ‘special effects.’ But in sports, the bodies must be honest or what's the point? In a horrible way, concussions are good for football; they validate how seriously the bodies function in that game. You need a few matadors gored to sell bullfight tickets.

“But drugs — Lance Armstrong on the highest level, and lesser lights like Melky Cabrera and Bartolo Colon — don't just poison the game. They poison our faith.”

The passion in this passage is palpable. I strongly suspect, however, that the work that may have meant the most to Deford was Alex: The Life of a Child, his nonfiction account of the death of his first daughter, Alex, from cystic fibrosis, at age eight.

Researching this post made me want to read far more of Deford’s work. I hope these short passages will have the same effect on anyone who reads them here.

(Photo of Frank Deford taken at the Bridgeport Public Library on Sept. 21, 2007.)

Quote of the Day (Frank Deford, on Athletes Leaving on Top)

“Those of us in the grandstand seats want our athletes – the ones who are our age – to quit while they’re still on top. That way they won’t embarrass us. We then want our heroes to instantly disappear so that we can always remember them (and ourselves) as magnificent and forever green. For it is when our athletes start to go downhill that we are first forced to come to grips with the possibility of our own mortality.” —Frank Deford, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter (2012)

The latest example is, of course, Peyton Manning (pictured). The NFL quarterback leaves with all kinds of records and a second Super Bowl trophy. By sticking around, he would have gained nothing, and risked everything important. Not just the legacy that Deford has in mind, or even Manning’s health—but his reputation.

It is possible, despite the lawsuit that Manning has filed, that we will never be able to know for sure, as Al Jazeera America claimed, whether he used performance-enhancing drugs a few years ago. Given the two decades since, it is also possible that we’ll never know if the quarterback sexually harassed a female trainer while he was attending the University of Tennessee.

Achievements on the field may well be products of strength, speed and skill. Purity? Perhaps less often than we hope.

Quote of the Day (Frank Deford, on High Schools, ‘Our Commonest Common Denominator’)

“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.” —Frank Deford, "When All the World Was Young, Lad," Sports Illustrated, 1977

Thanks to my co-worker and friend Sarah for inspiring this post.

(The image accompanying this post is from my own high school--now, sadly, closed--St. Cecilia's, of Englewood, NJ.)

This Day in Sports History (Roller-Derby Queen Weston Dies)

May 10, 1997—Former roller-derby star Joanie Weston, whose immense athleticism was overshadowed by contests that stressed fan-pleasing fistfights and hair-pulling, died at age 62 at her Hayward, Calif., home of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare brain disorder.

In the early 1970s, as I grew weary of the increasing demands of the upper grades in my elementary school (heavier homework loads, more advanced math), I looked forward to watching our TV on Saturday mornings. I had moved beyond the still-standard cartoon fare of that time of week. 

But I had inexplicably found a show that, like school, called for more attention (mine) and a higher skill set (someone else’s) than, say, Bugs Bunny, but which, in contrast with my academic pursuits, was decidedly entertaining.

Roller derby had attained a zenith from which it would fall precipitously. It was not only reaching 120 cities through syndication but it was being mentioned in publications such as Sports Illustrated (e.g., this classic 1969 overview of the sport by the great Frank Deford), songs by Jim Croce, and even a film, Kansas City Bomber (whose reason for being perhaps had less to do with the sport’s inherent skills than with the anatomical charms of star Raquel Welch).

Leo Seltzer had conceived roller derby as a continuation of the transcontinental roller-rink “marathons” common during the Depression—then picked up on rules suggested by the great sportswriter-fiction writer Damon Runyon to bring about the modern sport. Seltzer’s son Jerry raised the sport's profile in the Fifties and Sixties by arranging widespread television coverage. 

There seemed no reason why, like football in the same decades, this rough-and-tumble pastime might not become far, far bigger very soon.

The sport to which roller derby was compared was wrestling, mostly because of its inevitable brawls.

But while I could care less about guys with rolls of muscle alternating with fat thumping each other on the mat, I was fascinated by roller derby. It was, like ice hockey, all a matter of speed and movement, and like ice hockey in those years it also had its share of fights (hello, Derek Sanderson?).

But I loved how the two teams in their helmets and shorts circled the banked tracks in whip-fast phalanxes, as so-called “jammers” probed for an opening as they tried to “lap” the opposition. Charlie O’Connell, lean, strong and disdainful (think of the New York Mets’ Dave Kingman on skates), ruled the men’s side of the sport. Joanie Weston, as “pivot” (the controller of the action) of the San Francisco Bay Bombers, was queen of the women’s side.

Only a year or two after I had started watching it, roller derby had largely disappeared from the airwaves, a victim of financial troubles. I had gone on to other things—high school and adolescence—and hadn’t noticed its passing. 

It wasn’t until I picked up Deford’s appreciation of the life of Weston in the New York Times Magazine 14 years ago that I thought again about the sport, and its great female star.

Away from arenas, Deford revealed, Weston was a sweet, nun-educated, pretty young woman who, while traveling the exhibition circuit, loved to cuddle at night in one of those lonely Holiday Inns with a mixed-breed canine named Malia. 

But once she strapped on her skates and helmets, preparing for no-holds-barred action in which she might block one minute and sprint as the jammer in another, she was something else entirely:

“[O]n the banked track, she was transformed. Hear it now: No. 38 in your program, No. 1 in your hearts. The Blond Bomber --- 5 foot 10, 165 pounds, strong and agile, as superb a female athlete as ever there was. She kept her hair strawberry blond and a scarf knotted around her neck to make her as stylishly feminine as her (wonderfully) tacky orange and black attire permitted. Never mind. Swirling, pounding, commanding, she looked the best part of a Viking queen, sallying forth.”

Weston’s prime occurred before Title IX was passed 40 years ago. Who knows how many remunerative athletic doors it might have opened for her?

One sport other than roller derby in which she was undisputedly dominant was softball. The story goes that, in one game, Weston hit eight home runs for St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles—and was ready to try for another when she was told by the nuns running her school that if she hit it, she would be excommunicated!

Nowadays, if you want to see a blond Valkyrie wage uninhibited combat against all comers, you have to catch Laura Ingraham subbing for Bill O’Reilly on Fax News. What the spectacle gains in decibels, it loses in dynamic images—a sorry tradeoff, if you ask me.

I understand that roller derby has undergone something of a revival this past decade, only this time playing down the wrestling-like antics. I think Weston would have approved.