Under Western Eyes

Back with the first grade for the first time since September. As a bonus, it was "Western Day," meaning that the teachers and students were encouraged to wear cowboy hats, jeans, vests, and other apparel in keeping with the day's motif. During the mid-morning "brain break," I had what I thought was an inspired idea to play sing-along videos on the classroom's SmartBoard of "Home on the Range" and "My Darling Clementine." 

As it turned out, it was not a popular decision with the students. A lot of complaints and derisive remarks unbecoming 6- and 7-year-olds. Vrishi was particularly pained, holding his hands over his ears during the songs and moaning. "A really bad day, guys, right?" he said, successfully mustering support from his classmates for his anguish. 

Playing longtime favorite "Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" immediately following Gene Autry did little to appease them.

The State of Pitching

For MLB starters, “Rest is atrophy,” according to one expert.

Today (October 29), former New York Times reporter Murray Chass wrote in his blog, “If there has been a theme to the 2017 post-season, it has been ‘Get the starting pitcher out of the game as quickly as possible.’ It is the latest pitching development that is bizarre and makes no sense.”

Chass made reference to pitcher Jon Lester of the Chicago Cubs, who last week said this on the “Tiki and Tierney Show” on CBS Sports Radio and CBS Sports Network about MLB managers pulling effective starters out of games early:

“I hate it. I absolutely hate it. You pay your starting pitchers to be starting pitchers. You pay your studs to be studs. I remember growing up and watching these big-time guys—Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, [John] Smoltz. ‘Here’s the ball. You guys go get it. We’re going to live or die by you.’ Obviously if that falters early, you need to make a decision. That’s different. But if they are cruising, leave them in.

“You’re stretching your bullpen to get 15 outs. That’s a lot of outs from your bullpen. That’s a lot of mixing and matching. That’s a lot of high-stress pitches on those guys. Now you’re bringing in Kenley Jansen to get six outs, which I’m fine with. I don’t mind using your closer for six outs. But for me, you go back to the Yankee days where you had Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, these guys going (for seven or eight innings) and then you give the ball to Mo [Mariano Rivera]. That’s the blueprint and that’s what you want every time.

“But I just feel like when you ask your bullpen to get nine, 12, 15 outs, there’s a lot of things that can happen and you went from a 3-1 game to a 7-6 game. I feel like that’s what happens when you do that. It puts a lot of stress on your bullpen. They have the off day today. I get it on that side of it. But for me, it’s just not baseball. Baseball is your starters go six, seven, eight and then you mix and match and do your things that you need to do from that point forward. That’s my opinion on it.”

Chass wrote, “I could not agree more.”

The topic reminded me of an enlightening conversation I had with Dr. Mike Marshall, a former Cy Young award winner, in January 2009, just prior to reporting dates for MLB pitchers. Excerpts of the interview ran on March 2, 2009 in SportsBusiness Journal and SportsBusiness Daily. 

Mike Marshall broke into the major leagues in 1967 with the Detroit Tigers. Fourteen years and eight teams later, he retired, but not before making his mark as the game’s most durable relief pitcher. In 1974 he appeared in 13 straight games and won the Cy Young Award after he set single-season records for appearances (106), relief innings (208) and games finished (84).

Marshall, who earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State in kinesiology (the study of muscles and their movements), has devoted over 30 years researching the art and science of pitching. He has been a tireless critic of the traditional pitching motion and an advocate for a training program he devised that he claims puts no stress on a pitcher’s arm. But he said he cannot get an audience with a major league team to discuss his findings.

Q. What’s your assessment of the business health of baseball?

Marshall: Well, I’m not involved that closely. And when I was a player rep, the owners didn’t tell us too much about the business part of it. Of course, the big business that they’re in now, and one that I predicted back in the mid-’70s, is cable television. That’s a huge revenue source for them.

Q. You saw the future in that in the seventies?

Marshall: Oh, yes. I was sitting with Ted Turner there in the old ballpark and we were talking about the different ideas that he had. He mentioned that he was going to put his team on cable television. I told him the thing I hate when I get on the radio is it’s all music. I want to hear news. I’d like an all-news station. He sort of took that idea pretty good.

Q. Are you suggesting that you gave him the idea for a cable news network?

Marshall: (laughing) I wish I had. I’m not going to say that that led directly to what he did, but certainly he thought well of the idea. We were talking, and I had come up with a contract negotiation technique where I would negotiate the money but then I would loan the money back to the team at prime rate, which was certainly better than what the teams usually got. He liked that idea, and then we started talking about different things in business that he was doing. I guess he thought I had some ideas about how to do things a little bit differently from what was being done then in baseball. The idea of loaning money out and making interest on it made sense to me.

Q. You might have been ahead of your time.

Marshall: I always felt that baseball was an industry that could have done a heck of a lot more, and still could.

Where I got into trouble was as a player rep. I kept recommending to my side of the negotiation that we should stop negotiating individual salaries and distribute the salaries ourselves by having the teams pay their percent of the total revenue into the Players Association, and then we’d come up with an equitable way to distribute the salaries that would follow a bell-shaped curve. That more than anything else is what got me out of baseball. It was more the Players Association than it was the owners that finally got me out of Major League Baseball. The idea that the agents wouldn’t make any money if they didn’t get to take their five percent for basically adding nothing to the value of baseball.

Q. What’s right about baseball? What does it do best?

Marshall: I don’t think it does anything best. It doesn’t train its pitchers; it doesn’t play the game the best. It’s all entertainment; it’s all star-driven.

Q. You had a 14-year MLB career with nine teams, won the Cy Young Award, taught for 22 years in college…

Marshall: Things went pretty well for me, much better than I ever expected. Teaching was a great joy, but I only did it where I could also be the head baseball coach. I’ve never been interested in being solely a professor, even with the opportunity to do research. I couldn’t have stayed away from the baseball field if I wanted to, which is why for the last few years I’ve been running my own baseball team: just dealing with baseball pitching.

Q. That is the Dr. Mike Marshall Pitchers Research and Training Center?

Marshall: Yeah, but I just turned 66. I’ve essentially shut that down. I’m training out those guys who are continuing into the second year of their program. As soon as these guys are gone, I’m done training baseball pitchers.

Q. Who is it that comes to you for the training?

Marshall: Over the last 10 years or so it’s been pitchers who did not get an opportunity to play college ball. And then there would be the injured players. Some were involved in college baseball, others in professional ball who were injured and released.

Q. These are pitchers who still hope to get a shot at the major leagues?

Marshall: Yes. The purpose I had when I started it was to introduce my ideas into the pitching motion. I wanted the opportunity to take pitchers and have them try new ideas out.… to see if we can’t improve baseball pitching. The primary problem that I’ve run into over the years is the rejection by the traditional baseball pitchers of anybody using my motion.

Q. Were pitchers trained more effectively in the past?

Marshall: Who are the pitching coaches? Check their academic backgrounds. Pitching coaches are ex-pitchers. Do you think they are going to invent anything new? They’re going to do what the guy who won the first game 130 years ago did. Scientifically, it is absurd what they teach.

Q. Your contention is that the traditional pitching motion is essentially flawed and leads to injury?

Marshall: If somebody wanted to invent a pitching motion that was inherently dangerous, that had all the elements of all injuries — you could ruin your hip, your knee, your lower back, the inside and outside of your elbow and the front and back of your shoulder — use the traditional pitching motion.

Q. And you support this from first-hand major league experience and from a career studying the subject?

Marshall: Oh, yeah. And on my web site (www.drmikemarshall.com) I have a list of all the pitchers who were injured last year and on the disabled list. It averaged out to over six per team. That’s over half of your pitching staff. How in the world can you not understand that there’s something wrong with what you’re doing!

Q. I saw a statistic that showed there were 271 different injuries to Major League pitchers last year that put them on the disabled list. Even with a minimum 15-day stay on the DL, that amounts to several seasons of inactivity. Multiply that by the average MLB salary…

Marshall: That’s a lot of money they’re wasting with unemployable or unusable pitchers. They might want to get a little science in there as far as strategies and so on. There are different things that they can do. With pitching injuries there are resolutions, and they don’t want to deal with that. I think I would take a look at trying to find out how to prevent these injuries, and yet nobody is. Or let’s put it this way: They are, but they’re asking the wrong people.

Q. Who are they asking?

Marshall: They’re asking orthopedic surgeons. Orthopedic surgeons are not the ones to ask about how to prevent injuries. They know nothing about bio-mechanics and how to fix them. And the bio-mechanists don’t know anything about anatomy. They’re just number crunchers, so they don’t understand what muscles get hurt and why. I know anatomy. I know mechanics. I know the laws of physics. And I’ve done it. I’m the only person that has all of the requisites to deal with pitching-arm injuries.

Q. No one else is qualified?

Marshall: Let’s put it this way: I haven’t found anyone else who is, and I’ve been looking all over for him.

Q. Wouldn’t that be helpful to an MLB organization?

Marshall: (laughing) From your lips to their ears. Pitching coaches are so afraid of me. I spent my time earning a doctoral degree. I actually know what I’m talking about. If that intimidates you, I’m sorry. But they keep saying I’m doing stuff outside of the norm. Damn right it’s outside of the norm. The norm is killing their arms and destroying the game.

Q. So, you can help, but you intimidate people? Is there some insecurity?

Marshall: That’s exactly what it is. The pitching coaches are very defensive and insecure.

Q. Putting aside the intimidation factor, and given the pitchers’ contracts and the loss of service to injuries, would it not be worth it to at least listen to an alternative plan, a plan that might conceivably keep the high-priced investments healthy?

Marshall: You’re too rational. I’ve offered to show them for free everything that I do. I’m not doing it for me. I don’t expect them to pay me anything. I just want baseball to be injury-free, as far as pitching-arm injuries that you can avoid.

Q. You sent a letter to all 30 MLB teams in the mid-’90s offering your services. How many teams responded?

Marshall: Zero. In each letter I said I wanted to talk to them about the training program I had. I said that I can eliminate all kids of pitching injuries, yadda yadda yadda, and I let them know that I had the doctoral degree and the playing experience, that I’ve done the research since 1967. I was the first one to bio-mechanically analyze the pitching motion. I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ll challenge anybody to demonstrate that anything I do is wrong. But I can’t even get anybody to say that.

Q. You set a number of relief records, and in the ‘70s you averaged two innings per appearance. Nowadays, most relief pitchers don’t throw two innings, and some of them don’t even throw one inning on successive days.

Marshall: That’s because they’re improperly trained. When I pitched 208 closing innings in 1974, I was never stiff, sore or tired. If I hadn’t thrown the night before, I’d throw at least 10 minutes of batting practice the next day. I could have pitched easily in every single game; I believe I could have pitched two innings in every single game. Of course, the hitters might have had something to say about that.

Q. Not to minimize what closers do now, but they enter the game in the ninth inning with the lead and the bases empty and just have to get three outs.

Marshall: Go ahead and minimize it. You’ve got a lead, so if you know how to pitch, you don’t give up home runs. If you pitch fewer innings, [the hitters] don’t get to see what you do as often, and it’s hard for them to make adjustments. So, pitching 80 innings one inning at a time with a lead? That’s a walk in the park.

Q. It’s easy?

Marshall: Billy Beane made a point. He said that if you want to get something for nothing, find a guy that can throw a little bit good and throw strikes, use him in a closing role and pump up a lot of saves, and then you can sell him for something very valuable because that’s not a very difficult man on your team to replace. He’s right! It’s the easiest gig in baseball.

Q. How about bringing your closer in with the bases loaded in the seventh inning. That’s a save situation.

Marshall: That’s right. That happened to me a lot. I’d finish an inning and then go back out the next inning. Or try pitching tie games in extra innings on the road. Now, that’s a gig! You’ve got to get six outs and the other guy has to get three, and your team has to score in order to get a win. It always amazes me that the managers never put their alleged best closer in the game in that situation, where if they give up a run, they lose. That doesn’t make any sense. If he’s so damn good, put him out there then.

Q. What would you do?

Marshall: I would have a specialist: somebody who could come and throw the nastiest sinker or some kind of overpowering pitch. He would come into this adrenalized situation and battle his way out of just that inning. Then I’d get somebody out there with nobody on for the easy gig.

Q. Bring someone like Mariano Rivera or Jonathan Papelbon into those situations?

Marshall: Absolutely. If he’s a good pitcher, put him in when it counts.

Q. Nobody does that.

Marshall: No. You asked me what baseball does right. There isn’t much baseball does right, in my opinion, either in playing the game or advertising the game. I don’t think they have the bullpen right either.

Q. It’s a copycat system. Every team does it the same way because they’ve always done it that way.

Marshall: Pitching coaches are afraid that if they do something different and it doesn’t work, they’re going to get fired. You can understand that. The general managers are quick to fire and place the blame elsewhere, and they’re very slow to try anything innovative or to bring someone in who will be innovative. That’s why baseball is the farthest [behind] in terms of any scientific research. They don’t even want to hear it. They are anti-science, anti-intelligence, anti-new ideas. And the blame goes to the owners. They have to have some intelligence about what’s going on.

Q. What will it take for baseball to at least examine another study?

Marshall: I have no idea. If you find out, you let me know and I’ll do it in a heartbeat.

Q. How has Greg Maddux stayed healthy for so long?

Marshall: I don’t have research studies on him at all, but one thing that he does extremely well is to pronate. That is, he turns his thumb down when he releases the ball, especially when he throws his changeup. But he does it on his fastball, too; that’s how he gets the ball to tail back to the pitching arm side of home plate. And pronating your pitching elbow prevents injuries to the elbow. He does some things very well technically.

And he does one more thing that I think is great. He’s smart and gets out of the game before hitters can hit him. He won’t go more than three times through the lineup. Even at his greatest, he wouldn’t go through the lineup more than three times. And he doesn’t try to overthrow. He throws balls that move and he tries to hit spots. So, he’s not just out there rearing back and letting lose with his body going all over the place. You put those things together, and he’s had a pretty good career. But who’s going to get signed today throwing 85-87 miles an hour, as Maddux does most of the time?

Q. Pitchers today are nurtured very slowly and pitch count in tabulated religiously.

Marshall: Yeah, and that’s causing the pitching arm injuries too because they aren’t fit.

Q. The pitchers are not fit?

Marshall: You have to be in shape to throw a baseball hard, and pitch count is not the answer. And if you have a really horrendous motion and every time you throw as hard as you can, you’re microscopically tearing the connective tissue of the ulnar collateral ligament. It tears and tears and tears very gently. You don’t ever rupture the entire ligament with one pitch on a perfectly healthy ligament. It’s over time. And the pitchers don’t feel any pain. When the pitchers complain of pain in their elbow, that’s muscle. You feel pain in tendons, but... ligaments are completely passive. They do not apply force. They’re like guy wires holding bones together. There’s no sensory mechanism, although they do have a blood supply and they are able physiologically adapt to stress. They will get bigger and stronger, and my training program emphasizes that. The program strengthens the ligaments but does not put any unnecessary stress on them.

Q. By fit, you mean arm fitness?

Marshall: Yes, and it doesn’t happen overnight, and you certainly don’t take offseasons off. Rest is atrophy. So, when these guys come in and say that their arm hurts, they are told to take two weeks off. All that does is make them weaker and the next time they throw they hurt it easier. A pitcher will have surgery, and then goes right back to throwing the same way. That’s the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Yet that’s what trainers do: right back to the same motion. No! Injury defines a bad pitching motion. If you get hurt, you have a bad pitching motion. Change it.

Q. According to a story in the New York Times last September, “A theory researched by the Sports Illustrated senior writer Tom Verducci and now widely accepted in baseball …says that any pitcher younger than 25 whose total number of innings jumps by more than 30 from the previous season leaves himself susceptible to injury the next year, or at least to a much higher [ERA].” Have you heard of this?

Marshall: Yeah, I have. All those sabermetric guys look at things from a statistical standpoint. I could buck that very easily. Just let me train those pitchers and I’ll increase the innings by 100 and they’ll never hurt themselves. It’s looking at things backward. You’re not finding causes; you’re trying to find Band-Aid solutions by looking at statistics. You’ve got a bad pitching motion—change it! That’s the problem.

 Q. Would a major league pitcher be allowed to come to you on his own?

Marshall: That’s been the question I’ve been wondering about all along. All these guys are hurt. I think they know who I am; maybe they don’t.

Q. What about reaching out to the agents? It would seem to be in their interest.

Marshall: There have been a couple of agents who said they would like me to take a look at their pitchers. But I never heard back from them.... Right now, pitchers who make the major leagues are genetic freaks: those who have the highest percentage of fast-twitch muscle fibers. They are not skilled. They do not have the ability to throw high-quality pitches, non-fastball type of pitches. It’s silly how ineffectively trained they are. These pitching coaches don’t know how to teach them anything. They’re just baby sitters who are trying to ride the coattails of some genetic freaks in the major leagues.

Q. If major league pitchers, and major league baseball itself, are, as you suggest, not open-minded to examining the problem of pitching injuries, what about going younger: Little League?

Marshall: I’m having success with the parents of 10 year olds. The parents are concerned about their sons being injured. College coaches are dogmatic as all get-out: It’s this way or the highway. High school coaches, because the parents can get on those coaches and keep them from having their sons participate, have leverage. The high school coach has to take the people who are enrolled in school. So we’re having some success with the high school coaches. I spoke recently to high school coaches in Louisiana and in Arizona, and was received well in both places. Several of them told me that they are going to implement my program. I expect the same kind of reception when I speak to the Illinois high school baseball coaches. The high school coaches have concerns about injuries to their pitchers.

Q. Tommy Lasorda said, “You wanna fix Little League baseball, let the moms coach.”

Marshall: There you go. Absolutely right. Moms don’t want their sons to get hurt. They will do anything to find a way not to have them hurt. If there is a bio-mechanically and anatomically perfect way to apply force to a baseball and eliminate injuries, why wouldn’t we want to go that way, even if it doesn’t look anything like the way [pitchers throw now]?

Imagine if Dick Fosbury, instead of being a high jumper, had been a kinesiologist who designed that jumping technique but couldn’t jump. Well, I designed my pitching motion and made several adjustments and set several records, but I don’t get credit for it; they just say I’m a physical freak. When Fosbury went out and jumped higher than anybody else, it was hard for his coach to say, “I’m not going to let you jump.” Well, they tried to ban it initially.

Q. Fosbury was ridiculed at first because his jump was so unorthodox.

Marshall: Exactly. And because he went over [the bar] backwards, they said he was going to break his neck. They tried to ban it based on injury. He didn’t injure himself, and now it is recognized as the bio-mechanically and anatomically perfect way to high-jump.

 Q. You paint a bleak picture for the future of pitching.

Marshall: Yeah. It’s going to remain as bad as it is today as long as people continue to teach and believe in the traditional pitching motion. But back in 1976 or ‘77, I got a telephone call from Bill Veeck. He said, “Hey, Marshall. I want to know what you know.” He was in Chicago and I was in East Lansing. He showed up the next day and we spent the whole day talking about baseball pitching. I showed him my high-speed film studies and explained everything. At the end of the day, he said he wanted me to become his pitching coach. I was a free agent and was about to sign a rather large contract for that time. I told him I’d love to do it as son as I was done pitching. Of course, he sold the team before that. But that was as close as it came to actually having some proper training in professional baseball.

Q. Original thinkers like Veeck have been looked upon skeptically. You need another original thinker now.

Marshall: You don’t think the owners are going to let one in there, do you?

Q. Can you concede that there might be an owner with some imagination?

Marshall: Mark Cuban, who wants to buy the Cubs, is an original thinker. If he were to find out that I know how to train pitchers, he just might let me do it. Nobody else will. It’s not going to happen. I don’t know if the owners are still mad about me getting free agency into baseball or what, but they’re not going to let it happen.

Q. Can you send baseball a Candygram and kiss and make up?

Marshall: I wish I could.

Q. All right, hypothetically, if you were baseball commissioner, what would be the first order of business?

Marshall: To take out the part of baseball that ruins it the most: to make sure the pitchers are able to pitch without injuries. The fans can’t enjoy the game if their pitchers are injured.

Q. You obviously have this passion for what you preach. You have offered to give away what you have learned. What is your motivation?

Marshall: I love baseball. It’s the greatest game in the world. No question about it. I was 5-foot-8 and a half inches tall at my tallest. Now, at age 66, I’m 5-foot-6 and a half. I was able to pitch major league baseball and finish in the top seven in the Cy Young five times. That can’t happen in any other sport. I can’t play professional basketball or football or any of the other major sports. But baseball is a great game: the most skilled, the most intelligent game there is. I love baseball and I don’t like injuries. There’s no reason for them. And it’s so simple to me. I can make just three or four suggestions and eliminate all pitching injuries. Nothing major, nothing complicated. Things you can learn in less than two weeks, and you’ll never injure your arm.

Q. It must be very frustrating.

Marshall: I stopped worrying about what other people think back when I was 6 or 7 years old. My obituary is written. Nothing I do from now on is going to make any difference.

Q. What’s the first line in your obituary going to say?

Marshall: The first closer in the game to win the Cy Young award. That’s what’s going to be my obituary.

Q. When in the obit will it get to your pitching theory?

Marshall: Never. Never. They don’t know about it, don’t care about it, aren’t interested in it. It will say I had this prickly personality, that I tried to force my own ideas about pitching on everybody else. What a jerk he was there. But, boy, he did win the Cy Young award. He wasn’t good enough, of course, to be in the Hall of Fame even though he owns all the closing records and more than any other closer in the history of the game has done.

I’m not upset. I know the politics of life. Life is not fair. You’re taught that. You think it is, and then you find out that it isn’t—and it isn’t. The Peter Principle is alive and well. People rise to the level of incompetence and that’s where they stay for the rest of their lives.

Q. Maybe we can get a Little League mom to be baseball commissioner.

Marshall: (laughing) That would be a start. But if there are kids out there who are throwing my way and enjoying themselves and are pain-free, great!

Mike Marshall Favorites

Vacation spot: No, once I’ve seen something, that’s great, whether it’s a place or book or a movie, but I don’t need to see it again. I want to see something else. My wife and I love to go to various cities in this country and spend four days and three nights. We get on the Gray Line bus tour and listen to everything about the city. If there’s one place we go more than anywhere else, it’s New York City, to see the plays. 

Piece of music: I’m stuck in the ’60s and ’70s. I’m a Muddy Waters fan.

Book: I’m not a novel reader. I read more scientific journals kind of stuff.

Quote: Einstein’s definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Movie: Cadillac Records

Best baseball movies: Bull Durham and Field of Dreams

Worst baseball movie: The Babe Ruth Story

Superstitions: No, I’m too scientific for superstitions.

Regrets: If you’re not trying, then you’re not making mistakes. But if you make mistakes and you learn from them, then there’s nothing to regret. You do the best you can. I wish I had done some things differently, but I did the best I could with the information I had at the time. And that’s

Most influential persons: William Heusner, my kinesiology professor, opened my eyes to things I didn’t know existed. As a result of that, I had a Major League career I never would have had. And Gene Mauch gave me a chance in the Major Leagues.

Toughest opponent: Joe Morgan

Any pitchers today you admire: Greg Maddux

S.I. Newhouse, John Brunelle, and Condé Nast

S.I. Newhouse Jr. passed away last weekend at age 89. A titan in publishing, he was the Chairman of Condé Nast and the owner of The New Yorker, Vogue, Allure, GQ, Gourmet, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest, and other magazines. He was also an extraordinary and generous man. I had the great pleasure and fortune to work for him for 20 years as Editor in Chief of Condé Nast’s Street & Smith’s Sports Group.

A shy man, Si (as he was known), in an interview with the New York Times in 1989, said, “I am not an editor. I flounder when people ask me, ‘What would you do?’”

Si had great trust in his editors, giving them the tools, the budget, and the support to do their jobs. He told the New York Times, “We feel almost that whichever way it goes, as long as it doesn’t do something absolutely screwy, you can build a magazine around the direction an editor takes.” Si surrounded himself and his editors, on the 14^th floor at 350 Madison Avenue, with smart, practical, plain-speaking, and decent executives.

Every year, about two weeks before Christmas, Si invited the company’s officers and the editors in chief and publishers of each of the Condé Nast magazines to a private lunch at the Four Seasons restaurant. A highlight was the heartfelt and gracious speech by Si in which he expressed his gratitude for the efforts of all those assembled. One year, CNP president Steve Florio passed along some inspirational words spoken by his grandmother, he told us, before she passed. “Tropo duro,” he said she whispered to him on her deathbed. “Stay tough.”

I came to Condé Nast in February 1979 from New York magazine after a former colleague, Kevin Madden, had left New York as advertising manager a month earlier to join Condé Nast's newest start-up, Self magazine. Kevin told me that Condé Nast was looking for a new editor for its sports division. (Wait, Condé Nast published sports magazines? It was a successful if not well-publicized property among the company's more glamorous titles.) Kevin's tip led to a first interview at CNP, which went well enough that corporate secretary and vice president of personnel Pam Van Zandt called me back for a second interview before offering me the job.

I loved working at Condé Nast, where the editors were respected and appreciated for their work and treated generously. I was given a raise every single year for over 20 years. Not once had I ever asked for one. How it happened was, my boss, executive vice president John Brunelle, would call or drop me a note during Christmas week. “Are you in the office tomorrow?” he would ask. “Stop by and see me. I need to talk to you.” The talk would be to inform me that I was being given a raise.

John passed away last year. What a patient and understanding boss he was, and what a forgiving and unforgettable mentor and gentleman he was to a young editor. 

In 1983, when I was in the process of selling my first house and closing on another, I was informed that Condé Nast historically, if not publicly, made available loans to its editors and publishers. I went to see John. After I sat down in his office, he pressed a button under his desk to release the door held open by a magnet. I felt like I had entered Ali Baba’s cave. I asked him about the possibility of securing a bridge loan. 

Without hesitating, he said, “Sure. How much do you need?” When I told him $19,500, he asked if it would be convenient for me to pick up the check the next morning. All that was required of me was my signature acknowledging receipt of the check. There would be no interest on the loan and no payment-due date. “Pay it back when you can,” John said. That was typical of my relationship with him. The few times I met with John in his office over what I perceived to be a press emergency, he listened carefully, quickly assessed the situation, and leaned back in his chair. “It’s all going to happen,” he said cheerfully, taking a puff on his cigar. 

It’s all going to happen? I repeated to myself. Yes, and it’s all going to be bad, I thought. But it never was. Much later, I realized what he meant by that. He had complete confidence that I would take whatever steps necessary and spend however much time and effort it took to avert the crisis. He was right. Years later, at a retirement party thrown for John at Michael’s restaurant in New York City, I mentioned the meeting and John’s calm response to my agitation to his wife and daughter. “Oh, he was always telling us that, too,” they said. 

Rest in peace, John and Si.

Pharm Fresh

After my friend Terry came down with the Shingles virus this summer, he sent out a public service e-mail to many of us recommending that we get the Shingles vaccine to save ourselves from the pain and discomfort he was enduring.

I took his advice to heart and called my insurance carrier yesterday. Having been reassured that I was indeed covered, I went to my local CVS pharmacy this morning.

“Can I help you?” asked Donnamarie (one word on her name tag), the receptionist at the pharmacy counter.

“I was hoping I could schedule an appointment for the Shingles vaccine,” I told her, relaying the information and pharmacological codes for the vaccine given to me by a helpful representative at Cigna. As I started to read her the requisite PCN number, Donnamarie brushed me off.

“Name?’ she asked.

“Kavanagh: K-A-V…”

Donnamarie wasn’t listening. She had begun tapping her keyboard immediately upon hearing my last name. She was stymied. “Are you in the system?”

“Yes.”

“O.K., let’s start over,” she said. “Kavanagh: C-A-…

“K-A-,” I corrected her.

“You have to let me know that,” said Donnamarie in her most exasperated George Costanza voice. “Most people spell it with a ‘C,’ you know.”

I knew, yet gently replied, “Yes, but not all people.”

“That’s how I’m used to spelling it,” she insisted. Clearly I had got on her bad side. It was about to get worse.

“First name?”

“Gerard,” I said, not bothering to spell it.

Just to confirm, Donnamarie said, “J-E…”

“That’s G-E-R-A-R-D,” I said.

Donnamarie gave me a pitying look. If this had been a cartoon, the thought bubble over her head would have read, “This guy doesn’t know how to spell his last or his first name!”

She waved me over to the waiting area, advising me that the pharmacist would shortly administer the shot, and gave me a clipboard with a form. “Mr. Kavanagh, please fill this out and put today’s date, July 17, at the top.”

“Thank you. Today is July 18.”

“Correct. Yesterday was July 17,” said Donnamarie. 

Détente.

Voltaire and Trump II

Once upon a time there lived a ruler of such frightful insecurity and fragile ego that neither the members of his court nor his subjects ever expressed any misgivings about his behavior. In his short satirical novel Zadig, translated by Donald M. Frame, Voltaire describes the narcissistic great lord Irax: “Peacocks are no less vain, doves no more voluptuous.” He is, we are told, “not bad at bottom but … corrupted by vanity and voluptuousness [who] breathed in nothing but false glory and false pleasures.” Irax “rarely allowed anyone to speak to him, and never anyone to dare to contradict him.”

Zadig, the prime minister of the kingdom, undertakes to rectify the bad behavior. He stages an ostentatious tribute with the cooperation of a vast entourage of the court’s sycophants and via such an uninterrupted litany of fulsome praise for Irax, “expressly for all the good qualities he lacked.”

At first, the testimonials, which included a three-hour dinner accompanied by violinists, singers, and a two-hour cantata that extolled the grandeur, the grace, and the wit of Irax, delighted him. When the litany of praise was repeated throughout the course of that day and the succeeding ones, Irax, exhausted and chastened, begged for it to stop. “He had himself flattered less, had fewer feasts, and was happier,” having come to understand that “always pleasure is no pleasure.”

I was reminded once again of Zadig after seeing the June 12 televised meeting of Donald Trump and his Cabinet, his first full meeting with it since taking office. Trump began the proceedings: “I think we've been about as active as you can possibly be and at a just about record-setting pace,” he told the reverential audience seated around a White House conference table. But as pointed out by CNN, Trump “has no significant legislative achievements and some of his top agenda items are stalled in the courts.”

Nevertheless, no one in his vast entourage of court sycophants…er, Cabinet members, dared to contradict Trump. Instead, by obsequious turns, they began to sing effusively the praises of their ruler.

Given the floor first after Trump’s opening remarks, Vice President Mike Pence, released from the Westworld basement, groveled with a straight face, “This is the greatest privilege of my life…to serve as vice president to a president who's keeping his word to the American people.”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on sabbatical from the Keebler factory, followed: “It's an honor to be able to serve you in that regard and to send the exact right message, and the response is fabulous around the country,” he said. 

“I want to thank you for getting this country moving again, and working again,” said Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, who just happens to be married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

And on it went.

“It's a new day at the United Nations,” said Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “We now have a very strong voice. People know what the United States is for. They know what we're against. They see us leading across the board.” Or was it "bored?" There was no transcript available.

“Mr. President, what an incredible honor it is to lead the Department of Health and Human Services at this time under your leadership,” said agency head Tom Price. 

Chief of staff Reince Priebus oozed, “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.”

The encomiums, unlike those recited for Irax, were not repeated throughout the day. Nor did the Cabinet meeting include musicians and a three-hour cantata. And Trump, alas, did not appear exhausted or chastened by the tribute.

One-on-One With Frank Deford

Voted Sportswriter of the Year six times by his peers, Frank Deford wrote for newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, Internet, movies, and Broadway. He was a senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated and a long-time correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports. His commentary was heard each Wednesday for years on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. This interview took place in March 2004. Frank passed away in 2017 in Key West, Florida.  

Q. “I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in the world is fixed.” You wrote that. One of the things I like about your style is your unpredictable or contrarian point of view. Mark Twain wrote, “Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.”

Deford: I think that’s probably true. I think I’m something of an iconoclast. Though sometimes people take me too seriously when I’m clearly being contrarian for the sake of saying, “Let us at least consider that point of view.” People get terribly upset. Soccer people in particular.

Q. Meaning what?

Deford: Soccer people are the most sensitive of all sports fans in the United States. They’re so defensive about their sport because it’s so beloved everywhere else in the world and barely tolerated here. And so they begin in a defensive posture. Normally they accuse the rest of us Americans who don’t like soccer of being barbarians. And, so, anytime you can say anything that’s the least bit contrary about soccer, you bring down the temple around you. Which I take great delight in.

Q. Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong?

Deford: I don’t know if I’d go quite that far, but it’s a good ideology to follow.

Q. You wrote a cover story about Howard Cosell in Sports Illustrated many years ago…

Deford: More negative mail on that particular article than any other. Because I dared to say, you know, “Cosell ain’t all bad.” There were so many people who hated Cosell, unreasonably, most of them. And it was because he was contrarian, and he wasn’t what we expected sports announcers to be.

Q. The disagreements are always more interesting than the agreements, aren’t they?

Deford: You know, I have to accept it, if I’m going to shoot my mouth off, as I do every Wednesday on NPR. In a way, I hate every letter that disagrees with me. I’m human. Notwithstanding, when I can sit back and look at it rationally instead of emotionally, I know that if I didn’t get those kind of letters, I wouldn’t be doing a good job. Because it’s important to take positions. You have to be honest in what you believe. I could not have written about Cosell in the way that I did unless I felt that way.

Q. Since we’re talking about quotes, do you have a favorite one, or words to live by?

Deford: Yes. This is from Jonathan Swift: “Instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” Which would go contrary to what we’ve been talking about. But that, in important matters—not in making fun of soccer—is the creed I follow.

Q. You have interviewed and written of some of the great “characters” in sports: Al McGuire, Bobby Knight, Jimmy Connors, to name a few. Who are the most interesting personalities in sports business today?

Deford: Nobody pops into my mind right away. There was a time when sports was in a great state of flux, when everything was changing. When there were new teams, whole new leagues, when free agency came in. There were a tremendous number of characters then. Al Davis comes immediately to mind.

There were agents who were fascinating. I remember there was a guy named Bill Riordan, who was Jimmy Connors’ manager and ran tournaments in tennis. There were all kinds of interesting characters then in business.

I think now they’re all pretty staid and typical businessmen because sports is a very stable environment today. All the great changes have taken place. What new has happened in sports in the last 10 or 15 years? It’s hard to think of anything. And now sports is just run by bureaucrats. I’m sure they are out there, but no one pops into my head that’s particularly interesting at this point.

Q. You called Mark McCormack brilliant, saying he created the only dynasty, ever, over all sport.

Deford: Yes. Mark was a dull guy, though. You asked me who the interesting personalities were. Mark was a brilliant man, and he was kind of fun to interview because he was so bright and you could have great discussions with him. But he certainly was not any kind of fascinating character as, for example, Al Davis is. It will be interesting to see, as a matter of fact, if the McCormack empire can survive the death of the king, or I guess I should say the emperor. And we don’t know that, do we?

Q. Is it possible that our appetite for sports is overstuffed but undernourished?

Deford: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Obviously there’s such a glut, and I think this is one of the reasons that young men—who we all know are the most elusive audience of all—have turned away from sports. Because if it’s just out there all the time, there’s no mystery to it anymore. And when something loses its mystery and its enticement, it loses its charm.

They used to say that there was a Tarzan movie playing somewhere in the world every moment of the day. Well, now there’s a basketball game playing, not somewhere in the world but on your television set every moment of the day. After a while, I think it all sort of blurs together. And that’s basically true with all sports.

It’s so hard for anything to be special anymore. I really don’t pay attention to anything until it gets to the championships. I can’t keep it all together. I sort of watch it all with one eye. But the championships are the only thing that matter to me anymore. And God knows there are enough of them.

Q. Speaking of God, ever since David and his slingshot, athletes have been pointing skyward after an individual accomplishment. Who knew that God was such a sports fan?

Deford: Well, he is. And we should all know that. He takes time out from his busy schedule to root for various teams. And those teams that pray the most, I think God favors. Now, it’s always tricky when two teams that pray equally meet each other. This makes it very tough for God. And sometimes he just doesn’t know what to do, and so as a consequence, he turns his back and lets the athletes decide without him getting involved.

Q. God is indifferent?

Deford: He’s neutral, but most of the time, as any sensible person knows, God determines what happens on the field. And I think that’s the way that it should be. It’s foolish for us to think that we should play these games without spirituality mattering more than athleticism.

Q. Speaking of God complexes, Billy Martin said, “There is nothing greater in the world than when someone on the team does something good, and everybody gathers around to pat him on the back.” What do you consider the best thing about sports?

Deford: Did Billy really say that? (Laughing) I remember Billy telling me that he was responsible for something like 40 victories a year as a manager. That sort of goes contrary to that, but that’s a very sweet sentiment. And I would subscribe to that absolutely. I’m enough of a romantic to be for that. Sweetness and light.

Q. What’s the worst thing about sports?

Deford: Drugs. Simple. End of story. You can go on and on and say the violence in sports, the ugliness that we hear and see in the stands now that we didn’t use to. Athletic scholarships and the entire fraud that big-time college athletics are. You can go on and on, but indisputably the threat to sports today is drugs.

Q. Witness the histrionics that regularly occur during a game. Does sport have to manufacture excitement?

Deford: I don’t think that’s sports manufacturing excitement. When you say sports manufactures it, it’s something you think in terms of, say, Bill Veeck, a promoter. These are the players, and they’ve grown up now with a much larger component of acting up and showing off. I don’t get as upset about that as a lot of people do.

I thought that [Terrell Owens’] Sharpie and [Joe Horn’s] telephone were rather amusing. And most people thought, particularly since God was watching, that this was an insult to sports, that it was sacrilegious. I thought it was kind of clever. I know it’s over the top, but both of them were original.

Q. A lot of it is dreary, though.

Deford: I get more upset about the guys who flex their muscles and do all that stomping around and throw the ball down. I’ve had enough of that. That’s boring. I’m glad to see these guys coming up with something new. And of course the league immediately put them down, so we were forced to have the same old same old.

Q. Well, because sports is a serious business.

Deford: Sports is serious. People said this was an insult to the game and to the many many NFL players who had played the game the right way in the dim, dark past. All things considered, I think that the more fun you can put into sports, the better that it is.

Now there was another instance, I believe it was also Owens, who after he scored a touchdown went out and stomped over the Cowboys’ star [logo at midfield]. That to me is ugly and has no place. But I think there’s a difference between the humorous things and the kind of taunting, which are sort of a form of violence. They’re accepted much more than the light-hearted things.

Q. You mentioned Bill Veeck. He was ahead of his time in sports marketing, before there was even such a term. How far have we come in sports marketing?

Deford: I think we’ve reached a point where it’s played itself out. Nobody’s come up with anything new lately. There’s no new ways to make money since luxury boxes that I’m aware of. And there’s really not been a whole lot of innovative marketing, except bobblehead dolls, in the last 10 or 15 years. Now there just aren’t that many ideas in sports. Haven’t been for a generation now. Everything is so serious. Everything is so commercial. Everything is so standard now that a lot of the fun has gone out of the games, I think. That’s why when a guy brings out a telephone, I say more power to him.

Q. Have the games become subordinate to the business of sport?

Deford: Well, no. I don’t think that’s fair to say. We still haven’t reached the point they have in both Asia and Europe where guys wear advertisements on their uniforms. They’ve had that for generations. Hell, if you go to a soccer game in Europe, they change their shirts at half-time. The guy’ll come out in a shirt that says Dannon yogurt for the first half, and for the second half he’s wearing a bank on his shirt.

Q. Are we getting there?
Deford: We’ve got a long way to go. I don’t know why that’s taken so long. Tennis players already wear that. It doesn’t bother anybody that all the NASCAR drivers and the cars themselves are billboards. I don’t understand why they don’t do product placement in golf tournaments, where they have, you know, a Hummer sitting up there instead of a sand trap. So there’s a lot more that can happen. If anything, we’ve been kind of conventional and traditional in our treatment of the games as far as commerce is concerned.

Q. The New York Times in a story [on Jan 18, 2004] referred to “NASCAR Dads.”

Deford: I did a piece on that for Sports Illustrated some time ago. I suggested there would be a new sitcom in which a NASCAR dad marries a soccer mom. Television loves these things. They call it “cute meet,” where two terribly different people encounter each other. You know, the odd couple. The NASCAR dad is more of the right winger; the soccer mom is more of the sensitive liberal.

I think, though, in both cases it’s a catch phrase which probably embraces a lot more than the stereotype. But more than anything else, it reflects on the increased popularity of NASCAR. We don’t say pro football dad or NBA dad, and whoever coined the phrase was really celebrating the new popularity of NASCAR, which I think is very real.

Q. In the story, NASCAR estimates that it has 75 million fans, or one-quarter of the U.S. population, and claims 6.7 million ticketed spectators last year. The point was that if there is a NASCAR dad, how does a political party get this large electoral bloc to vote for its candidate.

Deford: Again, I think the stereotype of the NASCAR fan is somewhat different from the reality. I’m not a NASCAR fan myself. It absolutely boggles my mind that anybody can sit there and watch cars going around in a circle. I love to watch people race; I love to watch horses race. I have no interest whatsoever in watching cars race.

But it’s loud and it’s fast, and more than anything else, though, I think the reason that NASCAR works—well, obviously, people like to see cars race—is because it has this wonderful formula in which, effectively, it’s an all-star game every week. The same handful of drivers. They race week after week after week against each other.

I don’t think it’s any accident that they follow the NFL pattern, which is one game a week, and that’s ideal. That’s what soccer is basically around the world. It’s a weekend game and you have the same teams. And so, NASCAR, to me, is very much like the NFL, and that’s why it works best.

Q. Incentive clauses: Bob Horner used to have a weight clause. A-Rod makes $25 million a year, but he gets another hundred grand if he makes the all-star team. Years ago, Joe Namath was on Larry King…

Deford: Did he want to kiss Larry?

Q. He didn’t try to kiss him, but Namath said he refused to have incentive clauses in his contract because he said he couldn’t play any harder than he was already playing. What’s your take on incentive clauses?

Deford: I think that’s a wonderful statement by Namath. I salute him for that. But those are not necessarily incentive clauses. In other words, if you make the all-star team, that doesn’t mean you tried any harder; it just means you’ve done better. I do think there’s a difference there. You’re being rewarded for success.

But it’s nonsense to give that to somebody like A-Rod, who’s already getting $25 million. I think those success clauses have a very applicable place in the contracts of rookies or journeymen. It’s just greedy for A-Rod or his agent to put that into a contract of that size.

Q. How do you assess the state of sportswriting today?

Deford: I think that there are more good sportswriters than there ever have been before. It’s a much more respectable profession to go into. When I started it was sort of like being a freelance model. It wasn’t something a gentleman was supposed to enter. There was, I hate to say this, a lot of corruption in sportswriting. If you were a sports editor and the boxing match came to town, the promoter would come over and grease your palm if he wanted to get some publicity.

So, sportswriting itself, in being more respected, has more good sportswriting. Unfortunately, we are more and more handmaidens of television. We’re really not allowed to write a whole lot about things that don’t appear on television. And there are just so damn many games that it takes up all the space. And so I think there are a lot of good sportswriters who unfortunately are not given a chance to write their best.

Q. Any favorites?

Deford: Sportswriting is so local. I love Scott Ostler in San Francisco. But how often do I see his column? Twice a year, maybe? I always say, though, that sports is the easiest thing to write. We try to keep that a secret. It’s wins and losses and there are characters. Guys who write politics basically write sports now. They’ve caught on. They don’t write about issues and important stuff. They write the game of politics. We have the best subject in the world to write about, if the agents don’t screw it up and start sequestering the athletes and keeping them away from us, which is happening more and more. It’s becoming like Hollywood.

Q. It’s the great American topic.

Deford: Sports? I believe that. Ever since it went on television. More and more people are familiar with it. And it’s real. That’s really the difference between sports and movies and music. You don’t know what the outcome is going to be. More than anything else, that’s what makes sports so charming.

Q. You have written that radio and TV sports talk (babble, you called it) mostly rewards the loudmouths and the meanies.

Deford: I can’t improve on that. And that’s not to say that there aren’t guys in the business who are honorable and fine journalists. Unfortunately, it’s the guy who makes the most noise, who gets the most attention and says the most outlandish things who rules that market.

Q. That's true not just in sports talk.
Deford: It tends to be true in political talk as well. If you are responsible and don’t say really crazy, outlandish things in a loud voice, nobody listens to you. That’s a shame. But what’s really bad about sports radio—and I should say some of sports radio, because I don’t want to indict everybody—is that remarks are made that have no basis in truth whatsoever and then they are picked up and passed on. It’s scurrilous.

Q. Who’s the greatest competitor you’ve seen?

Deford: Bill Russell.

Q. Sports Illustrated, NPR, HBO…What’s a typical day off like, assuming you do get a day off?

Deford: I write movies and books. This morning, I went and did my commentary for NPR. I’ve been working on a speech. I’m finishing up a movie. I’m very good at being able to compartmentalize myself. Having said that, I’m not any kind of workaholic at all. I know when to stop and sit down with my wife and drink a bourbon or two. I go to the theater. And the main thing is, I don’t play golf. It’s amazing what you can do if you don’t play golf.

Q. That’s a lot of hours a day.

Deford: That’s it. People say, “How do you write novels?” It’s because I don’t play golf. That’s the most important thing that I don’t do. That allows me to do all the other things. I don’t care about golf, or talk about golf, or go to the pro shop and buy golf clubs or shoes or gadgets that help me play golf better. That provides me with an entire other life that other sportswriters don’t have. Because all sportswriters play golf, except for me, as near as I can tell.

Q. As it happens, I don’t play either.

Deford: I can’t believe that! Really? People think you’re crazy, don’t they? They’re always inviting me to tournaments.

Q. People always tell me how much I’ll love it.

Deford: Yeah, that’s right. And then you ask them, and they hate it, most of them. It’s a masochistic game. Actually I enjoy watching golf—if it’s a championship. I watched Michelle Wie this weekend. Once she left, I didn’t want to watch. The Masters will be the next golf tournament I’ll watch. It’s a wonderful game. It’s so pretty. But I don’t want to play it. I want to do other things with my life. But I’m amazed to have met somebody in the business who doesn’t play golf. You’re the first person.

Q. I just tell people I don’t have any plaid pants.

Deford: (Laughing) And don’t want a pair.

Q. In one of your columns you cite Socrates’ belief that the two main keys to a young person’s development are the fine arts and athletics?

Deford: Absolutely, and those are the first two things cut in school funding. Talk about short-sighted. And more and more, they’re cut because it’s important for kids to take standardized tests. And they have to study for those standardized tests. I think that’s one of the worst things about American education.

I’m the first one to scream about the overemphasis of big-time athletics. But to cut athletics at the elementary and the high school and junior high levels, which are basically exercise and good health, and athletics teaches people to work together on a team. I think those things are so very vital.

Q. And the arts.
Deford: The same thing with fine arts, because the appreciation of music…I can’t hold a note and really don’t understand music, and I’m not much better with art. But at least having had that background was one of the richest things that I learned. We just don’t understand how short-sighted we are with these damn standardized tests, which teach everybody how to take multiple-choice questions and not to understand Michelangelo or Renoir or Beethoven. It’s just insane.

Q. It’s an impatience to stick a label on the kids.

Deford: Yeah. We have this epidemic of obesity in this country where the current generation is going to be the first since Colonial times in which it lives a shorter life than its parents. And so much of that is because nobody gets any exercise any more. But standardized tests are much more important for us to take. Get everybody exactly down pat.

Q. Why does the NCAA care about where or how a college athlete (Jeremy Bloom, for example) makes money outside of college?

Deford: Because they want to control it. Simple as that. That’s all the NCAA is about. It’s about controlling athletics and athletes so that the colleges spend as little money as is necessary and make as much money as they possibly can. And once they allow a Jeremy Bloom to cross over that line, they’ve lost control. The NCAA, as far as I know, is the most successful, potent cartel in this country. And why it survives without any court challenges is beyond me.

Q. Anything to be done?
Deford: I’ve heard this, I promise you, the day I got into sportswriting, “The college presidents are going to take over. Don’t you worry, once the college presidents take over, this is all gonna be straightened out.” And they don’t want anything to do with it, except to stand up every now and then and say they’re going to take over and they’re going to straighten this out.

There’s not a college president who won’t tell you that “College athletics is terrible—except, of course, at my school, where everything’s fine.” They want nothing to do with it. They’ve got enough on their hands, and they can’t fight the athletic departments because they’ve become too powerful. And they can’t fight the alumni, who love sports. It’s just a hornets’ nest. If anybody thinks college presidents are going to save college sports, they believe in the tooth fairy.

Q. Mark Twain said, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” What are you reading now, and what books have meant the most to you?

Deford: I think that’s wonderful. I’m very eclectic in my reading. I go from novels to history. I’ve never had a writer whom I’ve patterned myself after, who’s changed my life. There are certain books along the way—The Catcher in the Rye probably is as prominent as any other—which have blown me away. I’m totally in awe of Shakespeare. Among modern writers I think William Styron had the greatest effect upon me. 

Q. Favorite sporting event? 

Deford: A good, important baseball game. A bad back-and-forth game (football, basketball, hockey, and so forth) can entertain you more than a bad baseball game. But a good baseball game, because it’s the most intellectual of all sports and the most thoughtful, engages me more than any other.

Q. Favorite piece of music

Deford: I’m thinking of all the country-and-western songs I like. I love that Traviata (hums “Libiamo”).

Q. Favorite actress?

Deford: I wish somebody would jump to mind. I just saw Diane Keaton… and Renee Zellweger. Catherine Zeta-Jones, because she’s so beautiful. You get seduced by the beauty of actresses. But I like the actresses who can play different parts. You know the one I love...O.K....Juliette Binoche.

Q. Favorite movie?
Deford: Viva Zapata!

Excerpts of this interview ran in 2004 in SportsBusiness Journal.