Frank Deford Quotations

She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes.

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.

He was the first prominent college player ... the first star to be associated with college, and in that sense he made baseball acceptable,

It almost seemed as if the Statue of Liberty had gone on tour, turning in her torch for a Yonex racket.

I think everything is in flux right now.

Look at the sports pages of the 1930s and '40s. It was all games, basic stuff. Not nearly as much behind the scenes. I think newspapers, the ones that survive, will be the clever and bright ones.

I think really that if they can get back to playing games by the Super Bowl, which is when an awful lot of people turn and look at basketball for the first time, if they can do that, I don't think there will be any damage whatsoever.

Those of you doing that with the Samaritan Center, ... I salute you.

You imagine people are looking forward to it as a treat, ... But the trick, I suppose, is to keep their interest up before you get to the ending.... Above all, you want the main character, Roger Bannister in this case, to be someone you like and you root for.

At the end of the day it was a guy from Nepal and a guy from New Zealand who conquered the world's highest peak for the British Empire. Bannister's feat a year later meant as much to the nation if not more. An Englishman had finally got to the top of the mountain.

... proud though I may be of my profession, it never occurred to me that it was meant to be a working majority, ... That more than half of young men in TV would want to cover sports has the same ring to it as if we learned more than half the males in medical school wanted to concentrate on cosmetic surgery.

That's what makes them so perfect -- they were two different sides of the same coin,

It really surprises people, and I understand why, but that was probably the easiest book I ever wrote, because it was simple narrative,

It's been a long time since I covered games,

Everybody loves sports. It's awfully hard to be critical of these athletes -- they're young, they're strong, they're beautiful. You want to celebrate these guys.

It was a great tragedy ... an athlete dying young always sets us back. We see them as so strong and handsome. We don't think they'll crumble.

Gamesmanship has come to replace sportsmanship all too often,

I do wish we wouldn't pander to the same audience over and over again,

And that, in turn, has been superseded by, 'In your face.'

Usually when an athlete gets a reputation it sticks with him, even when he's an old man.

I think at its best, sport does bring us together.

If the players aren't getting paid, there's something terribly, terribly wrong, and that's true only in the United States. Everywhere else, where money is involved with sport, the players get paid. But these poor kids in college, they're doing it for free, and that's just disgraceful.

The joy sometimes is in the simple beauty.

I don't think there are many kids who sit around and want to be actors. I don't think there are many kids who want to sit around and want to be senators. But so many of us want to be athletes, so we're envious of them and we put them up on that pedestal.

I never wanted to be an editor. I never wanted to be a boss. I just wanted to write, and it didn't make any difference whether it was fiction or nonfiction or short stories or whatever. I just - that's what I was destined to do.

If you're a white kid growing up and you see a Black player and he's got the name of your college or your town across his chest, that means something.

I criticize the NFL in many ways, but I think it's made great strides. I think college basketball, great strides. College football means so much to alumni, doesn't it? It sort of represents the school. It's when you go back; it's at the beginning of the school year.

I don't think you can explain why all these other sports and college basketball have a fair representation of African American coaches, but college football doesn't. You can dig and scramble and scratch, but at the end of the day I think it's just pure, old-fashioned racism.

I think there are white alumni out there who wouldn't mind having an African American president of their school, but would be reluctant to have an African American coach, because he represents the school so. I think it's just sheer backward racism.

I was a much better writer than I was an athlete. My college coach told me flat out, he said, "Deford, you write basketball better than you play it."

the National Football League needs "a guardian, not a CEO" to deal with the fact that "the sport is simply more and more identified with violence, both in its inherent nature and in its savage personnel.

In Hollywood, writers are considered only the first draft of human beings.

I don't understand blogs. People used to write to make money, no? You didn't give it away. I have nothing against blogs. I don't have a problem with them. But it's like, 'What are you doing? Why aren't you working?

I think one of the most immoral things is college football and basketball, where everybody is making money except the players.

So much of life, so much of work, is luck.

Hockey is the only place where a guy can go nowadays and watch two white guys fight.

I grew up in Baltimore and that's why I root for the Orioles. I'm very suspicious of people who move and take on a new team. You should stick with the team of your youth all the way to your grave. That shows a sense of loyalty and devotion.

To see the glory in sport, where somebody comes from behind and does something, sinks a shot in the last second or throws a touchdown pass or hits a home run, there is a beauty in that, and at the end of the day, that's why we love sports more than anything else.

I believe that professional wrestling is clean and everything else in the world is fixed.