RIP Frank Deford

One of the greats. Not sure that guy comes around again. The great longform writers of today are just as good but they don't enjoy the clout or the budget or the freedom.

 

My father isn't the kind of person who really noticed bylines, but when a Sports Illustrated arrived with a Deford story, he'd tell me it was going to be a good issue.

 

I don't have much to add about how much the man's work meant to me while coming of age. That's been covered.

But I say the following earnestly, sincerely, and because I genuinely feel like I have to get it out: It's meaningful to me to read that such a great writer - a legend - treated people the right way. I had become pretty disillusioned about that here in recent months.

I mean this. It is important to hear, for me.

RIP. I can't wait to dig into some of his old pieces.

 

Dick in the experience of my career, the very biggest names I met were the ones most friendly and kind to the newest people in the business. Red Smith, Roger Angell and Bob Verdi were three examples of superduperstars who were just that to newbie alternative weekly writer yours truly. I'm sure I didn't always live up to their example, but it was there and I tried.

 

And Frank also starred in one of my favorite Miller Lite ads.
He actually once wrote a book about that ad campaign, and offered a little advice if you're ever asked to appear in a commercial. He was told to bring two sport jackets to the shoot, but the producer hated them both, and they hooked him up with the tweed jacket he wears in the ad. He got to keep it, and that jacket became the star player of his winter wardrobe for years. Said if he had known that, he would've brought his two ugliest jackets.

 

Here's my Brush With Deford story. When I was a junior at little Williams (Mass.) College, I worked in the sports information office. It was much better than working in the dining hall, which was my previous gig. We had a new SID that year, and though even his position was part time (and remained so for many years), he wanted to do something special to elevate the department's role at the school. So he made up an award for the "Top Sports Information Assistant," called it the Frank Deford Award, and actually got Frank to come to the school to give out the inaugural award. Mind you, Williams is a Div III school with 2,000 students; no more than a handful of people actually did significant work in the office. Our SID, a great guy named Dick Quinn, just wrote Deford out of the blue. They both had daughters who suffered (and died) from cystic fibrosis, which is I think what helped convince Frank to do it, besides being a great guy as many here have said.

That was 1990. I won the award the next year, with Dan Shaughnessy presenting. In fact my award included an artist's depiction of Deford, Shaughnessy, and myself. (The picture of Dan presenting me the award popped up years later on Deadspin, which got me unwittingly roped into a Deadspin-siccing-its-minions-on-Shaughnessy deal, which is another story.) Years later I presented the award, which will be the first line in my obit – "Pete, the only Frank Deford Award winner to also present the award..."

After college, I worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. I worked in London during my third year, and for some reason got it in my head that I wanted to be a sportswriter rather than, well, rich. That I'd never written for my college or even high school newspaper didn't strike me as a serious obstacle. The summer before my freshman year in HS (1984), my dad and younger went to all the baseball stadiums, before everyone started doing that. So I wrote about that, because I didn't have any idea what reporting was. It turned out to be a 17,000-word opus and completely unpublishable. But Frank Deford read it. Or, at least, he sent me a nice note about it. He actually said he thought it would make a cool coming-of-age screenplay, which I thought was awesome. I will say he did try to discourage me a bit from trying to be a sportswriter – he explained accurately how it is to start at the bottom, and said something like "I'm not sure you want to leave London for that." Too late, I was hooked.

Maybe 8-9 years later, I was writing for Sports Illustrated, and I saw Frank walk into the SI library, which was near my desk. By the time I screwed up the courage to go talk to him, he had left. I just wanted to thank him. I wish I had. Since then, I have tried hard not to miss opportunities like that.

RIP to a legend.

 

Sorry if this has been posted elsewhere and I've missed it, but I thought Charlie Pierce on his former boss was quite a read:

The root beer and the starlight: Frank Deford's legacy

 

Having read one of his books where he touched briefly on the ad campaign, I can say he was no fan of Rodney Dangerfield.