Frank Deford

Benjamin Franklin Deford III was born in Baltimore on December 16, 1938, went through the Calvert School and Gilman there, and graduated from Princeton in 1962. Sports Illustrated hired him that year. He was still on the masthead when he died in 2017, which makes fifty-five years at a single magazine, a figure that will not be matched because magazines no longer last that long.

The magazine was eight years old when he arrived and still working out what it was. Deford's answer, over the following decades, was that it could be the place where the long profile lived: five, eight, ten thousand words on one person, reported over weeks, written to be read rather than skimmed. He was voted National Sportswriter of the Year six times and Magazine Writer of the Year twice by the Washington Journalism Review, and the second of those is the one that tells you what he was actually doing.

The method was old-fashioned even then. He spent time with the subject, read what had been written, and then wrote something that did not sound like any of it. The pieces were structured like short stories, with a scene up front and the argument held back, and they treated athletes and coaches as people with interiors rather than as producers of statistics. Younger writers at the magazine studied the openings. Editors elsewhere tried to hire him away for decades and mostly failed.

That preference for a scene over a stated argument is not just a magazine trick. Admissions readers respond to the same choice in a personal statement, where the first few lines usually decide whether the rest gets read closely, and Structora's guide to personal statement opening lines walks through that same principle for students writing their own.

He wrote eighteen books. Nine were novels, which is unusual for a sportswriter and was, for Deford, the point: he considered himself a writer who happened to work in sports, and he was touchy about the distinction. Everybody's All-American (1981), about a Louisiana football hero whose life peaks at twenty-two, became a film in 1988. Bliss, Remembered (2010) was set at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter (2012) was the memoir, published the year of the award.

The book that most people who are not sports fans know is Alex: The Life of a Child (1983), about his daughter Alexandra, who died of cystic fibrosis on January 19, 1980, at eight. He chaired the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation from 1982 to 1999 and remained chairman emeritus afterward. It is the one subject on which the dry voice disappears.

In 1980 NPR's Morning Edition gave him a weekly commentary slot, and for thirty-six years a Deford essay meant it was Wednesday. The pieces ran four minutes, were about sports in the way that a good sermon is about the reading, and reached an audience that had never bought Sports Illustrated. The schedule went monthly in 2016, and he signed off in May 2017, three weeks before he died.

Television took him too. He won an Emmy for his work on the 1988 Seoul Olympics, a CableACE award in 1994, and from 1995 was a correspondent on HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, which suited him: long segments, one subject, no highlights package. He also wrote for Newsweek and Vanity Fair and turned up on CNN.

The one failure on the list was not his idea and not, in the end, his fault. In 1989 he left the magazine to become editor-in-chief of The National, the first daily sports newspaper in the United States. It hired well and spent freely and folded after eighteen months. He went back to Sports Illustrated. Everyone involved still describes the paper as the best sports section ever printed, which is a consolation of a sort.

The Red Smith Award had gone to newspaper people for thirty-one years when the Associated Press Sports Editors gave it to Deford in 2012, the first recipient whose primary home was a magazine. The following year came the National Humanities Medal, an honor that normally goes to historians and poets, with a citation that credited him with transforming how Americans think about sports. The PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing arrived the same year.

He considered himself a writer who happened to work in sports, and he was touchy about the distinction.

He died in Key West, Florida, on May 28, 2017, at seventy-eight. The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association had already put him in its Hall of Fame; so, less solemnly, had the Roller Derby Hall of Fame, in 2012. He would have enjoyed listing them together.