I listened with pleasure to Bob Edwards interviewing Frank Deford about Deford's recent memoir "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter." Edwards and Deford, two old pros of the media game, blended perfectly.
That I had read the book added to my enjoyment of the interview on satellite radio. Deford, despite a surprising fondness for worn-out cliches, has the gift of readibility. His stories about his early days at Sports Illustrated and about the athletes he's met went down like fine champagne. Today's ESPN generation might not remember some of the players Deford writes about -- Elgin Baylor, even Bill Bradley -- and could learn that today's hyper sports environment didn't spring up from nowhere.
Referring back to those cliches, and interjectiions such as "Heavens to Betsy," the book does show signs of careless writing and today's lower editing standards. For example, Deford makes a big point of how his name is frequently misspelled DeFord, but then it's misspelled that way throughout the book. I read the memoir in e-book form on my Nook, which made me wonder if ebooks are taken from unedited versions. I've felt with other ebooks that the editing standards for them are even lower than those for printed books. Deford's sentences can have a breathless, run-on quality, as if dictated off the top of his head.
I also wondered about his assertion that he was the first national writer to do an article on Bill Bradley when Bradley was at Princeton, Deford's alma mater. John McPhee's book "A Sense of Where You Are" is my first memory of Bradley. Perhaps Deford wrote his Sports Illustrated profile of Bradley before McPhee wrote his book, excepted in the New Yorker, as I recall. Deford might be right that he was the first one to write about Bradley, but I'd be curious to know for sure.
Deford amusingly writes about his stint as editor of the National, the great failed experiment of a national sports daily. Several of my colleagues at the AJC left to follow the National dream, including the late Van McKenzie, whom Deford warmly remembers.
Listening to Deford and Edwards chat and laugh together like a veteran vaudeville team, I realized that Deford overcomes the drawbacks with his generous, magnanimous spirit. He's a throwback to the days when sports were not taken so seriously and possessed a mythic, magical quality. Today's sports-talk yakkers, stats junkies and overpaid, entitled athletes have taken away a lot of the fun. Deford sounds, and reads, like a man whos's had fun.