Obit watch: May 30, 2017.

Frank Deford, noted sportswriter.

As you know, Bob, I am not a sports fan. However, I am a fan of reading, and frequently encountered Deford’s work in collections of sports-writing, or in back issues of SI at the doctor’s office, or other places I don’t remember now. Heck, I even read large parts of Alex: The Life of a Child: I want to say it was reprinted in Reader’s Digest or some damn place.

Point being, I always kind of liked the guy, or at least his writing. I wasn’t really a fan of his NPR work, to be honest. But that probably had more to do with it being NPR than him personally.

“I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before,” he wrote in “Over Time.” “But I also believe that the one thing that’s largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory — the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls ‘the arc.’ That is: stories. We have, all by ourselves, ceded that one neat thing about sport that we owned.”

Also among the dead: former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2017 at 9:15 am and is filed under Obits, Radio, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.