Day 284

Fresh Start_284: A quick history lesson

In the hip-hop community, you here artists talk about the history of “the game” and you must respect the people who came before you. The culture of hip-hop is something special and something celebrated, and rightfully so.

 Sports and hip-hop seem to be alike in that respect, with the “respect your elders” mentality. You saw it this year when Lebron was asked about passing Michael Jordan on the All-Time Postseason Scoring List. You see it in the rap community with Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Ice Cube, Logic, and Chance just to name a few.

Respecting something—especially the past means you understand what happened before you, and how what the happened in the past effects what you are able to do right now. Lil Wayne summarizes the hip-hop community and athletes “Athletes wanna be rappers, and rappers want to be athletes.” It goes hand in and hand when you truly think about it. Athletes listen to music before the game, music is played during the game, and today is mostly hip-hop. For the artists, a majority of them where athletes at some time during their childhood, so they get the game that they are watching (sometimes as good as the athletes themselves).

Where you don’t normally see this is the respect for the past is the journalism community. We definitely look at the past as something that was full of incredible reporting, articles, and storytelling. With the death of Frank Deford on Monday, I went into a personal history lesson of this great sports journalist. Deford had a style that isn’t easily duplicated. Deford’s ability to take figures in sports that were outcast as difficult people to deal with and put that person’s character on examining table for the entire world to see was a type of writing you don’t normally see in sports. Sports is about statistics, numbers, and winning. Taking deep dives into an athlete’s character is something that was taken for granted before Deford and even after. Many of the casual fans don’t care who is hitting home runs, getting buckets, or scoring touchdowns for their favorite team as long as their production on the field isn’t hindered from personal life off the field.

Being as young as I am, I wasn’t alive for the majority of Deford’s greatest work. Thankfully the internet has my back, so I can go back and read some of his great work. My three personal favorites in no order are: “The Rabbit Hunter,” “Raised by Women to Conquer Men,” and “The Ring Leader.” I can’t begin to tell you how good each of these pieces are for different reasons. But, being a sports writer is only a part of the legend that is Frank Deford. Deford after he brought the game of basketball to Sports Illustrated single handedly, and after he created “The National” sports newspaper, he went to NPR and did over 16,500 commentaries, with the most recent commentary just a couple of weeks ago.

Two of the greatest sports writers where hired by Sports Illustrated at the same time (Dan Jenkins and Frank Deford) in 1962. That’s like drafting Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Michael Jordan in the same draft. Deford would go on to show the magazine how incredible the game of basketball truly was. As Deford told Bryan Curtis of The Ringer on a podcast “I didn’t just want to be known as the basketball guy.” With what happened in Deford’s career shaping out the way it did, nobody will remember him as just “the basketball guy.”

With the founding of “The National” newspaper in 1990, it created a nucleus of potential for sports writing. With its short infant life (18 months) it produced some of the best sports writing that has ever been written, and that’s because it was written by the best sports writer’s in the country at the time. John Feinstein, Mike Lupica, and Deford himself were all a part of this newspaper—so you may ask how it failed? The advertisers and potential buyers didn’t see the potential of the paper at the time, and the distribution was just a nightmare. The money that was used to form the paper was to get the best talent to write for the paper, and in turn it didn’t last. The now dead website “Grantland” has an incredible oral history of the newspaper that I highly recommend. The last thing about the paper is; every writer that wrote at The National went back to their old job, like this venture was a crazy summer job that everyone enjoyed.

Deford’s most recent professional venture was at NPR, and naturally I am not the biggest NPR fan, which means I wouldn’t know Deford as well as I could have if I listened to NPR. Deford introduced sports to an audience that isn’t a naturally crowd for sports, and did so in only 3 minutes. NPR allowed Deford to write and record commentaries for the station, and every commentary had to be exactly 3 minutes long or it would get cut.

With the impact that Frank Deford had on a ton of sports writers who are writing today, I can only imagine what his roll would be if he was coming out of college right now. I can’t imagine what a sport dedicated newspaper would look like, nevertheless be the best sports writing there is on the market. I am thankful for Deford and what he would lay out—inspiring writers that I look up too.

So, looking back at the past, and realizing the framework that Deford worked for is inspiring. His deep dives into the characters of some of the most colorful and impactful figures in sports creates a form of journalism that writers strive for. The way he dressed, set a high-level dress code that the vast majority of writers don’t live up too. Respecting the past, understanding what happened, I know have a clearer vision at what a true sports journalist is.

Looking at Sally Jenkins obituary and the obituary that the New York Times has done on Frank Deford, are two pieces at wonderfully put in perspective the life and career of the sports writing legend. Jenkins piece is special because her father Dan and Deford worked right next to each other at Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times piece is great because it’s a New York Times obituary. Thank you Frank Deford for being the fantastic journalist and writer, and for giving a quick history lesson, and giving me a different way to look at sports.

Sources:(si.com, grantland.com, theringer.com, washingtonpost.com, nytimes.com)

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