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.