Frank Deford, who passed away last week on Memorial Day, is familiar to most as the charming curmudgeon who commented on sports for NPR’s Morning Edition since 1980. A worthy career in itself, it was nothing compared to his work as a profile artist for Sports Illustrated, where he invariably found the essence of his subjects and revealed it with panache. SI has graciously made available his best stories on its website, including this one on tennis star Jimmy Connors from 1978:
Deford also had the great foresight, or perhaps just good fortune, to discover professional basketball before almost anyone else in the national media landscape, establishing his career profiling stars like Wilt Chamberlain and John Havlicek when the NBA and its players were willing to do whatever they could to get his attention. In a delightful reversal of the current relationship, where athletes have the status of rock stars and writers beg for their time, Deford was able to get all of the time he needed with his subjects by buying them dinner and drinks with his SI expense account. Once, as Deford wrote in his memoir, Over Time, My Life as a Sportswriter, he interviewed Havlicek on a cross country plane flight by having Havlicek leave his seat in the coach section to visit him in first class, where Deford sat on the basis of SI’s largesse. Those were the days.
Perhaps the best tribute to Deford, though, might be the Miller Lite commercial from 1981 where he appeared with Billy Martin and Marv Throneberry:
The Deford in this ad, with his pencil mustache, could easily have stood in for the 1930s Hollywood movie star Errol Flynn. In his prime, Deford was anything but a curmudgeon. He was a swashbuckler.
