RIP Frank Deford

Did Rodney not offer to share any blow?

 

Pete, you need to drop in more often. A great story.

The first I heard of Deford was when he was editing The National. I know him more for his ESPN/NPR work; gotta dig into some of his writing. RIP.

 

He was HOF caliber off his run at SI. The National was supposed to be his late-career run off into the sunset.

A few years different on the timeline, The National might have worked. A few years earlier, it could have packaged with ESPN; a few years later, been the first nationwide internet sports site. It just came at the wrong specific time for its print format to hit big.

 

Agreed.

 

But wasn't its founding at the peak (or near peak) of print revenues? I always thought distribution figured to be the big hurdle.

 

Print revenues were cresting; of course nobody had any way to know that at the time. Distribution was the biggest headache.

 

I have total admiration for Deford, absolutely. But it pissed me off when he unleashed his band of egomaniacs on us with The National. They tried to hi-jack everything they were at. They demanded the best press seats and exclusive interviews. I was at a three-paper chain totaling about 100k. Our circulation was more than theirs. Their production was horrible and they couldn't get it delivered. And that was 25 years ago, before delivery became a universal problem.

 

I was working in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1990-1991. I would walk to two miles to a newsstand as the sunset to get the copy of the National that a guy at a newsstand would save for me to read with my dinner. This was pre-internet and the only national sports writing I had been exposed to was the Sporting News and Sports Illustrated. I was blown away by the quality of the product.

Then I went home to visit my parents in the Denver area and the leading newsstand there did not carry the National on a same day basis, which says a lot about their distribution problems.

 

Of course, the only organization at the time which had anything like the distribution resources they needed was Gannett and USA TODAY, and The National was in many ways its direct competitor.

A decent number of people traveling nationwide every day buy (or used to, anyway) USA TODAY in the morning, read the sports section, and throw the rest of the paper out. The National pretty much wanted to hijack that audience. I wouldn't imagine Gannett was all that wild about helping them do it.

 

I've always heard that distribution was the problem, too.

The best story from The National days involves John Feinstein's cat. I don't know it well enough to tell it. If you are ever in the presence of Charlie Pierce, I beg of you: Walk up to him, introduce yourself, and say "What's the story about John Feinstein's cat?" And then sit back and listen to the best story, told in the best possible way, that you've heard in your life.

 

This is a message board called sportsjournalists.com. Sports journalists have a pretty good chance of running into Charlie Pierce.