Frank had a gift. He had a feeling for people in whom he had a deep interest. He also understood what might interest them. His writing style was unique and original as was he. He wrote as he spoke, with the trace of a Southern twang, and in his writing, fifty-cent words were fluidly strung together to make million dollar sentences.

Frank became chairman of the "Prince” where his journalistic skills transcended just sports. I remember we drove together to Fort Dix, New Jersey one snowy day in March 1960 to interview Elvis Presley when Elvis was mustered out of the army. Frank talked to Elvis as though he were just another country boy who loved music, delighted to welcome Elvis back in town. And when Frank cheekily asked Elvis if he would continue his "suggestive movements,” I gasped as I took copious notes of the interview, and we had a story.

There were a lot of interesting stories back then, and Frank made sure that they were all well covered. Fidel Castro came to Princeton, proclaiming that he was a great friend of America; Martin Luther King preached racial justice from the pulpit of the Princeton University Chapel. William F. Buckley talked conservatism to a liberal audience in Whig Hall; and fiery Catholic Chaplain Father Hugh Halton trashed secularization and the denigration of religion. Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Ray Bremser read their poetry of protest on the all-male 99% white, ostensibly heterosexual campus. I remember Frank asking Jones to compose an impromptu poem, and on the spot. Jones recited:

"There are no girls in Tigertown.

And Tigertown is falling down.

Escape, escape escape.”

Frank wrote as he thought―with clarity and self-deprecating wit. For our 40th Princeton reunion in 2001, he wrote to the Class: "I had the unique experience—especially for someone who graduated with what was then called ‘a gentleman’s C’-of being invited to teach for a semester at Princeton….Notwithstanding all the public speaking I do, I was scared to death of facing these seventeen guaranteed brilliant modern Princeton students, who I also assumed to be generally humorless and altogether driven. As it turned out, I had a much happier time than I had anticipated. This was because the students were a great deal nicer than I had expected…not…all that smarter than we were.”

Frank moved on from the "Prince” to achieve eminence as a sportswriter. He wrote for Sports Illustrated and became a senior editor. His passion for basketball went unabated. He interviewed all of the greats: among them, Michael Jordan, Kobe, Kareem, Bill Russell, Magic, Isiah, and Earl the Pearl. He also interviewed stars of other sports, such as tennis greats, Billy Jean and Martina, who became his friends. He spent so much time talking to glammy tennis star Maria Sharapova, he was rumored to be having an affair with her. Who would ever deny it?

Prolific in his writing, he wrote some 14 books. I thought the best was his 2013 memoir, Over Time: The Life of a Sportswriter. He landed a weekly gig on public television. People in a position to know have likened him to his heroes, Red Smith and Grantland Rice, the greatest sportswriters of all time.

Certainly his saddest moment was the death of his eight-year-old daughter, Alexandra, from cystic fibrosis, which led him to adopt another child. Perhaps as a cathartic for his agony, he wrote the moving bestseller, Alex: The Life of a Child. It was a grief from which he never fully recovered.

Frank was drowning in accolades too numerous to mention. President Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal in 2012. He won a Peabody, an Emmy, six times named U.S. Sportswriter of the year, was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame and on and on.

He wore the mantle of his extraordinary talent with amazing grace. But mostly, I will remember his zest for fun, the sparkle in his eyes, his nimble wit, and his generosity of spirit, which will endure in the hearts of those who knew him best.

The guy really had the touch. In the land of sportswriters, he lives in County Legend.

James D. Zirin, is a lawyer, a talk show cable TV host, and the author of two books: Supremely Partisan—How Raw Politics Tips the Scales in the United States Supreme Court, and The Mother Court—Tales of Cases that Mattered in America’s Greatest Trial Court.

Frank Deford’s Wicked Grace

The greatest sportswriter of his generation has passed away, leaving behind a legacy of acolytes who swear by the joy and power of the written word.

By Dave Zirin

Frank Deford was a part of my family lore years before I was born. My father was a student reporter in 1958 and had a young running buddy from Baltimore named Frank Deford.

The story my dad still loves to tell, perhaps more than any other, was about the time in 1960 when they covered Elvis Presley’s return from the army, and Elvis was aggressively courted in full view of the press by a young starlet named Tina Louise (later Ginger on Gilligan’s Island). My dad—a terrifically detailed storyteller—always brought the Elvis/Tina Louise spectacle to life and would speak Frank Deford’s name with a terrific pride that they were colleagues, a pride the young me didn’t understand. (I barely knew who Elvis was either.)

Then, when I was 12 years old, I understood the gleam in my dad’s eye. I was slumped down in my school library skimming a back issue of Sports Illustrated and found The Rabbit Hunter, an incisive, elegant article by Deford that explored a decidedly inelegant person, Indiana University basketball coach Bob Knight. To learn that sports writing could also be storytelling about flawed, three-dimensional people was life-altering.

Soon I read everything by Deford I could find, from his long-form (before it was called long-form) articles in Sports Illustrated to his page-turner paperback novels, to the devastating memoir Alex: The Life of a Child, about his daughter’s struggle with cystic fibrosis and her death at the age of 8.

Deford, to my young wonder, could write about the shattering tragedy of his child’s death, or a boxer’s lament over a lousy fight, or a sudsy, fictional sports epic like Everybody’s All American, and immediately make you feel like you were entering some kind of virtual-reality zone, viewing the story from the inside.

This was my only connection to Frank Deford for 15 years: my dad’s stories and my own insatiable need to read all he put to the page. Then, in 2005, trying slowly to build my own sportswriting career, I wrote a book called What’s My Name, Fool?, with a then-fledgling, now-ubiquitous radical press, Haymarket Books. My publisher asked me to find a blurb that could make some ripples in the sports world. I contacted Deford via e-mail with a great deal of trepidation. He responded to me almost immediately with his phone number and asked me to call. When I did, I punched all of the numbers but the last one about five times before finding the nerve, my hand and ear slick with sweat. When I finally made contact, the first thing he said to me was, "Dave Zirin… Jim Zirin’s son, my goodness… Did you know that your dad and I covered Elvis Presley?” He then told me his version of the story, which was exactly like my dad’s, shaming a son who thought his father maybe had a penchant to gild the lily.

Deford gave me the blurb, and his public endorsement, where he lauded the idea of someone "taking sports to task in a manner we haven’t seen in some time,” opened doors for me I had always assumed would remain closed.

Over the years I was able to get to know Frank. It was a joy. He was a throwback, with his pencil mustache, effortless charm, and easy grace. He did not walk into a room so much as glide, wearing a suit that looked freshly pressed even if he had been caught in the rain. Frank was tall with large shoulders and a narrow waist, so every coat and tie on his frame looked like a zoot suit, making it seem even more like he came from a different era, a time when you could be cool without being an asshole. Put another way, imagine if the Kevin Kline of your dreamy imagination was a sportswriter. That was how Frank Deford projected himself onto the world.

Beyond the superficial, he was always kind, with sharp advice that never came with a hint of condescension. And most importantly, he shared his passion for the written word. It is difficult to find a sportswriter under 50 who wasn’t influenced by his ability to provide nuance and shading to sports heroes who previously lived in a purgatory of one dimension.

This sportswriting legacy wasn’t conscious. As he said to me in a 2013 interview, "I just wanted to write. I wanted to be a writer as soon as I learned how to write. It didn’t have to be sports, but sometimes life takes you by the scruff of the neck and you go with it. And sports had everything to me: the characters, the drama, the settings.… if you can’t write sports, get out of the business.”

In 2012, we shared a stage in Charlottesville at the Virginia Festival of Books. This gave me the opportunity to tell him in front of a couple hundred people, with a catch in my voice, "You are the reason I wanted to be a sportswriter.”

He answered rakishly, without missing a beat, "My apologies.” After the laughter died down, he looked out to the audience and said directly to the crowd, "If you want to know how I know this guy, let’s start by talking about his dad. His dad and Elvis Presley.”

He then spun that yarn of Elvis Presley and Tina Louise into velvet. The crowd loved it. Frank spoke to those 300 people like he had a drink in one hand and they were a circle of five.

After learning that Frank Deford had passed away, I wrote on Twitter that "Frank Deford made me want to write.” A person named Owen Wearing responded, "Frank Deford made me want TO READ.” In 140 characters, that is a better tribute than anything I could give, not to mention the greatest legacy any writer could possibly leave.

Frank showcased the finesse and power of the written word and, yes, he made me want to read. Now that Frank is gone, without his prose to amplify what flashes in front of our eyes, the world is a decidedly duller place. But he would roll his eyes at the idea of us in mourning, with dour looks affixed to our mugs. Instead, he would want us to carry the torch of storytelling, and aspire to the wicked grace that he reached for with every article. The best tribute to Frank Deford, in a world of emojis, would be a commitment by writers to never stop writing, and always make the effort to color the world more brightly by exploring shades of gray.

From the Washington Post

Frank Deford, who wrote about sports with panache and insight, dies at 78

By Matt Schudel May 29

Frank Deford, often considered the finest sportswriter of his generation for his detailed psychological profiles of athletes and coaches, who also won acclaim for his novels, his television and radio commentaries and for a heartfelt book about his daughter’s struggle with cystic fibrosis, died May 28 at his home in Key West, Fla. He was 78.

He had been treated recently for pneumonia, but the immediate cause of death was unknown, said his wife, Carol Deford.

Mr. Deford (pronounced duh-FORD) joined Sports Illustrated in 1962 and soon emerged as the most accomplished stylist on sportswriting’s brightest stage. He gained access to locker rooms and to the innermost thoughts of the world’s most famous athletes, yet many of his most memorable stories were about the forgotten figures in sports history.

In the 1960s, Mr. Deford wrote profiles of Princeton basketball star Bill Bradley and Boston Bruins rookie Bobby Orr that went beyond the locker room and revealed a humanity and even a spiritual depth in his subjects. His stories, along with those of other Sports Illustrated writers including Dan Jenkins and Mark Kram, helped raise sportswriting from the daily chronicle of victory and defeat to something with more literary ambition.

Tall and distinguished-looking, with a pencil mustache, Mr. Deford "looked like a movie star and dressed the part,” author Michael MacCambridge observed in "The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine.” Mr. Deford became "the anchor of the magazine, the writer around whom the rest of the issue was built,” MacCambridge added. "His prose was a graceful mixture of storytelling and subtle (sometimes not so subtle) psychoanalysis.”

Mr. Deford captured the determined drive of tennis stars Arthur Ashe and Jimmy Connors and wrote a searching profile (and later a biography) of Bill Tilden, a 1920s tennis champion haunted by a secret gay life.

"He was the proudest of men and the saddest,” Mr. Deford wrote about Tilden, "but never so happy as when he carried his rackets into the limelight or walked into a room and took it over.”

In 1984, Mr. Deford wrote about a little-known Mississippi football coach, "the toughest coach of them all,” who was "so tough he had to have two tough nicknames, Bull and Cyclone, and his name was usually recorded this way: Coach Bob "Bull” "Cyclone” Sullivan.”

By then, Mr. Deford "had become an institution,” MacCambridge wrote, "the biggest name at the magazine, and one of the most emulated, respected, eagerly read writers in the country.” He was named sportswriter of the year by the National Association of Sportswriters and Sportscasters six times.

For Mr. Deford, it wan’t enough to present in-depth profiles of familiar names, such as coaches Paul "Bear” Bryant and Bobby Knight. He sought to grasp how sports were an inescapable part of the American soul, an emblem of loyalty, aspiration and, all too often, heartbreak.

In a 1985 feature, "The Boxer and the Blonde,” Mr. Deford recounted the saga of a 1941 heavyweight fight between the scrappy, undersized Billy Conn and the unbeatable champion, Joe Louis. But it was also a love story, as the title suggests, set in the flickering twilight glow of prewar America.

After 12 rounds at the Polo Grounds in New York, Conn was leading Louis and seemed assured of victory in what would have been a remarkable upset. Conn was knocked out in the 13th round.

"This was the best it had ever been and ever would be, the twelfth and thirteenth rounds of Louis and Conn on a warm night in New York just before the world went to hell,” Mr. Deford wrote. "The people were standing and cheering for Conn, but it was really for the sport and for the moment and for themselves that they cheered. They could be a part of it . . . and it can’t ever get any better. This was such a time in the history of games.”

Mr. Deford left Sports Illustrated in 1989 to launch The National, a daily sports newspaper that folded 18 months later. Since the early 1980s, he had been a regular on the airwaves, often appearing on NBC, ESPN, HBO’s "Real Sports,” Miller Lite commercials and, for 37 years, as a weekly commentator on NPR.

His farewell radio essay was heard on NPR earlier this month.

Mr. Deford was often asked what the most impressive feat he had ever seen an athlete perform. In his 2012 memoir, "Over Time,” he wrote that it came on a visit to South Africa in the 1970s with Ashe, the African American tennis star.

Ashe agreed to go to a white college to debate the South African system of apartheid with white students.

"In your heart, do you think it’s right?” Ashe asked.

"The three students dropped their eyes,” Mr. Deford wrote. "I’ve never yet seen another athlete throw a touchdown pass or hit a home run or score a goal that was as impressive as what Arthur Ashe did that afternoon.”

Benjamin Franklin Deford III was born Dec. 16, 1938, in Baltimore. His father was a businessman.

Mr. Deford began writing as a schoolboy, but he was also a 6-foot-4 basketball star in high school. At Princeton University, he gave up the game after the coach told him, "Deford, you write basketball better than you play it.”

He was suspended for one year at Princeton after being caught with a girl in his room and missed another year while serving in the military. He was editor of the campus newspaper and skipped his graduation ceremony in 1962 to start work at Sports Illustrated.

After the National went defunct, Mr. Deford wrote for Newsweek and Vanity Fair and became a reporter on HBO’s "Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel.” He returned to Sports Illustrated as a contributor in 1998.

At a White House ceremony in 2013, President Barack Obama presented Mr. Deford with the National Humanities Medal, the first time a sportswriter had received the award.

Survivors include his wife of 51 years, the former Carol Penner of Key West and Manhattan; two children, Christian Deford of Manhattan and Scarlet Crawford of Stone Ridge, N.Y.; two brothers; and two grandchildren.

In recent months, Mr. Deford had completed a novel that is expected to be published later in the year.

Among his 18 books, he wrote 10 novels, including "Everybody’s All-American,” which was the basis of a 1988 feature film starring Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lange.

Mr. Deford’s most personal book, "Alex: The Life of a Child” (1983), was about his daughter Alexandra. The book became a made-for-TV movie in 1986. In the book, Mr. Deford wrote of the inevitable moment when his daughter asked if she was going to die.

" ‘Well, sure,’ I said,” Mr. Deford wrote, "as casual as I could be myself. I’d been prepared for this for a long time. ‘You’ll die sometime. But I’ll die, too. If there’s one thing we all do, it’s die.’

" ‘But you’ll be real old,’ she said. " ‘Not necessarily. I mean, I could die in an accident anytime.’

"Alex threw her arms around my neck. ‘Oh, my little Daddy, that would be so unfair.’

‘Unfair?’ I said. Unfair is just what she said.

" ‘You don’t have a disease, Daddy. You shouldn’t have to die till you’re real old.’ ”

Alexandra died in January 1980 at the age of 8.

Frank Deford remembered

Frank Deford’s Wicked Grace

Frank Deford, who wrote about sports with panache and insight, dies at 78