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Frank Deford, renowned sportswriter, dies at 78. Frank Deford, the renowned sportswriter and commentator, has died. He was 78. The death was confirmed Monday by NPR, where Deford delivered commentaries for 37 years. "Frank [left] us 1,656 of his signature insights into the world of sports and the human stories behind athletic triumphs," NPR President and CEO Jarl Mohn said in a statement. "The world of sports commentaries will never be the same." Deford was also well known for a decades-long career at Sports Illustrated, where he started working in 1962. The SI Twitter account called him a "titan and a gentleman." Deford wrote lengthy features on iconic sports figures like Bob Knight, the cantankerous Indiana basketball coach, and Billy Conn, the boxer known as "The Pittsburgh Kid." He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2013 "for transforming how we think about sports." "A dedicated writer and storyteller, Mr. Deford has offered a consistent, compelling voice in print and on radio, reaching beyond scores and statistics to reveal the humanity woven into the games we love," Obama said. Deford wrote regularly for NPR and delivered commentaries on "Morning Edition" until just a few weeks ago. "From the Super Bowl as Shakespeare to the Sports Curmudgeon, to his regular castigating of the NCAA over how it treats its student athletes, to America's complicated love affair with the NFL, Frank made every week memorable," NPR noted at the time. In his final appearance, Deford said he was grateful to have reached an audience that included people who "haven't necessarily given a hoot about sports." "Nothing has pleased me so much as when someone -- usually a woman -- writes me or tells me that she's appreciated sports more because NPR allowed me to treat sports seriously, as another branch on the tree of culture," he said. Deford was voted U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times, and was elected to the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame. His 1981 novel "Everybody's All-American" was adapted into a movie. Prominent sportswriters weighed in with their memories of his life and work. "I loved reading Frank Deford in SI and I loved The National," tweeted Bill Simmons, referring to the short-lived daily sports newspaper where Deford was editor-in-chief almost three decades ago. "Sad to hear he passed away." "R.I.P. Frank Deford, a very nice man every time I met him," wrote Will Leitch, the Sports on Earth editor and Deadspin founder. I loved reading Frank Deford in SI and I loved The National. Sad to hear he passed away. My favorite Deford piece: https://t.co/aq4NHCNyBw — Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) May 29, 2017. R.I.P. Frank Deford, a very nice man every time I met him. This 2008 Daulerio interview with him was quite a thing. https://t.co/69IfzCnTD1 — Will Leitch (@williamfleitch) May 29, 2017. A great writer, father, inspiration & soul: Frank Deford RIP. Talent, character, kindness. Handsome to boot. — Scott Simon (@nprscottsimon) May 29, 2017. I just saw the news about Frank Deford. He hadn't been well but I'm in shock. The best of the best as a writer and as a man. On radio right — John Feinstein (@JFeinsteinBooks) May 29, 2017. The Best of Frank Deford. Few writers have been as closely identified with anyone place as Frank Deford was with Sports Illustrated. In two separate stints at the magazine, first from 1962 to '89 and then from 1998 to 2017, Deford established himself as the best sportswriter in America. His bonus stories for SI became the stuff of legend. Here are 10 of his very best. They are presented in no particular order. Each one is its own gift. Deford was a longtime supporter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Readers wishing to make a donation in his memory can contact the foundation at www.cff.org. The Boxer and the Blonde. Issue Date: June 17, 1985. The boxer is going on 67, except in The Ring record book, where he is going on 68. But he has all his marbles; and he has his looks (except for the fighter's mashed nose); and he has the blonde; and they have the same house, the one with the club cellar, that they bought in the summer of 1941. A great deal of this is about that bright ripe summer, the last one before the forlorn simplicity of a Depression was buried in the thick- braided rubble of blood and Spam. What a fight the boxer had that June! It might have been the best in the history of the ring. Certainly, it was the most dramatic, alltime, any way you look at it. The boxer lost, though. Probably he would have won, except for the blonde—whom he loved so much, and wanted so much to make proud of him. And later, it was the blonde's old man, the boxer's father-in-law (if you can believe this), who cost him a rematch for the heavyweight championship of the world. Those were some kind of times. Read the whole story. Raised By Women To Conquer Men. Issue Date: August 28, 1978. Playing, competing, with a racket in his left hand, Jimbo is more a Thompson than a Connors—in a sense, he is Jimmy Thompson. Has any player ever been more natural? But then, in an instant, he wiggles his tail, waves a finger, tries to joke or be smart, tries too hard—for he is not facile in this way and his routines are forced and embarrassing, and that is why the crowds dislike him. He is Jimmy Thompson no more. He is trying so hard to be Jimmy Connors, raised by women to conquer men, but unable to be a man, to be Big Jim or Bill Riordan. He is unable to be one of the boys. Read the whole story. The Ring Leader. Issue Date: May 10, 1999. It was 30 years ago, and the car containing the old retired basketball player and the young sportswriter stopped at a traffic light on the way to the airport in Los Angeles. (Of course, in the nature of things, old players aren't that much older than young writers.) The old player said, "I'm sorry, I'd like to be your friend." The young writer said, "But I thought we were friends." "No, I'd like to be your friend, and we can be friendly, but friendship takes a lot of effort if it's going to work, and we're going off in different directions in our lives, so, no, we really can't be friends." And that was as close as I ever got to being on Bill Russell's team. Read the whole story. The Rabbit Hunter. Issue Date: Jan. 16, 1981. As Bobby Knight is the first to say, a considerable part of his difficulty in the world at large is the simple matter of appearance. "What do we call it?" he wonders. "Countenance. A lot of my problem is just too many people don't go beyond countenances." That's astute—Bobby Knight is an astute man—but it's not so much that his appearance is unappealing. No, like so much of him, his looks arc merely at odds. Probably, for example, no matter how well you know Coach Knight, you have never been informed—much less noticed yourself —that he's dimpled. Well, he is, and invariably when anyone else has dimples, a great to-do is made about them. But, in Bobby's case, being dimpled just won't fly. After all: DIMPLED COACH RAGES AGAIN. No. But then, symbolically, Knight doesn't possess dimples, plural, as one would expect. He has only the prize one, on his left side. Visualize him, standing in line, dressed like the New Year's Baby, when they were handing out dimples. He gets the one on his left side. "What the bleep is this?" says little Bobby drawing away. "Wait, wait!" cries the Good Fairy or the Angel Gabriel or whoever's in charge of distributing dimples. But it's too late. Bobby has no time for this extraneous crap with dimples. He's already way down the line, taking extras on bile. Read the whole story. The Kid Who Ran Into Doors. Issue Date: September 1, 1975. The late Tony DeSpirito could have been the best there ever was on a horse, the very best. He knew that himself. When he visited his children, who had been too young to see him when he was great, sometimes he would laugh and say, "I'm the king. I am. Nobody could ever do on a horse what your father did." And there was no braggadocio to it. It was almost teasing. He just wanted his children to know, for the record. He would laugh. "The king, Donna. Your father was the king." Read the whole story. The Toughest Coach There Ever Was. Issue Date: April 30, 1984. Coach Bob "Bull" (Cyclone) Sullivan was a legend in his place. That place was Scooba, Miss, in Kemper County, hard by the Alabama line, hard to the rear of everywhere else. He was the football coach there, for East Mississippi Junior College, ruling this, his dominion, for most of the '50s and '60s with a passing attack that was a quarter century ahead of its time and a kind of discipline that was on its last legs. He was the very paradigm of that singular American figure, the coach—corch as they say in backwater Dixie—who loved his boys as he dominated them, drove off the weak and molded the survivors, making the game of football an equivalency test for life.​ Read the whole story. 'I Do Love The Football' Issue Date: November 23, 1981. The first of the two-a-days in the 24th year of Coach Paul (Bear) Bryant's tenure at Alabama takes place just after dawn on a steamy summer's day, Monday, August 17th. It would be winter, four and a half months later, before the Crimson Tide would be finished playing; the team has gone to a bowl for 22 straight years and, by now, as The Bear says, "We win two games, some bowl will invite us." Oddly, he overslept this morning. You'd have thought The Bear would have been raring to go, he being a legend in his own time, this being the start of his supreme season; besides, he's an early riser. But Billy Varner had to rouse him, up at his house by the third green at the Indian Hills Country Club. Billy drives The Bear around in a Buick LeSabre. He has for six years, since, The Bear explains, "I started gettin' death threats and all kinda things." Billy was a bartender out at the club, and The Bear had him taught to shoot a pistol so he could pass the police tests. They get along beautifully, which is important, because by now The Bear probably spends more time with Billy Varner than he does with his wife, whose name is Mary Harmon if you know The Bear and Miz Bryant if you only worship from afar. Read the whole story. 'I've Won. I've Beat Them' Issue Date: Aug. 8, 1983. Even now, so few comprehend. About Howard Cosell, that is. Cosell does. "I have won," he says, as is his wont. As we know. In that jejune world up in the booth—high up in the booth—only one man possesses quickness and momentum. He is not the one with the golden locks or the golden tan but the old one, shaking, sallow and hunched, with a chin whose purpose is not to exist as a chin but only to fade, so that his face may, as the bow of a ship, break the waves and not get in the way of his voice. For as long as he speaks, whoever rails at Cosell's toupee isn't seeing the bombs for the silos. Read the whole story. The Best There Ever Was. Issue Date: September 23, 2002. After I got that autographed Unitas football, every now and then I'd pick it up and fondle it. I still do, too, even though Johnny Unitas is dead now, and I can't be a boy anymore. Ultimately, you see, what he conveyed to his teammates and to Baltimore and to a wider world was the utter faith that he could do it. He could make it work. Somehow, he could win. He would win. It almost didn't matter when he actually couldn't. The point was that with Johnny U, it always seemed possible. You so very seldom get that, even with the best of them. Johnny U's talents were his own. The belief he gave us was his gift.​ Read the whole story. A Time For All Us Children. Issue Date: March 27, 1978. Like most boys, I had a favorite player. His name was Bob Repass, and he played shortstop for the old minor league Baltimore Orioles. While I lived and died with Bob Repass ("Hey, Bob-a-re-pass!" we shouted), I do not recollect that he seriously diminished my devotion to my father. On the other hand, the heritage of Bob Repass still resides with me. He wore No. 6. To this day it is my firm belief that six is my lucky number. Why? Because it is my lucky number, that's why. Because Bob Repass wore it when I was eight years old. Read the whole story. The Best of Frank Deford. Whether Frank Deford is the voice you hear on National Public Radio's Morning Edition or the name you see in the Newsweek byline, you are sure to be highly entertained with the irreverent musings of this much-acclaimed sports mind. Deford possesses a witty and poignant take on the world of athletics that has earned him a wealth of fans, from the most ardent sports enthusiast to the greenest novice. In this best of the best compilation, Deford creates insightful, richly, drawn yarns on the human drama and the occasional high comedy of athletic competition. The Best of Frank Deford relates not only the specific and the spectacular events that make up great sports writing, but reflects through sports the larger world of American culture. This is a grand collection of his most vivid caricatures, colorful anecdotes, and out-of-left-field observations on the often humbling and humorous nature of sport. The Best of Frank Deford is a treasure of Deford's best writing and will make an instant fan of any reader. DEFORD, Frank. ( b. 16 December 1938 in Baltimore, Maryland), sportswriter known for the perceptiveness, wit, and compassion of his comments in magazines and books and on National Public Radio. Deford was the eldest of three sons born to a middle-class couple, Benjamin Deford, a businessman, and Louise Deford. Looking back on his earliest years, he said, "For a writer, I had a terrible thing—a happy childhood." He decided at age ten that he could write. He enjoyed sports but was not as good at playing them as he was at writing. At Princeton University, from which he graduated in 1962 with an A.B. degree in history and sociology, Deford wrote for and edited the Daily Princetonian and also wrote two plays that were produced on campus. He had not intended to go into sportswriting, but when Sports Illustrated offered him a job after graduation, he took it. He began as a reporter but soon was assigned longer feature articles, which made his reputation. He married Carol Penner in 1965; the couple had three children. In the 1970s Deford began publishing books. His first, There She Is: The Life and Times of Miss America (1971), dealt with a nonsports form of spectacle. He also served as a ghostwriter for books by the tennis stars Arthur Ashe, Jack Kramer, Billie Jean King, and Pam Shriver and told the sad story of the tennis great Bill Tilden, whose career was destroyed by the revelation of his homosexuality. The 1970s also brought Deford great sorrow. His second child, Alexandra, was born in 1971. As an infant she seemed sickly, and soon she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. The doctors said she might die in days, but she suffered through operations and painful treatments until 1980. Deford joined the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, eventually becoming its chairman, and wrote a moving account of the experience, Alex: The Life of a Child (1983), which was made into a movie. In 1980 Deford began a weekly sports commentary for National Public Radio (NPR), where he remained for more than twenty years. He gained recognition for his sportswriting, being voted the sportswriter of the year by the National Association of Sportswriters and Sportscasters every year from 1982 through 1988, but he still recognized the low estimation in which his field was held. In 1987 Deford published a collection of his best sports features and called it The World's Tallest Midget, his sarcastic view of the way the world perceived the "best sportswriter." The book showed the remarkable range of subjects that could be covered in just seventeen sports articles. It included studies of such famous sports personalities as the football pioneer George Halas and the Marquette University basketball coach Al McGuire, and an account of the well-known 1957 National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball championship. There was also a report of a boxing match between two unknowns that ended in death and the remarkable tale of "The Toughest Coach There Was," an otherwise forgotten Mississippi junior college coach. By the late 1980s Deford was thinking of moving on to new career challenges. He had been with Sports Illustrated for a quarter of a century, and he was becoming tired of interviewing athletes much younger than himself. An opportunity presented itself in 1989, when the Mexican millionaire Emilio Azcarra set out to create the first American daily sports newspaper. He called it the National and hired Deford as its editor in chief. Deford said that it would show that Americans really buy the newspaper for the sports page. Whatever the merits of that theory, the National never was able to solve its distribution problems. It published its first issue in January 1990 and its last in June 1991. When Deford left Sports Illustrated to work for the National, there was bitterness on both sides. Some people at the magazine believed that the National was intended to compete with Sports Illustrated, a theory Deford denied. In 1992 he began writing commentary for Newsweek and signed a contract with Vanity Fair to produce three profiles per year. Deford also wanted to be a serious novelist. He already had turned out five light sports novels— Cut 'n' Run (1973), The Owner (1976), Everybody's All-American (1981), The Spy in the Deuce Court (1986), and Casey on the Loose (1989)—but he now grew more ambitious. After the demise of the National, he wrote Love and Infamy, a historical novel with no sports content that portrayed the World War II events at Pearl Harbor through the eyes of two best friends, one Japanese and one American. The novel was published in 1993 to a generally respectful critical response, but it did not become a best-seller. In 1998 Deford and Sports Illustrated reconciled. He returned to writing for the magazine, and his NPR commentaries began appearing on their website. In 2000 he wrote the Home Box Office television special Bill Russell: My Life, My Way, and in 2001 he published The Best of Frank Deford: I'm Just Getting Started, which interspersed radio commentaries with longer essays on such figures as the Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight and the famed basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. Deford brought to his sportswriting a knowledge of the technicalities of the sport he was describing (and he wrote about most of them), a graceful prose style often brightened with wit, and, most of all, a compassionate understanding of the human realities of the story he was telling. In writing stature, he was far more than the world's tallest midget. Deford has written little about himself, but there is some autobiographical detail in Alex (1983), and the two collections of his articles. He discusses his fiction-writing ambitions in Christopher Goodrich, Publishers Weekly (6 Dec. 1993), and reminisces about his NPR work in the "Listen" section of the Durham Sun-Times (Nov. 1999). In Johnette Howard, Houston Chronicle (18 June 2000), Deford is taken to task for his Sports Illustrated article on the sexy image of the tennis player Anna Kournikova. Noreen O'Leary admiringly summarized his career in Mediaweek (8 May 2000).