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Overview
Frank Deford (1938–2017) was one of the most beloved sports journalists in America. A contributing writer to Sports Illustrated for more than fifty years, and a longtime correspondent on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, in his dotage Deford was perhaps best known for his weekly commentaries on NPR’s Morning Edition. Beginning in 1980, Deford recorded sixteen hundred of them, and I’d Know That Voice Anywhere brings together the very best, creating a charming, insightful, and wide-ranging look at athletes and the world of sports.
In I’d Know That Voice Anywhere, Deford discusses everything from sex scandals and steroids to why, in a culture dominated by celebrity, sport is the only field on earth where popularity and excellence thrive in tandem. This page-turning compendium covers more than thirty years of sports history while showcasing the vast range of Deford’s interests and opinions, including his thoughts on the NCAA, why gay athletes “play straight,” and why he worried about living in an economy that is so dominated by golfers. A rollicking sampler of one of NPR’s most popular segments, I’d Know That Voice Anywhere is perfect for sports enthusiasts—as well as sports skeptics—and a must-read for any Frank Deford fan.
Named a Best Sports Book of 2016 by Buffalo News
“Frank Deford definitely is worthy of a spot on the Mt. Rushmore of sportswriters . . . As always, Deford’s writing is glorious, hitting all the notes from funny to emotional to profound . . . Once again, his words make sports come alive.” —Chicago Tribune
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802190352 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Deford’s 1981 novel Everybody’s All-American was named one of Sports Illustrated’s Top 25 Sports Books of All Time and was later made into a movie directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Dennis Quaid. His memoir Alex: The Life of a Child, chronicling his daughter’s life and battle with cystic fibrosis, was made into a movie starring Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia in 1986.
In 2012 President Obama honored Deford with the National Humanities Medal for “transforming how we think about sports,” making Deford the first person primarily associated with sports to earn recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was also awarded the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sportswriting, the W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award, and the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award, and was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters of America Hall of Fame. GQ has called him, simply, “the world’s greatest sportswriter.”
Frank Deford (1938–2017) was an author, commentator, and senior contributor to Sports Illustrated. In addition, he was a correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and a regular Wednesday commentator for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. He won both an Emmy and a Peabody Award for his broadcasting.
Deford’s 1981 novel Everybody’s All-American was named one of Sports Illustrated’s Top 25 Sports Books of All Time and was later made into a movie directed by Taylor Hackford and starring Dennis Quaid. His memoir Alex: The Life of a Child, chronicling his daughter’s life and battle with cystic fibrosis, was made into a movie starring Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia in 1986.
In 2012 President Obama honored Deford with the National Humanities Medal for “transforming how we think about sports,” making Deford the first person primarily associated with sports to earn recognition from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was also awarded the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sportswriting, the W.M. Kiplinger Distinguished Contributions to Journalism Award, and the Associated Press Sports Editors’ Red Smith Award, and was elected to the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters of America Hall of Fame. GQ has called him, simply, “the world’s greatest sportswriter.”
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Mass and Class, Together
2007
Perhaps you heard recently when Al Gore observed that the country was too celebrity obsessed. This, he said, was too distracting to hoi polloi — or the Boobus Americanus, if you incline more toward Mencken's own Latin assessment of our citizenry — from caring about issues that really matter.
Shortly thereafter, though, Jack Shafer, a media columnist for Slate, the online magazine, suggested that the former vice president had missed the greater target.
"If (Gore) possessed any real courage," Shafer wrote, "he'd attack sports coverage" — which, the columnist estimated, must eat up 20 percent of every newspaper's editorial budget. Fair criticism? Are sports fans really lotus eaters? Well, to be sure, there are an awful lot of featherbrained fans who could rattle off the entire roster of the Kansas City Royals before they could name their own congressman.
But somehow I doubt that these folks would suddenly become as acutely involved as informed citizens if, tomorrow, all sports coverage instantly ceased. Probably, in fact, their new devotion would be to something more base, like pornography.
On the other hand, while a lot of intelligent folks do think sports are serious business, I doubt that anybody who even conscientiously follows the high jinks of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, et al. ever believes that that stuff really matters. It's just a benign retreat from reality.
Actually, although God knows this irony surely didn't occur to Mr. Gore, he was really, unintentionally, singling out women. Yes, it is they, far more than men, who tune in the celebrity programs and buy the gossip magazines. No, please, neither am I dumb enough to castigate women en masse, but I do think that a proportionate devotion to sports — a population which numbers more men, by far — is a healthier escape than the predilection for dunking into the world of boldface.
But remember this, perhaps above all, about sports. In our culture, sports is now the only entertainment where popularity and excellence thrive in tandem. The best movies, the best plays, the best books, the best art, the best music are never nowadays what attracts the most attention. As a matter of fact, popular culture is too often dominated by junk, while true brilliance goes unappreciated.
But sport is different. Those who care about sports are connoisseurs. The best and most artistic and most graceful of the genre is what attracts the most devotion. Paying attention to excellence is so rare in this tacky universe. Sports is the only discipline — on the whole earth, so far as I know — where mass and class are still conjoined.
That doesn't absolve the many abuses in sport. It doesn't excuse the fans who impart too much of their lives to a mere diversion. It does, though, distinguish sport and elevate it above our other popular entertainments.
CHAPTER 2Words to Play By
1983
Many baseball terms have moved into our everyday vernacular. Every Broadway producer wants to hit a home run. A foul ball is the rascal your daughter is in love with. A good salesman takes a lot of orders by throwing a change of pace. And everybody is now on guard in this world when they hear they're gonna have to play some hardball.
But overlooked, I think — and much more interesting — is how baseball has taken words from the general lexicon and applied them altogether differently to the game.
For example: deep and/or shallow. Outfielders are deep when they play back, farther from the plate, or shallow when they're closer. So far as I know, this is the only place in our usage where deep and shallow are employed in a lateral sense. Everywhere else, deep or shallow refers to the vertical — as, for example, when a team has a deep pitching staff.
If a batter hits a long ball, he gives it a ride. I wonder how that developed? Everywhere else, if you provide a ride, you take something along with you. If baseball patois was like the rest of language, you should send a long ball on a trip, rather than give it a ride. In this regard, don't forget that a home run became a "round-trip," but a double never is called a one-way trip.
But then, there is no logic to baseball argot.
Why is a slow pitch an off-speed pitch? A slow thoroughbred is not an off-speed runner. Rather, he is a bum, a stiff, or a muskrat. Off invariably has a definitive quality to it. The light is off or it is on. Turn it down or turn it up to provide gradations, but on is on and off is off. You are on the bus or you are off. But only in baseball is off (or on) used in a qualitative sense. He took a little off that pitch. He put something on it.
One of my favorite baseball expressions is range — as a verb. A musician has great range. So does a company's product line. So, for that matter, does an outstanding jump shooter in basketball. But only shortstops regularly range deep into the hole. Range, as a baseball verb, is employed more than all the other ranges put together. Nobody ever said, for example, that Bill Clinton ranged more to the center. Why is that?
By far my favorite baseball verb is shade. Damn, that's beautiful. Wake me up in the middle of the night and tell me the outfield is shaded to the right, and I can picture exactly what you mean. In fact, is it possible that a lot of this descriptive baseball vocabulary developed on the radio for fans who could not see the game? Or does it date back to antiquity? I can see Spalding or Hanlon or some other nineteenth-century manager in my mind's eye now, coming out of the dugout and screaming to the outfielders to shade to the right.
I'm pretty sure a breaking pitch has always been around. Why? If I asked you to describe a curve in the road you would never say it breaks. Possibly breaking pitch comes from the ocean, where a curling wave breaks. And yet, we never say that a curveball explodes, which is, of course, what so often happens when something breaks. Only a fastball explodes, even though a fastball doesn't break.
A batter who hits a ball down the line — that is, a right-handed batter, who slugs the pitch to left field — is said to pull the ball. Why? When you pull something in the rest of the world, you bring it to you. Only in baseball do you step into something, swing away, and then have that result identified as a pull.
I also like it when a batter punches the ball the other way (which is a very accurate usage) and it is referred to as fighting the pitch off. The reason this fascinates me so is that fighting off is otherwise almost exclusively used in amorous terms. The heroine fights off the cad's advances.
To me, though, perhaps the most intriguing baseball term of all is take, as in he takes the pitch. Otherwise, take is a very aggressive word. Take a dollar. Take a chance. Take it or leave it. Take a hike. To take a pitch should mean to rip into it and give it a ride ... excuse me, take it on a trip.
But in baseball, take means not to take.
Take that.
CHAPTER 3Our Indecent Joys
2013
This may sound far-fetched, but football reminds me of Venice. Both are so tremendously popular, but it's the very things that made them so which could sow the seeds of their ruin. Venice, of course, is so special because of its unique island geography, which, as the world's ecosystems change, is precisely what now puts it at risk. And, as it is the violent nature of football that makes it so attractive, the understanding of how that brutality can damage those who play the game is what may threaten it ... even as now the sport climbs to ever new heights of popularity.
Boxing, another latently cruel sport, has lost most of its standing, so it is often cited as the example of how football too must eventually be doomed in our more refined, civilized society. However, the comparisons between boxing and football don't fly because there is a huge difference between individual and team sports.
Football teams represent cities and colleges and schools. The people have built great stadiums, and the game is culturally intertwined with our calendar. We don't go back to college for the college. We go back for a football game, and, yes, we even call that "homecoming." It would take some unimagined cataclysmic event to take football from us. Concussions for young men are the price of our love for football, as broken hearts are what we pay for young love.
Indeed, part of boxing's decline may well be because football has exceeded its display for bloodlust. When George Bellows was painting those graphically gruesome boxing paintings a century ago, he noted that the "atmosphere" around the ring was "more immoral" than the brutality within it. The thrill of watching football is not that players perform with such incredible precision, but that they do so even as they dance in the shadow of collision. Enthusiasm for sport can be a convenient cover to excuse the worst in us.
Of course, the difference between the Venice of Italy and the football here is that everybody loves Venice, but only Americans care about our gridiron. Football is, and always has been, a sport on the edge of that immorality that Bellows saw when he painted men cheering pain. But then, football is also, and always has been, the presumed proof of American manliness — the sport that was the beau ideal of what was called "muscular Christianity."
Way back in 1896, after the president of Harvard University wanted to ban a sport he called "more brutal than cock-fighting or bull-fighting," Henry Cabot Lodge, a senator from Massachusetts, responded by declaring that "the injuries incurred on the playing field are the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors." Have no fear. Football is still our own indecent joy. The fighter jets will long fly over the Super Bowl.
CHAPTER 4Sisters, 1 and 1-A
2002
I've been very amused lately whenever some new accomplishment of the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, is mentioned in this fashion: "The first sisters ever to play in the finals of a major tournament," or "The first sisters ever to rank one-two in the world," as if all sorts of other sisters through the years have made the semifinals or been ranked three and four. Let's get this in perspective: what Venus and Serena have achieved, two sisters being the very best in the world at one thing, is not only unique to tennis, not only unique to all major sports, but as far as I know, to all human endeavors. The only brothers I can think of who stood one-two in their field were Wilbur and Orville Wright, and they invented their field.
Well, in tennis, there were the Doherty brothers, Reggie and Laurie, who dominated Wimbledon a century ago, but they were sequential champions. And, anyway, tennis wasn't a much bigger deal than a steak and kidney pie then. Dizzy and Daffy Dean won all four games for the Cardinals in the 1934 World Series, but "me and Paul," so-called by Diz, "weren't the best pitchers overall by any measure."
With Venus and Serena, though, it's as if Mozart and Beethoven were brothers. And, let's get it straight: the Williamses simply are, suddenly, tennis today. They're it, the whole sport. Women's tennis used to be this wonderful championship smorgasbord, but Lindsay Davenport is injured. Martina Hingis is recovering from an operation, happily trailing her boyfriend, Sergio Garcia, about the links. Arantxa Snchez-Vicario and Monica Seles have grown long in the tooth. And Jennifer Capriati, last year's sweetheart, has morphed into an ungracious churl. All who's left to contend with Venus and Serena are two Belgians and a collection of Eastern Europeans whose names all end in "ova," except, unfortunately, none of them anymore are named Anna Kournik-ova.
No, it's just Venus and Serena now, better, stronger, and even more becoming. Speaking some French in their joint victory and defeat speeches after Serena beat Venus in the Roland Garros final earlier this month was just so attractive, especially at a time when Europeans find Americans so self-centered and superpowerously insensitive to others. So the Williams ladies not only won the French; they won over the French. And if there's a sure bet in sports today, it's that they will get through to the Wimbledon final, rat-a-tat-tatting their power game on the grass.
Unfortunately, that's the problem. Venus and Serena have no passion for playing one another. And tennis, like boxing, thrives on contrast. Somebody once said that a tie is like kissing your sister. And, well, now we know that playing your sister is also like kissing your sister. But then, Venus and Serena can't be blamed if they're simply too good and the finals now are just a sweet embrace of sisterhood.
CHAPTER 5By the Seat of Their Pants
2001
The tragic death of Dale Earnhardt, particularly coming as it did just as NASCAR had moved into big-time network television, has prompted a great deal more discussion about the justification of automobile racing in our civilized American society. Especially in the North, most especially among old-line sports fans, there's a visceral deep-seated antipathy toward NASCAR.
Just so, as we say, you know where I'm coming from, let me tell you. Automobile racing leaves me cold. Don't take it personally. It's only a matter of taste. I also don't like Picasso, Scotch whiskey, Thanksgiving, or Forrest Gump. There are four things that compete on racetracks. I enjoy watching horses and people race, and I don't enjoy watching dogs and cars race.
I also have no affinity for most NASCAR fans. I do not wish to bond with them, and I certainly do not wish to drink beer with them. But having said that, let me also state directly that I do not think for a moment that race fans are bloodthirsty ghouls who go out to the tracks to picnic and to see accidents.
The manifold despair displayed for Mr. Earnhardt's death should dispel that canard all by itself for all time. No, NASCAR fans love their drivers. They don't want them dead or maimed. As a matter of fact, I believe that's why car racing is so much more popular than horses, people, and dogs racing, because the same drivers compete Sunday after Sunday. And since we all drive cars, car race fans identify with their heroes, more so, I think, than do fans of other sports.
The attraction is not seeing an accident. Rather, the attraction is watching drivers risk an accident time and time again. We don't go to the circus to see the lion eat the lion tamer; we go to marvel at how close the lion tamer came to being eaten.
Critics also like to argue that race car drivers are not real bona fide athletes. Of course, they are. You can be an athlete sitting down. Dale Earnhardt was as much, if not more, of an athlete as is any baseball designated hitter, any PGA golfer, or any three-hundred-pound lineman stuffing the run.
There's no question in my mind that much of the distaste for NASCAR has nothing to do with the sport, but is derived from history and geography. If only General Pickett had had The Intimidator in car number three leading his charge across the Gettysburg dale, things would have been very different.
NASCAR, you see, reminds us that the South has risen again. But it also amuses me that the cries for the abolition of automobile racing, the captious claim of its barbarism, invariably come from people up North who love boxing and find that sport manly. Certainly both boxing and automobile racing are dangerous, but the difference is that boxing is the one where the intent is to hurt your opponent.
Safety issues in automobile racing? Boxing is anti-safety. But automobile racing is terribly perilous and before long, as sure as there will be another chorus of "Dixie" raised from the infield, some other driver will follow poor Earnhardt to his grave.
But nobody makes these men climb into their driver seats and none of them are trying to hurt one another. Automobile racing does not insult our morality the way that boxing, the favorite sporting amusement of many intellectuals, does. No, although NASCAR may be too loud and tacky, too fast and garish for many of us, it is a perfectly honorable slice of American life and death.
CHAPTER 6The Groundhog Games
2012
Why do we like the Olympics?
Or: if somebody hadn't thought to start them up again one hundred and sixteen years ago, would ESPN have invented them to fill in summer programming?
I'm not being cranky. It's just that most of the most popular Olympic sports are really the groundhog games. Swimming, gymnastics, and track and field come out every four years, see their shadow, and go right back underground where nobody pays any attention to them for another four years. Can you even name a gymnast? Okay, track and swimming — maybe you've heard about Usain Bolt and certainly you know Michael Phelps, but that's slim pickin's for two weeks in what's supposed to be a celebrity-driven world.
The Olympics are like an independent movie with foreign actors you've never heard of.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I'd Know That Voice Anywhere"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Frank Deford.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Nine Innings, Four Periods,,
and an Overtime,
Foreword,
ONE,
Mass and Class, Together,
Words to Play By,
Our Indecent Joys,
Sisters, 1 and 1-A,
By the Seat of Their Pants,
The Groundhog Games,
Back in the Day,
TWO,
Sports Are in the Union, Too?,
Spittin' Image,
The Other Winnie-the-Pooh,
Little Big Man,
Stoodint Athaleets,
The Real Bad Guys,
The Volunteer State,
THREE,
The Pursuit of Sports,
Baseball's Sad Lexicon,
To an Athlete Leaving Young,
The All-Purpose Sports Movie,
The Other Sports Violence,
Another Way to Win,
Par for the Course,
FOUR,
The Super Bard,
Worse Even Than Us?,
Where Have We Gone?,
Me and Paul,
Bad Bubbly,
We're Number 33!,
Trading Up,
FIVE,
Football Are Us,
The Victim,
Euro Exceptionalism,
I Can Work Longer Than You,
The Snakes in the Garden of Sports,
Chicago,
Put an End to It,
SIX,
Give and Go,
Pretty Good,
Mister Misses,
His Refuge,
You're It Is Out,
The Last in the Line,
Hailing Proudly Too Often,
SEVEN,
Kept Men,
Seashells and Balloons,
Keeping the Elephants Away,
Real vs. Reality,
That Sunday of Ours,
Play a Fore,
Home Alone,
EIGHT,
Match Play,
Up to Speed,
Did He Say That?,
Da Boys Will Be Boys,
Time to Go,
A Good Aim,
Deliverance,
NINE,
Who Needs War?,
Headmaster,
Girl Watching,
Too Much to Care,
Namesake,
The Patriots Act,
The Forgotten (Well, Briefly),
TEN,
All Guys All the Time,
Loyal (Sports) Alumni,
The Old Butterfly,
Sound Off,
Past-ism,
Let's Give 'Em a Hand,
Southern Comfort,
ELEVEN,
Artful,
Gone Fishin',
Nouveau Heart and Mind,
Little Big Man,
Life in the Time of Drugs,
GMs and ADs,
End of a Love Affair,
TWELVE,
Presidential Exploitation,
Wistful Day,
Fat Chance,
Game Changer,
There's No "I" in U.S.A.,
Gimme That Old-Time Momentum,
Mulligans,
THIRTEEN,
The Other State U's,
The Fenway Park Address,
Getting to Know You,
Patriot Games,
August Song,
The Rev. Mr. Coach,
Used to Be,
FOURTEEN,
Blessed Are the Pure,
Speaking of Sports,
Life Among the Idle Fans,
Juiced,
Don't Tie One On,
Paying Through the Noseguard,
Sweetness and Light,
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