Frank Deford Quotes
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If there ever was an 'America's team,' it would be itty-bitty, little Green Bay, stuck way up there somewhere, owned by the salt-of-the-Earth citizens themselves.
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It's still the tradition for various football powerhouses to pay guarantees to schools with cream-puff teams to come on over to our place and submit to massacre.
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People often lump radio and television together because they are both broadcast mediums. But radio, anyway, and the radio I do for NPR, is much closer to writing than it is to television.
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I can remember going to see the minor league Orioles. Until I was 15 years old, we'd go down with 3,000 people to watch them play the Syracuse Chiefs or the Jersey City Little Giants. That's what passed for Baltimore sports.
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There were a lot of places, including Los Angeles, that didn't have major league baseball. There were other really large cities that had no major league teams, but at least they had college football.
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In the summer of 1963, my second with 'Sports Illustrated,' Jerry Tax, the basketball editor, got the Celtics' Frank Ramsey, the NBA's first famous sixth man, to do a piece for the magazine revealing some of the devious little tricks of his trade. Things like surreptitiously holding an opponent's shorts - nickel-and-dime stuff.
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The Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons are there today as sure as they were when what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Would you rather have a basketball team, or would you rather be Detroit?
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I never saw war, so that is still my vision of manhood: Unitas standing courageously in the pocket, his left arm flung out in a diagonal to the upper deck, his right cocked for the business of passing, down amidst the mortals. Lock and load.
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I'm a writer. I'm moonlighting on television. I never made any pretensions to that. As much as I like being on 'Real Sports,' I have been a writer since I was a little boy, and that's still my first love.
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I get very envious of my general news colleagues who are always being handed sexy new stuff like global warming, China, and Donald Trump, while my sports colleagues and I must be eternally satisfied with the same old home-court advantage, soccer, and momentum.
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First and foremost, Howard Cosell is sports. There are all these people, these fans, who claim that when Cosell does a game on television, they turn off the sound on the TV and listen to the radio broadcast. Oh, sure. You probably know critics in your neighborhood who vow the same thing. Well, too bad for them.
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I think I would die if I couldn't get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.
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'SI' came to me and said, 'We want you to do a story on Russell as the greatest team player,' which I certainly agreed with.
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It's almost impossible to explain how little the NBA amounted to when I started covering it in 1963. It wasn't fair to call it bush, although everybody did. It was simply small - only nine teams - and insignificant.
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Nowadays, of course, flesh peddlers and scouting services identify the best athletes when they are still in junior high. Prospects are not allowed to sneak up on us.
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By coincidence, this particular tiny show on earth that consists entirely of me talking about sports on NPR is also folding its tent flaps this May of 2017. Yes, this is my swansong, my farewell, my last hurrah. Adieu, adios, arrivederci, auf wiedersehen.
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How did females become 'guys?' How did everyone become 'guys?' Remember, too, that a male guy was something of a scoundrel. And a wise guy was a fresh kid, a whippersnapper. In its most other famous evocation, men in Brooklyn said 'youse guys.' Damon Runyon referred to hustlers, gamblers, and other nefarious types as guys.
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Because I lost a daughter, eight years old, to cystic fibrosis, I think that anytime that I'm dealing with people who, like Andrea Yeager, are trying to help those sick children, I identify very much with them.
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The dollar is a winner. The euro is a tie. Get off the dime, Europe, and play to win.
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All sorts of famous sports people have been suspended for extended periods.
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When Juan Antonio Samaranch said the Olympics are more important than the Catholic Church, I just couldn't believe it. I said to myself, 'Don't let your expression show that he has just made a total ass of himself. Be cool, and just keep right on talking.'
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I think, in accepting the amount of money that athletes make, I think that fans accept that now. It's the nature of the beast; that's the way it is, so they understand it. All, I think, fans have changed - because the price of tickets has gone up so much - that they feel a certain sense of entitlement when they go to a game.
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It's fascinating, isn't it, that whereas so many of our statues have been of military leaders, now it may well be sports stars who are the ones more likely to be so honored.
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You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.