Quotes from Frank Deford

Several NBA teams got their best gates every season when they scheduled a doubleheader and booked the Globetrotters and their stooges for the opening game.

Owners own teams so that they might move them to another municipality with better luxury boxes.

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.

Majesty is a thing of beauty to behold, whatever the particular enterprise.

It's fascinating, isn't it, that whereas so many of our statues have been of military leaders, now it may well be sports stars who are the ones more likely to be so honored.

I get very envious of my general news colleagues who are always being handed sexy new stuff like global warming, China, and Donald Trump, while my sports colleagues and I must be eternally satisfied with the same old home-court advantage, soccer, and momentum.

Don't dismiss Auriemma and UConn just because their excellence shines on the female side of the coin.

There were a lot of places, including Los Angeles, that didn't have major league baseball. There were other really large cities that had no major league teams, but at least they had college football.

Football teams represent cities and colleges and schools. The people have built great stadiums, and the game is culturally intertwined with our calendar. We don't go back to college for the college. We go back for a football game, and, yes, we even call that 'homecoming.'

The sport [football] is simply more and more identified with violence, both in its inherent nature and in its savage personnel... [The National Football League] now needs a guardian, not a CEO.

I'm a writer. I'm moonlighting on television. I never made any pretensions to that. As much as I like being on 'Real Sports,' I have been a writer since I was a little boy, and that's still my first love.

I'll forever be grateful to NPR that they gave me such extraordinary freedom... It was 37 years of a fond relationship.

Blondes are like left-handed athletes, they all get a second look even if they don't deserve one.

Joe) Dimaggio was, in fact, mostly just a cold fish. Not even his brother Dom, who played outfield for the Red Sox..., seemed to care much for the Yankee Clipper. As someone best summed up Dimaggio: What kind of guy learns to love the most beautiful woman in the world only after she dies?

Seltzer says that Robert Kintner of ABC—later president of NBC—declared adamantly, "No sports will ever be on television on Sunday." Then Seltzer adds: "Yes, he said that. He told me that.

I remember one time I wrote something very, very critical about Wilt Chamberlain. The next time I saw him - and Wilt was not a man, as huge as he was - he was not a man of confrontation. And we were in the Lakers locker room. And he sent Jerry West over, and he said, 'Frank, Wilt would like you to leave.'

What we accepted as great art - whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony - is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

The Tigers, Lions, Red Wings, and Pistons are there today as sure as they were when what was good for General Motors was good for the country. Would you rather have a basketball team, or would you rather be Detroit?

The dollar is a winner. The euro is a tie. Get off the dime, Europe, and play to win.

The only thing we know for sure about superiority in sports in the United States of America in the 20th century is that Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics teams he led stand alone as the ultimate winners.

You're writing about young, vibrant people; there are wins and losses. In other words, it's great drama.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for abiding me. And now, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I bid you goodbye and take my leave.

The hardest thing in the world is to write something critical about someone and then show up the next day in the locker room. I mean, that is not fun, and that takes an awful lot of guts. And I never enjoyed that.

I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. 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.'