Sportswriting legend Frank Deford still in the game after 50 years

There are giants in the field of sports writing, names that stand out above the rest like a veritable Mount Rushmore of journalism. Ring Lardner. Grantland Rice. Red Smith.

But for the modern connoisseur, there is no one that looms larger than the venerable Frank Deford.

Since first signing on with Sports Illustrated all the way back in 1962 as a researcher, Deford has churned out engaging profile after engaging profile as the entire field of sports journalism has changed around him over the years. And he became, according to GQ, “the world’s greatest sportswriter.”

But beneath the six U.S. Sportswriter of the Year awards, the 69 SI cover stories and the 18 books, lies a man that is inexorably Ivy League.

“IT’S ALWAYS BEEN A REGRET OF MINE”

Born in Baltimore, Deford spent much of his young life hoping to make a name for himself in a city then more known for its status as a pass-through for the suits on their way to D.C. from New York than its sports.

But then a crooked, crew-cutted, sandlot schmoe called Johnny Unitas took over as quarterback for the Colts in 1956.

Unitas’ heroic exploits energized the city, giving Baltimore legitimacy and for Deford, a lifelong hero.

Emboldened by the spirit of “Johnny U,” Deford traipsed off to Princeton and immediately embraced the pre-professional spirit of the Ivy League that seems so entrenched in its culture today.

Or so you would think.

“I always said that I pretty much wasted my years at Princeton because I was just writing all the time … writing and having a good time,” Deford said. “I never really took advantage of the education there. Most of the time, I was working on the newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, where I ended up as the chairman and writing stories and plays and things like that.

“I enjoyed my time at Princeton, but it’s always been a regret of mine that I didn’t take advantage of it.”

Growing bored of the idyllic campus after his junior year, Deford set off to join the army, doing a six-month tour before returning to finish his degree in 1962 and leave the self-described “desultory academic layby” behind to begin the rest of his life.

Where he wound up would change the face of sports writing forever.

“THE LOWEST RUNG”

In his senior year at Princeton, Deford received an interview with Time, Inc., the parent company of a fledgling magazine by the name of Sports Illustrated.

After having his clippings looked over, Deford was the beneficiary of the recent firing of one of the magazine’s baseball researchers.

With his mandatory service out of the way, Deford saw no reason not to take the job.

“They offered me a job on the lowest rung, as a researcher,” he said. “I never even went to my graduation … I started at Sports Illustrated as soon as my last exam was over.”

After toiling on the lowest rung for a while, Deford got his first big chance when he was assigned to do a feature for the December 7th, 1964 issue on the then-best college basketball player in the world — fellow Princetonian Bill Bradley.

The feature was as modest and restrained as the man it was profiling. There was no injected “I” voice, no haughty conclusions on Bradley’s destined stardom.

It is deferential to the subject himself, letting little anecdotes about Bradley’s life — his curious habit of leaving his family’s occupation blank on his athletic forms, for example — “show” the reader his essence instead of Deford blithely “telling” them.

Even today, Deford looks back fondly on his first work.

“[Sports Illustrated] thought I was a ‘loony Princetonian,’ talking about their good player,” he said. “They finally let me go down and do a story on Bradley and then they ran it … and then of course Bradley went on to just do even better than I had imagined and it made me look very smart.”

While Bradley established himself as a hall of famer with the Knicks in the NBA, Deford’s career followed a parallel path, quickly rocketing up SI’s ranks to become one of its most esteemed writers.

“JUST FUN AND GAMES”

Deford doesn’t write much for Sports Illustrated anymore, but the magazine’s senior contributing writer (an understatement if there ever was one) is still omnipresent in the sports world.

His memoir, “Over Time,” was released just last year, almost acting as a precursor to his recent receipt of the National Press Foundation’s W.M. Kiplinger Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism.

The first sportswriter to receive the award in its history, Deford is anything but dismissive of the honor.

“Just winning it is a tremendous honor,” he said. “I’m tremendously gratified, not only that I won it, but that they’ve given it to anyone in sports. It’s nice that it’s me, but I’m just so glad that they overlooked the prejudice against sports, the fact that it’s just fun and games … and they saw a craft there.”

Just fun and games.

It’s a phrase that Deford repeats often, and at the end of the day, he’s right. In an existential sense, the life of the average Penn student isn’t affected by whether the basketball team wins or loses.

But there’s a realization that Deford has experienced that keeps him going. That’s propelled him to more than 50 years of work at Sports Illustrated and almost every honor possible in the world of magazine writing.

“The best sports writing is the best writing in journalism,” he said. “I think it lends itself day in and day out to really good writing and the reasons are obvious: it’s exciting, it’s glamorous. People win. People lose.

“You can peer into sports and see life as its lived, at least at its rawest.”

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