Top 66 Frank Deford Quotes

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The wonderful thing about delivering sports commentary

The wonderful thing about delivering sports commentary on NPR was that because it has such a broad audience, I was able to reach people who otherwise had little or no interest in sport – especially as an important part of our human culture.
Frank Deford
I think the best thing I’ve written is a story called ‘The Boxer and the Blonde.’ It’s a piece about Billy Conn, the white would-be heavyweight champion of the world, who lived in Pittsburgh.
Frank Deford
I remember, when I was growing up in Baltimore, we’d get on a streetcar and go down to see the Orioles, and for a couple of bucks, you could get a pretty good seat. Kids can’t do that anymore. So I think that changes the whole nature of sports.
Frank Deford
By coincidence, this particular tiny show on earth that consists entirely of me talking about sports on NPR is also folding its tent flaps this May of 2017. Yes, this is my swansong, my farewell, my last hurrah. Adieu, adios, arrivederci, auf wiedersehen.
Frank Deford
Pete Rose may not make the Hall of Fame, but a statue of him is going to be erected outside the Cincinnati Reds ballpark.
Frank Deford
As it happens, Cumberland was on the verge of bankruptcy and had to give up football. But the villainous Heisman made it play a game that had been scheduled when Cumberland still had a team, or Heisman threatened to demand a $3,000 forfeiture fee that could well have put the school out of existence.
Frank Deford
The strike zone should be what the rule book says it is and not a personal idiosyncrasy.
Frank Deford
The Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons are there today as sure as they were when what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Would you rather have a basketball team, or would you rather be Detroit?
Frank Deford
There were a lot of places, including Los Angeles, that didn’t have major league baseball. There were other really large cities that had no major league teams, but at least they had college football.
Frank Deford
I can remember going to see the minor league Orioles. Until I was 15 years old, we’d go down with 3,000 people to watch them play the Syracuse Chiefs or the Jersey City Little Giants. That’s what passed for Baltimore sports.
Frank Deford
More and more teams are, in the vernacular, ‘going small,’ with only one big man down deep. Good grief, the position of power forward is in the process of going the way of short shorts.
Frank Deford
Several NBA teams got their best gates every season when they scheduled a doubleheader and booked the Globetrotters and their stooges for the opening game.
Frank Deford
In days of yore, Opening Day of the baseball season was special, signifying that spring had come at last. Today, however, Opening Day sort of dribbles into existence, and the spiritual start of spring now belongs to the Masters golf tournament, where the azaleas and magnolias and dogwood bloom.
Frank Deford
When Juan Antonio Samaranch said the Olympics are more important than the Catholic Church, I just couldn’t believe it. I said to myself, ‘Don’t let your expression show that he has just made a total ass of himself. Be cool, and just keep right on talking.’
Frank Deford
At all levels – with men and women – the 3-point shot has utterly transformed the way the game is played. More and more, the players are spread out, looking to pop behind the 3-point arc.
Frank Deford
When I was covering games, and this is back in the ’60s, you’d go into the manager’s office. I can still visualize Earl Weaver from the Baltimore Orioles. I can just see Earl now in his underwear… with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, holding court. And that was the way it was done then.
Frank Deford
All sorts of famous sports people have been suspended for extended periods.
Frank Deford
Hard as it is to believe, there were three magazines fighting over me. ‘Newsweek’ wanted to keep me, ‘ESPN The Magazine’ was coming into existence and wanted me, and ‘SI’ wanted to bring me back. Isn’t that amazing? I had a choice, like a free agent.
Frank Deford
Before the Colts arrived in 1947, the best athlete in town was a woman duckpin bowler named Toots Barger. Football? The biggest games in Baltimore had been when Johns Hopkins took on Susquehanna or Franklin & Marshall at homecoming.
Frank Deford
In the television era, the second week of the Olympics is reserved for what is considered the marquee event: track and field.
Frank Deford
Once again it is peaceful at Augusta National Golf Club, after some rather ugly stand-offs in recent years, when the club balked at changing its all-white, all-male membership tradition. African-Americans and female Americans are on the club manifest now along with other golf-Americans, and all is serene once again.
Frank Deford
That’s the greatest compliment I can get: when somebody from Key West says, ‘Hey, Bubba.’ That means I’m in!
Frank Deford
I had gone to work for ‘Newsweek’, left ‘Newsweek’ and went to work for ‘Vanity Fair,’ and then went back to ‘Newsweek’. I came back to ‘SI’ as a contract writer.
Frank Deford
The stories that are most unfamiliar, the ones that seem to come out of the blue about people that aren’t well known, usually come from producers that have really done a lot of homework and looked around. Other stories come from the correspondents.
Frank Deford
Don’t dismiss Auriemma and UConn just because their excellence shines on the female side of the coin.
Frank Deford
‘SI’ came to me and said, ‘We want you to do a story on Russell as the greatest team player,’ which I certainly agreed with.
Frank Deford
Majesty is a thing of beauty to behold, whatever the particular enterprise.
Frank Deford
The year after Russell retired, in the famous seventh game of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, Willis Reed, the New York Knicks center, limped onto the court against the Los Angeles Lakers, inspiring his team and freezing Chamberlain into a benign perplexity.
Frank Deford
There are some books that get huge numbers of positive reviews, but reading them satiates people. They say, ‘I’ve read enough now’.
Frank Deford
I am something of a ham. Yeah, I’d always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn’t as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.
Frank Deford
Dan Rather pulling on a sweater and thereby winning a whole new chunk of the populace: That’s television. President Reagan’s press conferences: That’s television. Keith Jackson is television. So are Kermit the Frog, instant replay, and the Fiesta Bowl.
Frank Deford
Football teams represent cities and colleges and school

Football teams represent cities and colleges and schools. The people have built great stadiums, and the game is culturally intertwined with our calendar. We don’t go back to college for the college. We go back for a football game, and, yes, we even call that ‘homecoming.’
Frank Deford
Statues of sports stars are all the rage – especially in baseball.
Frank Deford
I’ve been delivering these little homilies since 1980 – that’s 37 years – and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries – and I trust you’ve hung onto every word.
Frank Deford
To compare writing an article for ‘Sports Illustrated’ to doing a piece for ‘Real Sports’, the article, it was all me. You know, I’m out there by myself with my pad and pencil. ‘Real Sports,’ I’ve got a producer, an assistant producer, and cameramen. It’s an individual game versus a team game.
Frank Deford
I think every time I can find a story that touches that human nerve, and even sometimes makes you cry, I think that I’ve found something that I’ll like very much.
Frank Deford
Nowadays, of course, flesh peddlers and scouting services identify the best athletes when they are still in junior high. Prospects are not allowed to sneak up on us.
Frank Deford
The only thing we know for sure about superiority in sports in the United States of America in the 20th century is that Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics teams he led stand alone as the ultimate winners.
Frank Deford
Bill Russell was the pivot on which the whole sport turned.
Frank Deford
I have survived so long because I’ve been blessed with talented and gracious colleagues and with a top brass who let me choose my topics every week and then allowed me to express opinions that were not always popular. Well, someone had to stand up to the yackety-yak soccer cult.
Frank Deford
Yes, the Masters is too stylish to be an American icon. It’s as out of character for Uncle Sam as a McDonald’s is for France.
Frank Deford
It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that whereas so many of our statues have been of military leaders, now it may well be sports stars who are the ones more likely to be so honored.
Frank Deford
Owners own teams so that they might move them to another municipality with better luxury boxes.
Frank Deford
It’s interesting too, that the coach of that Georgia Tech team who led his valiant warriors to those 222 points was none other than John Heisman. Yes, he whom the Heisman trophy is named for, an award that honors that college player who best exemplifies excellence and integrity.
Frank Deford
I think I would die if I couldn’t get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.
Frank Deford
It costs a lot of money to deliver newsprint. It’s so much easier to do it through the air, Internet, radio, television. The second easiest thing is to do it through the mail. But when you have to take something heavy and put it on someone’s doorstep, that costs a lot of money.
Frank Deford
It’s almost impossible to explain how little the NBA amounted to when I started covering it in 1963. It wasn’t fair to call it bush, although everybody did. It was simply small – only nine teams – and insignificant.
Frank Deford
You have to do what the market requires of you… You either keep swimming, or you sink.
Frank Deford
Does each of us need to suffer agony to understand how brutal our gridiron entertainment is? Surely, seeing is believing enough. So, what is football doing to us as a people? How do we explain an America that alone in the world so loves this savage sport?
Frank Deford