The Best Of Frank Deford

After nearly 40 years in the trenches, Frank Deford's niche in the pantheon of modern sportswriters is secure, making the subtitle--I'm Just Getting Started--of his latest collection (tongue-in-)cheekily optimistic. Irony has always been one of Deford's best weapons; by putting his award-winning magazine work from Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair beside his award-winning commentaries from National Public Radio, The Best of... shows how adeptly he's wielded it in two very separate mediums. Still, reading the recent magazine work along with selections from two decades of radio broadcasts--Deford insists the latter are really nothing more than written columns read aloud--makes for an odd coupling that has you wishing for a lot more of the printed Deford. Not that there's anything wrong with the radio version. Deford's commentaries are timely, pithy, clever, opinionated, and insightful, but they're ultimately as ephemeral as the airwaves they were delivered on. His magazine journalism, on the other hand, is anything but ephemeral. It is work that is rarely less than elegant, and often just plain exquisite.

His long looks at Bobby Knight, Bill Russell, and a former Connecticut high school football star who commits suicide at 24 are breathtaking. So is his exploration of University of Arkansas basketball coach Nolan Richardson, spun out by Deford as a play in four acts. His intertwined profile of Roger Bannister--the first four-minute miler--and Sir Edmund Hillary--the first to climb Everest--is a tour de force, as is his personal journey into the world of bowling. These are all pieces to be savored again and again for their expansiveness, circumspection, reportage, heart, style, and wit. They remind you what is Best about a writer of Deford's caliber in ways the constraints of radio can't pull in quite as clearly. --Jeff Silverman