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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 19, 2014)
4 street roots Dec. 19, 2014 Frank Deford The legendary sports curmudgeon talks stand-up guys, naughty boys and the scourge that is the NCAA BY EMILY GREEN I • ST A FF W R ITE R n sports journalism, there are few as legendary as writer and commentator Frank Deford. His transformative and fruitful career has thus far spanned six decades; his stories reaching audiences via radio, television, books, movies and magazines. As GQ simply put it, he is “the world’s greatest sportswriter.” Deford’s been awarded an Emmy, a Peabody and the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award - to name a few - and he was elected into the Hall of Fame of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association in 1998. Last year President Barack Obama presented Deford with a National Humanities Medal for transforming the way America thinks about sports. At 76, Deford’remains a relevant voice in sports journalism. His markedly original and fiercely compelling sports commentaries can be heard Wednesday mornings on NPR, and he continues to appear regularly as a senior correspondent on HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel." He’s currently in thé process of finishing his 19th book, a family saga he describes as an American “Downton Abbey.” It will be his 10th novel. His last book, “Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter,” was a New York Times best seller. Deford spoke with Street Roots from Key West, Fla., where he and his wife, Carol, reside most of thè year. We wanted to hear his thoughts about some feceht controversies involving athletes, and how • he thinks the current climate in sports Compares to the nature of athletics when he first stepped out as a sports reporter for Sports Illustrated in thé early 1960s. I Emily Green: R ecently, the sp o rts w o rld p a u s e d w h e n fiv e St. L o u is R am s players took to the field with their arm s raised, showing their support o f protesters in Ferguson. It's ju st one example o f statements made today. From your perspective, do you think social a n d political statements made a few decades ago by athletes were more powerful than the ones being, made by athletes today? Frank Deford: People have said fora long time now, “What’s the matter with athletes, they’re not nearly as engaged as athletes were' back in the 60s when you had Jim Brown, (John) Carlos, (Tommie) Smith, (Bill) Russell and Arthur Ashe and so forth, but I think it’s a case of the athletes mirroring their peers more than anything else. I don’t think that young people in general have been very engaged . politically in the last few decades the way they were in a very ’ compestuous time, with Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement. My^ sense is that now that an issue has arisen, which particularly affects African-American athletes, it’s rather natural that they come to the floor and make themselves known. After all, Charles Barkley’s come out and said quite the opposite, that he doesn’t see anything wrong with what the police have done, so I ’m delighted to see young athletes speak up. It doesn’t trouble me at all. E.G.: Over the Course o f y o u r career, what kinds o f changes have you seen in the attitudes and motivations D f professional athletes? r.U.: it s pretty much mirrored die larger society. I don’t think athletes have particularly diverted away from what’s going on in the general mind of the public. There have been some extraordinary leaders. Billie Jean King is probably the most prominent force, culturally, among athletes, and she stood out very bravely, and at a time when she was struggling to be the best player in the world, and I’ve always held her up as the best example of an athlete who can speak up. But again, athletes afe, after all, young people - we should never forget th a t We shouldn’t expect them to be leaders. We shouldn’t expect them to be necessarily articulate. I’m sometimes amazed that they do speak as well - some of them - as they do. The average 23- c 24-year-old is still very much of an unformed’person, and the best athletes have been coddled and cheatedon-behalf-of and praised and held m the highest regard since they were children, so I am sometime incredulous that they’ve managed to come through as well as they do I look back on myself, and.if I ever received the attention i s a teenage that the athletes do, I think I would have been very unbalanced i iv i ^ nas oeen breaking some pretty big news in sport lately, with the Ray Rice elevator video and the D onald Si recording - why do you think these stories surfaced vie gossip rag and not from the mouths o f sports journal F.D.: Sports writers are assigned to cover teams See DEFORD, page 5
