Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Over Time My Life as a Sportswriter by Frank Deford Sportswriter Frank Deford On Life, Love & Loss. If you have ever listened to NPR on a Wednesday morning, then you've heard Frank Deford offer his commentary--cantankerous as it may be-- on everything happening in the world of sports. On Thursday, Deford joins Steve Kraske on Up to Date to discuss his new memoir, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter . Covering over fifty years of life on the sidelines, as well as his personal triumphs and tragedies, Deford's reminisces are a remarkable account of a life lived court side. Note: Book excerpts are provided by the publisher and may contain language some find offensive. Excerpt from Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter. From Chapter 3: In Which I Encounter Faster Guns. High schools are our commonest common denominator. Good Lord, they even all smell the same, that stale institutional odor that can be disturbed only by another ringing bell. The children fall out into the corridors, moving with a special rhythm, at a pace they will never again employ in life. Nothing else in the human experience resembles the break between classes. — "When All the World Was Young, Lad," Sports Illustrated , 1977. Besides prefaces counting their pages in Roman numerals, the other thing about books that always confounds me is that we authors go on and on, tediously, with acknowledgments, but we usually make a mystery of our dedication. So, here is who this book is dedicated to: my high school adviser and my high school basketball coach. You see, since much of this book is about writing and sports, it is especially appropriate to dedicate it to them. Jerry Downs not only was my adviser but he taught me English, and (although I could've done without the Thomas Hardy) he showed me how to appreciate great writing — Shakespeare in particular, of course — and he wonderfully encouraged my own writing and helped me improve it without ever being pedantic. He also directed me in school plays (struggling mightily with me when I was in my James Dean period), where I believe I learned to appreciate actors more than athletes. He was everything good that a high school teacher should be, and he was a wonderful influence on me, but, of course I was a teenager then and therefore I didn't let him know that I thought that. Nemo Robinson — square name: John — was my varsity basketball coach. I had no idea, until forty years later, that he had been a certified hero at the Battle of the Bulge. That was revealed to me only when the History Channel devoted a whole program to a re-creation of his incredible courage, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star with valor. In deep snow, out in the open, Lieutenant Robinson led an assault on an entrenched, well-fortified German position, then crawled back and forth under the enemy machine-gun to rescue several of his wounded men, dragging them to safety — even as he suffered a hernia for these extraordinary exertions. But what did I know when Nemo coached me? If I'd actually known what he'd so bravely achieved against the Germans I would've been too nervous around a truly courageous man like that. Luckily, I just knew Nemo as Coach Robinson, who put up with me. Because I'm tall, people naturally assume I played basketball. Every tall guy gets that. When people meet Abraham Lincoln in heaven, I'm sure they start off asking him where he played hoops. Unfortunately, I'm not much of an athlete. I have terrible hand-eye coordination. It's so bad that, when operating a computer, for some unknown reason, I hold the mouse backward. Apparently, I alone in the world have this mysterious vertical dyslexia. Incredibly, though, I could shoot a basketball, and when I was in my senior year at Gilman School, playing for Nemo, and the jump shot was coming into vogue, I just sort of magically started making jump shots. I'd put on a little weight, too, from taking the Charles Atlas course, which cost $30 (an awful lot of money at the time). Mr. Atlas called his secret regimen "Dynamic Tension." You sent away for it through the ads on the back of comic books, where there were panels showing how the erstwhile skinny Charles himself had put on muscle and, thereupon, at the beach, beat up a bully who had kicked sand in his face. Ideally, you did the exercises naked before a mirror; this gave them more of a hush-hush, even lurid, aspect. When I got my driver's license at sixteen, it listed me at 6 feet 2½ inches, 127 pounds, so I was a wraith. With the help of Charles Atlas, by the time I was a senior I was up to a hefty 150, and I'd grown a couple more inches, too, so I was finally able to muscle up jump shots. It was all quite amazing; overnight I got off the bench and became a star. It absolutely confounded Nemo that I came out of nowhere. But me — I knew, secretly, my success was a fluke. As a precursor to so much in my life, I was just in the right spot. We had a very good center named Tommy Garrett, who was 6 feet 7 inches, so he had to play the opponent's big man, and by far the best athlete on our team was the point guard, Alan Yarbro, who would bring the ball up court, do all the hard work, then pass me the ball so I could launch my beautiful new jump shot over the poor little shorter guy guarding me. By coincidence, that season, 1956–1957, was the first time that the Baltimore high school conference, which had been segregated, allowed in the black schools. Promptly, Dunbar easily won the championship. Its star player was named Joe Pulliam. One day, before school, we were sitting around reading the Baltimore papers, both of which, that day, selected me for second-team all-city. Joe Pulliam was one of the five players on the first team. My friend Bob Reiter said, "You know, Frank, whatta shame. The one year the colored boys come in, they have a good basketball team. Otherwise you would have been first-team all-Baltimore." I said, "Bob, I really don't think this was like a onetime thing for the colored boys in basketball." It was one of the few predictions in sport I've ever gotten right. Like most sportswriters and, for that matter, like most other people, very few of us ever predict sports correctly. It isn't even worth the effort, and you shouldn't pay any attention to what anyone predicts, but everybody keeps trying and many people take it seriously. From Over Time: My Life As A Sportswriter by Frank Deford. Copyright 2012 by Frank Deford. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. Over Time : My Life As a Sportswriter by Frank Deford (2013, Trade Paperback) С самой низкой ценой, совершенно новый, неиспользованный, неоткрытый, неповрежденный товар в оригинальной упаковке (если товар поставляется в упаковке). Упаковка должна быть такой же, как упаковка этого товара в розничных магазинах, за исключением тех случаев, когда товар является изделием ручной работы или был упакован производителем в упаковку не для розничной продажи, например в коробку без маркировки или в пластиковый пакет. См. подробные сведения с дополнительным описанием товара. Deford's memoir, 'Over Time,' shows a sportswriter in full. Journal Sentinel sports columnist Bob Wolfley offers his take on the local and national sports scene. By Bob Wolfley of the Journal Sentinel. If you enjoy candor and irreverence, funny little encounters and majestic condemnations, you are going to despise Frank Deford’s memoir "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter." If you can’t stand prose that can cha-cha-cha when it wants or waltz when it prefers, then don’t waste your time at this dance. An advance proof of the book (Atlantic Monthly Press, 354 pp.) was sent our way. It is scheduled to go on sale May 1. Deford’s voice is unmistakable. If you have heard it on his NPR commentaries or his "Real Sports" reports, or at a speech a few years ago on the Marquette campus, you know what that means. It’s the exact same voice you heard so many years ago in those exquisite "Sport Illustrated" profiles – a form which long ago was put on the federal endangered species list. If Deford can’t be described as anti-authoritarian, at the very least he is eagerly prepared to be spectacularly unimpressed by the lords of the realm. "Professional sports commissioners are very much a mixed bag," Deford writes. "Their only constituency is the teams owners, so, in a way, the czars, so-called, usually reflect the group personality of the magnates, so-called. Of course, that’s not always true. Bart Giamatti was much too attractive to represent baseball owners, and Fay Vincent didn’t have a baseball pedigree. Most of the football owners had no idea who Pete Rozelle was when they picked the kid, in desperation, to break a deadlock. The most telling artifact I ever spotted in a commissioners’ office was in Bud Selig’s. Posted proudly on his wall was the cheap certificate you can send away for for a few bucks attesting to your having duly made "Who’s Who in America." Here Selig is the lodestar of the national pastime, and he has to advertise that he’s made it in the Yellow Pages of people? But the owners love him; he’s their kind, only they all think they’re all just a little bit smarter than Buddy is." The commissioner need not be dismayed. On these pages Deford is much tougher on Bowie Kuhn as a person, for example. And much, much tougher on the NCAA, college conference commissioners and college presidents as groups. He scalds Vince McMahon, which you might expect, and Rodney Dangerfield, which you might not. Sometime as a younger man Deford acquired a particular, palpable moral revulsion for high-end college athletics. He recalls volunteering to cover an NCAA convention in the 1970s. "I did foolish journalistic things like that occasionally," Deford writes. "Big-time college sports is, of course, a complete fraud, a fountain of deceit, so every now and then – particularly when I was younger and not entirely jaded on the subject – I would involve myself somehow and seek to shine a bright light on this great American hypocrisy." He is underwhelmed by college athletics’ attempts to reform itself. "The Knight Commission is a glossy-resume, happy-meal group, mostly of educators, who assemble periodically with a lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth to discuss how terrible college athletics are," Deford writes. "Then they make all sorts of gauzy recommendations that nobody pays attention to. But it makes the members of the Knight Commission feel better about themselves. If I were still in high school, I would call it a circle jerk." Last year Pete Dexter wrote a review of a novel by Jim Harrison and said: "You can still feel the excitement every time he pulls something new out of his ear. Which pretty much happens on every single page." The same accusation can be leveled at "Over Time." Consider one entirely random selection, which could be followed by others, then others and still others, and they all would be equally good: "Coaches are movies. Players are snapshots. So, the one great irony of writing about sports is that the most important people in sports are young and unformed, and, consequently, if through no fault of their own, less interesting." "I am not, as Gilbert and Sullivan might say, the very model of a modern manly man. This is because I do not play golf, I do not like to barbeque, and I don’t know the first thing about wine. But primarily it is the golf, or lack thereof, that astounds other men. Males of my sort simply expect that you play golf." "More and more we tend to celebrate the loudmouths – the highest percentage, it seems, being wide receivers in football – who first make themselves accessible, then voluble, and thereupon qualify as ‘characters,’ but, who are, really, just so many obnoxious jerks. Of course, I’m old and cranky, so pay me no mind. I’m even finally getting tired of Charles Barkley." "The fuss we make over high school sports is probably the main reason so many men in the United States are forever adolescent. High school sports have replaced The Western as the male American lyric." “Golfers almost never seem to choke, as all other professional athletes do. It’s a hard game, is all. Unyielding. Unforgiving. Everybody’s trying. He didn’t mean to get a bad lie. Just bum luck that he pushed that easy three-foot putt that could’ve tied him for the lead. Likewise, the fans never boo anybody in the sport, and every course is a home field for every golfer; I suspect this inhibits journalistic criticism, too. You da man . Never mind all the salacious sex stuff that came out – Tiger Woods always got mulligans for his surly behavior on the links. My favorite euphemism is all of sport is that a drive finds a sand trap. Not that some bum actually hit his Titleist there. But in all of baseball history, there’s never been a batter whose ball found the shortstop’s glove with the bases loaded.” "At a coffee shop at the Palmer House in Chicago, Deford sat on a stool next to what turned to be Colonel Harland Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame. “ ‘So, young man, I want to give you an important piece of advice. . . . ‘If you want people to listen to you,’ ” the Colonel began, holding his cane up some for emphasis . . . ‘Son if you want people to listen to you . . . 'He paused, and then, with firm finality, intoned, ‘Wear a white suit.’ ” Richie Ashburn (to Deford) on Pete Rose: “ ‘I’ll tell you. Pete Rose is the most obsessive person I’ve ever met in my life. It doesn’t matter – baseball, women, gambling – he’s obsessed with whatever he’s involved with. He doesn’t drink, you know.’ I nodded. 'Let me tell you, Frank. If Pete had a drink at lunch, he’d be an alcoholic by the time he went to bed.’ ” “I did have a brief dalliance with the New York Times in 1977, when the editor, Abe Rosenthal, tried to lure me to the great broadsheet, to be the columnist who, he kept saying, would be ‘the heir to Red Smith.’ Even though I was sure by then that I was better at writing longer pieces than short columns, it was seductive. The New York Times. The certified, accepted, designated, approved Paper of Record. Plus, the heir business. It could turn a fellow’s head. Looking back, I’m sure it would’ve been the wrong move for me, but fortunately, Rosenthal was so disagreeable, so arrogant, that every time I might begin to convince myself to come over, he would manage to talk me out of it by talking on.” “Had my introduction to sportswriting been limited solely to the hack Baltimore sports editors, I might’ve been prepared to consider that writing about sports could be a more distinguished genre somewhere out there in the wider world. Unfortunately, however, the Morning Sun also carried the weekly column of Grantland Rice, who, my father advised me, was the crème de la crème of the profession – and, sadly, Mr. Rice’s sappy prose was barely a step up from the offerings of the local sports scribes. Unfortunately, as but a wiseass child, I had no idea what a force Rice had been, how he had affected sportswriting – and, really, ultimately, the way so many Americans looked at sports.” “In my self-centeredness as a writer, only now did the scales begin to fall from my eyes. For all that we sportswriters bitch about not being appreciated as literary artists, its sports editors who are really more invested in the institution. . . . it’s the editors (and producers on TV and radio) who are at the core of sports journalism.” "While I am a pretty versatile writer, one thing I've never really been able to accomplish well is working with another writer. I just can't grasp how two people could write something well together - collaboration, they called it, which always makes me think of weasels collaborating with the Nazis. I guess you have to have the right personality to be collaborative. I imagine I'm either too vain or too stubborn to make it work, but I have tried to do it a few times." "On bus rides to shoot ads with the Miller Lite Beer All-Stars: "On team charters - any team, any sport - the coach or manager takes the first seat on the right next to the door, and sure enough, that's where Red Auerbach always plunked himself down on the All-Star bus. Then, at the other extreme, the back of the bus: that's where the rowdy wisenheimers sat, talking loud, cackling, trying to top each other. Bob Uecker, always in character as a wise guy, would take the central seat, back row, and be the loudest naughty boy." "When I was doing a story on Al McGuire, we were in a nightclub in Toronto one evening. Al was no book-learner, but was a truly wise man, who probably saw the odd connections and disjunctions of life better than any other person I've ever known. The band struck up a song, 'Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.' Al turned to me and said, 'More people will dance now.' 'Why,' I asked, bewildered at his total assurance. 'Summer song,' Al said sotto voce. 'This was a summer song. People remember summer songs better.' Instantly, the dance floor was thronged." About Bob Wolfley. Bob Wolfley retired in October 2014 He wrote the SportsDay blog and column and about TV and radio issues. Alex: The Life of a Child. In 1971 a girl named Alex was born with cystic fibrosis, a degenerative genetic lung disease. Although health-care innovations have improved the life span of CF patients tremendously over the last four decades, the illness remains fatal. Given only two years to live by her doctors, the imaginative, excitable, and curious little girl battled through painful and frustrating physical-therapy sessions twice daily, as well as regular hospitalizations, bringing joy to the lives of everyone she touched. Despite her setbacks, brave Alex was determined to live life like a typical girl—going to school, playing with her friends, traveling with her family. Ultimately, however, she succumbed to the disease in 1980 at the age of eight. Award-winning author Frank Deford, celebrated primarily as a sportswriter, was also a budding novelist and biographer at the time of his daughter’s birth. Deford kept a journal of Alex’s courageous stand against the disease, documenting his family’s struggle to cope with and celebrate the daily fight she faced. This book is the result of that journal. Alex relives the events of those eight years: moments as heartwarming as when Alex recorded herself saying “I love you” so her brother could listen to her whenever he wanted, and as heartrending as the young girl’s tragic, dawning realization of her own very tenuous mortality, and her parents’ difficulty in trying to explain why. Though Alex is a sad story, it is also one of hope; her greatest wish was that someday a cure would be found. Deford has written a phenomenal memoir about an extraordinary little girl. Об авторе. Frank Deford (1938–2017) was an author, commentator, and senior contributor to Sports Illustrated . In addition, he was a correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and a regular Wednesday commentator for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition . He won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his broadcasting. Deford’s 1981 novel Everybody’s All-American was named one of Sports Illustrated ’s Top 25 Sports Books of All Time and was later made into a movie directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Dennis Quaid. His memoir Alex: The Life of a Child , chronicling his daughter’s life and battle with cystic fibrosis, was made into a movie starring Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia in 1986. 'Over Time,' by Frank Deford: review. When I joined Sports Illustrated as a reporter in 1987, the twin lodestars among the magazine's senior writers were Frank Deford and Gary Smith. Deford possessed the physical air of the boulevardier; he was tall (6-4), natty (favoring purple) - his wavy hair swept back, his pencil mustache connoting rakishness. His writing voice, too, was casual but authoritative, the kind that might belong to a storyteller in a sidewalk cafe pausing to remove a cigarette from a case. Smith was young grunge to Deford's song-and-dance man; he was unflashy and thin, almost ascetic looking, the words of his stories delivered in an intense stream. Both had the ability to pierce to the heart of a subject. But those of us who toiled in the "bullpen," where the reporters checked facts and aspired to be senior writers, admired Deford's standing - numerous TV and radio gigs, film-optioned novels and the deference he earned at the magazine and in the sports world - but we admired Smith's writing more. Maybe it was a generational affinity, but grunge was winning. Still, Deford had produced some of the best magazine writing of the second half of the 20th century, stories that helped elevate sportswriting from a purple-prosed pursuit of no consequence into journalism taken seriously. He was a master of the long, rich "bonus" pieces that closed each magazine: "The Boxer and the Blonde," the story of Billy Conn; "Raised by Women to Conquer Men," about Jimmy Connors; and "The Toughest Coach There Ever Was," the moving tale of a tormented Mississippi junior college football coach. From my lowly post as a fact-checker, Deford was a consummate professional - cooperative, friendly, even-tempered and solid with research. I remember one piece of advice about writing that he imparted: He said his narrative was like a clothesline that he hung bells on, and at the end, he wanted to shake the line so that all the bells rang. More often than not, his stories delivered that kind of visceral reading pleasure. Therefore, it pains me to say that I wish there were more of that thoughtful craft and thoughts about craft in this memoir, "Over Time." The first half of the book staggers around quite a lot, careening from his desultory academic career at Princeton to engaging portraits of his family in Baltimore to a puzzling anecdote about the young Cassius Clay (Deford admits he doesn't like boxing) and a sad, almost pointless one about Howard Cosell's cognitive decline. 16 years ago a judge gave a young trafficker a second chance. Today he returned to court to become a lawyer A longtime Bay Area radio news voice announces his retirement Stunning new photos reveal depths of 'historic' California drought Texas attorney under fire for racist comment on abandoned Tesla engineer’s LinkedIn post These are the San Francisco Bay Area restaurants that closed last month The secrets tucked away in the San Francisco Armory, as told by its former Kink-y tenants A fight over Jim Crow Road divides rural Northern California town. At times, he overplays the role of the current "old and cranky" observer, who "can't stand any of the goddamn music playing in the locker room." He gets points for honesty, I suppose, but when he tells us to "pay me no mind," we're tempted to accept the offer. Too often, Deford's language strains painfully toward the casual; he's liberal in his use of the pleading "you see" and atonally throws in an OMG or a BFF while also dropping an antique phrase like "Katie bar the door." The book reaches its nadir midway when he riffs on not being a "writerly writer" and concludes about those writers who are "whiners": "Bitching about the angst of writing is our menstruation. Get over it." At that point, he seems to have emptied himself of bile, and indeed just four sentences later when he states, "You write best when you like your subject matter," the book becomes the chronicle of his career we hoped it would be from the start. He sketches insightful remembrances of stars like Wilt Chamberlain and Billie Jean King and lavishes affection and admiration on Sports Illustrated colleagues Andre Laguerre, Dan Jenkins ("exactly what a Sports Illustrated writer was supposed to be like"), and the "tortured" writer Mark Kram, whose "story on the Thrilla in Manila is, simply, the finest piece of writing, ever, about any one specific event - in sports or anything else." By the time he moves toward the end of the book, with two chapters on his good friend Arthur Ashe, and a poignant moment of communion with Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder, we're finally in the ballpark with the Frank Deford who made the subjects of his Sports Illustrated stories so memorable, collected in his essential 1987 collection "The World's Tallest Midget." That book contains brief first-person, behind-the-scenes comments on the subjects and stories, many of which are duplicated in the memoir. Reading that book, along with Gary Smith's 2008 collection "Going Deep," will go a long way toward covering the landscape of sports history in the past 50 years, via sports writing's Sinatra and Cobain.