Quotes from Frank Deford

By coincidence, this particular tiny show on earth that consists entirely of me talking about sports on NPR is also folding its tent flaps this May of 2017. Yes, this is my swansong, my farewell, my last hurrah. Adieu, adios, arrivederci, auf wiedersehen.

NPR allowed me to treat sports seriously, as another branch on the tree of culture.

Nowadays, of course, flesh peddlers and scouting services identify the best athletes when they are still in junior high. Prospects are not allowed to sneak up on us.

In the summer of 1963, my second with 'Sports Illustrated,' Jerry Tax, the basketball editor, got the Celtics' Frank Ramsey, the NBA's first famous sixth man, to do a piece for the magazine revealing some of the devious little tricks of his trade. Things like surreptitiously holding an opponent's shorts - nickel-and-dime stuff.

If I come on three days after the Super Bowl and say pretty much what everybody else has said, what's the point? That was the tricky thing... coming up with a new angle every time - or most times, because you couldn't bat a thousand.

If I'd grown up in Sao Paulo, I'm sure I would've been a great soccer fan.

The strike zone should be what the rule book says it is and not a personal idiosyncrasy.

So much of life, so much of work, is luck.

I think I would die if I couldn't get to the typewriter every day. I really need that.

Remember when John Roberts was seeking confirmation of the Supreme Court, and he said judges should be just like umpires, just calling balls and strikes? Well, turnabout is fair play. What baseball needs behind the plate are umpires like those judges who are called strict constructionists, which means you follow subtle law to the letter.

Before the Colts arrived in 1947, the best athlete in town was a woman duckpin bowler named Toots Barger. Football? The biggest games in Baltimore had been when Johns Hopkins took on Susquehanna or Franklin & Marshall at homecoming.

Yes, the Masters is too stylish to be an American icon. It's as out of character for Uncle Sam as a McDonald's is for France.

The year after Russell retired, in the famous seventh game of the NBA Finals at Madison Square Garden, Willis Reed, the New York Knicks center, limped onto the court against the Los Angeles Lakers, inspiring his team and freezing Chamberlain into a benign perplexity.

Usually when an athlete gets a reputation it sticks with him, even when he's an old man.

I think every time I can find a story that touches that human nerve, and even sometimes makes you cry, I think that I've found something that I'll like very much.

You can stand at a bar and scream all you want about who was the greatest athlete and which was the greatest sports dynasty, and you can shout out your precious statistics, and maybe you're right, and maybe the red-faced guy down the bar - the one with the foam on his beer and the fancy computer rankings - is right, but nobody really knows.

Pete Rose may not make the Hall of Fame, but a statue of him is going to be erected outside the Cincinnati Reds ballpark.

Statues of sports stars are all the rage - especially in baseball.

If you're a father of a child who dies, it's an experience that never leaves you. It scars you forever and ever and ever. And so when I do any kind of story with somebody who's in the same position as my daughter was, there's no question that something comes out of me and embraces that story in a way that only a father who lost a child could.

I never saw war, so that is still my vision of manhood: Unitas standing courageously in the pocket, his left arm flung out in a diagonal to the upper deck, his right cocked for the business of passing, down amidst the mortals. Lock and load.

At all levels - with men and women - the 3-point shot has utterly transformed the way the game is played. More and more, the players are spread out, looking to pop behind the 3-point arc.

On Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., there are statues of five Confederate luminaries and then, incongruously in this company, one of Arthur Ashe.

I remember, when I was growing up in Baltimore, we'd get on a streetcar and go down to see the Orioles, and for a couple of bucks, you could get a pretty good seat. Kids can't do that anymore. So I think that changes the whole nature of sports.

It's still the tradition for various football powerhouses to pay guarantees to schools with cream-puff teams to come on over to our place and submit to massacre.