Sportswriter Is One Word

The Red Smith Lecture in Journalism John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy University of Notre Dame SPORTSWRITER IS ONE WORD Frank Deford Red Smith Lectures in Journalism James Reston, “Sports and Politics” (1983) Murray Kempton, “Finding an Authentic Voice” (1984) James J. Kilpatrick, “The Art of the Craft” (1985) Charles Kuralt, “The View from the Road” (1986) Art Buchwald, “While the Gipper Slept” (1988) Robert Maynard, “Red Smith’s America and Mine” (1989) Dave Kindred, “90 Feet Is Perfection” (1991) Eugene L. Roberts Jr., “Writing for the Reader” (1994) Georgie Anne Geyer, “Who Killed the Foreign Correspondent?” (1995) David Remnick, “How Muhammad Ali Changed the Press” (1998) Ted Koppel, “Journalism: It’s as Easy as ABC” (1999) Jim Lehrer, “Returning to Our Roots” (2002) Frank McCourt, “From Copybook to Computer: What You Write On and How You Do It” (2003) Ken Auletta, “Whom Do Journalists Work For?” (2005) Judy Woodruff, “Are Journalists Obsolete?” (2007) Tim Russert, “When Politicians Meet the Press” (2008) Frank Deford, “Sportswriter Is One Word” (2010) Red Smith Lectures delivered from 1983 through 2008 are collected in Making Words Dance: Reflections on Red Smith, Journalism, and Writing. Information about the book is available at www.andrewsmcmeel.com. SPORTSWRITER IS ONE WORD Frank Deford THE RED SMITH LECTURE IN JOURNALISM Introduction By Robert Schmuhl SPORTSWRITER IS ONE WORD By Frank Deford UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 August 2010 The Red Smith Lectureship in Journalism is sponsored by John P. and Susan McMeel and Universal Uclick. The Lectureship seeks to foster writing excellence and to recognize high journalistic standards. In the words of John P. McMeel, chairman and president of Andrews McMeel Universal, “Red Smith’s writing continues to offer lessons about stylistic and professional accomplishments that remain valuable to students and to journalists.” © 2010 by the University of Notre Dame Introduction t the gift shop of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, the likeness or A signature of America’s most American author decorates every imaginable object d’art and tourist trinket. You can also peruse a harvest of the writer’s books, biographies about him, and volumes featuring his words. Among the collections of compositional chestnuts, a visitor not long ago discovered The Quotable Writer, a compilation (edited by Lamar Underwood) of wise or wisecracking bons mots about the mysteries and vagaries of literary life. The first “quotable writer” named on the volume’s cover is Red Smith. Though Mark Twain doesn’t merit the book jacket’s honor roll—five of his wry remarks appear in the text—Smith shares featured billing with Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, E. B. White, Gustave Flaubert, even Aristotle. “Writing is easy,” Smith asserts on one page. “All you have to do is sit at a typewriter and open a vein.” For a later quotation, he eschews irony: “The columnist tries to capture the color, flavor, and electricity of an event. It’s not an easy assignment.” In a career encompassing over a half-century, Smith bled prose that earned a 1958 cover story in Newsweek, headlined “Star of the Press Box,” and a 1981 profile on the CBS program 60 Minutes, calling him “America’s foremost newspaperman.” While a columnist at the New York Times, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1976. After his death in 1982, the University of Notre Dame—from which Smith graduated in 1927 and received an honorary doctorate in 1968—inaugurated the Red Smith Lecture in Journalism. The series recognizes Smith’s accomplishments and introduces new generations to his work and to abiding issues in the craft of journalism. On April 14, 2010, Frank Deford came to Notre Dame as Red Smith Lecturer. In the 776-page opus The Best American Sports Writing of the Century (1999), Smith and Deford are among a choice few of the forty-eight contributors with more than a single selection—and Smith exceeds all others with five stories deemed “best” by the book’s editor David Halberstam. While Smith concentrated on newspaper columns and the occasional magazine article, Deford is among America’s most versatile writers. A senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated, where his work has appeared since 1962, he is also a weekly commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition (an assignment that began in 1980) and senior correspondent on the HBO program Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. 4 Author of sixteen books, including ten novels, Deford is a member of the Hall of Fame of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. On six occasions, his peers voted him U.S. Sportswriter of the Year, and the magazine GQ summarized his career in a four-word phrase: “the world’s greatest sportswriter.” Introducing The Red Smith Reader, the editor Dave Anderson observes, “If you blindfolded yourself, reached into Red Smith’s files, and yanked out 130 columns, any 130 columns, you would have a good collection.” A similar sentence, with a like-minded opinion, could be written about Deford. His 1987 collection, The World’s Tallest Midget, is subtitled The Best of Frank Deford. Thirteen years later, a new volume of assembled prose carried the title The Best of Frank Deford. But this time the subtitle got personal: I’m Just Getting Started. Deford is both personal and at his pedagogical best in his Red Smith Lecture, “Sportswriter Is One Word,” which follows. A consummate storyteller considers the journalistic environment of today and tomorrow that can conspire against well-crafted word-portraits so common in sportswriting’s earlier decades. The Smith Lecture series—the activities at Notre Dame as well as the subsequent publications— flourishes because of the continuing generosity of John and Susan McMeel of Kansas City, Missouri. As chairman and president of Andrews McMeel Universal, John McMeel is at the center of contemporary multimedia communications, and Universal Uclick, in particular, is a principal provider of columns, features, and comic strips for journalistic outlets around the world. Like Red Smith and Frank Deford, John and Susan McMeel know the value of writing that endures— and its importance for the future. —Robert Schmuhl, Director John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy University of Notre Dame 5 FRANK DEFORD SPORTSWRITER IS ONE WORD portswriting is so often, so blithely criticized, but, of on. The best I could ever come up with in the minority Scourse, Red Smith was a sportswriter, too, so that’s line is that I am a Huguenot, but it’s been three hundred always given me a certain amount of cover. some-odd years since you Catholics were burning my I have, however, been conflicted, because here I am, crowd at the stake, so it’s been hard for me to gin up much almost fifty years into my profession, and I’m still not sympathy for myself along those lines. quite sure what I am. I’m too much of a hybrid. Yes, for me, as a writer, it’s been a tough row to hoe. Well, certainly I do know I’m a writer, but only part of In keeping with this struggle, like Red Smith, I never set me is a journalist. I have my tenth novel coming out in a out to be a sportswriter. It was something that I fell into couple months, a good old-fashioned love story titled Bliss, after college––providently––but it always leaves me with Remembered, and it’s written by me as a woman. Whatever the sense that someday . someday I will grow up and that may be, I don’t think it’s journalism. And most of my become a real writer. pieces, both in magazines and on television, are really more After all, there is no good sportswriting, you know. storytelling than reporting––as, indeed, so many of Red’s Whenever I happen to write something that may find best columns were. some favor with someone, invariably he’ll say, “Frank, that I take a certain amount of pride, though, that I have was good. In fact, it was so good, it wasn’t sportswriting.” somewhat succeeded as a writer despite having so very Ergo, if it’s bad, it’s sportswriting. If it’s any good, it much to overcome. must be something else. First of all, I had a wonderfully happy childhood. But I, deluded as I am, I do believe that sportswriting, This is a terrible handicap for a writer. amongst all the subsets of journalism, offers the best Ideally, you want to have grown up in poverty, with opportunity for good storytelling and for good writing on a father who beats you, and with a mother who is a a regular basis. prostitute . but saintly. It’s also, although I probably should keep this secret to Secondly, I am not a minority. myself, the easiest territory for a writer to romp around I was always especially so jealous of those Catholic in. First of all, simply: it’s a subject your readers want to writers who could dine out for years on the idiosyncrasies read about. Sports, after all, are dramatic––somebody wins, of parochial schools, of nuns rapping them on their somebody loses. Sports are glamorous and vivid, and the knuckles with rulers. I had no such quaint tales to play athletes are performers––so a lot of them are extroverts; with. many are young and handsome and even more are young In fact an agent of mine once said, “Frank, you are the and foolish, and so they say foolish things, which is the last of the tall, white, WASP, heterosexual, Ivy League dream of every reporter.

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