Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I am something of a ham. Yeah, I'd always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn't as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords. "
Frank Deford
I Am
School
Words
Related Quotes:
" Dan Rather pulling on a sweater and thereby winning a whole new chunk of the populace: That's television. President Reagan's press conferences: That's television. Keith Jackson is television. So are Kermit the Frog, instant replay, and the Fiesta Bowl. "
Frank Deford
Winning
Sweater
New
" People often lump radio and television together because they are both broadcast mediums. But radio, anyway, and the radio I do for NPR, is much closer to writing than it is to television. "
Frank Deford
People
Together
Writing
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Thank You
Children
Goodbye
" I'll forever be grateful to NPR that they gave me such extraordinary freedom... It was 37 years of a fond relationship. "
Frank Deford
Me
Grateful
NPR
" I have survived so long because I've been blessed with talented and gracious colleagues and with a top brass who let me choose my topics every week and then allowed me to express opinions that were not always popular. Well, someone had to stand up to the yackety-yak soccer cult. "
Frank Deford
Blessed
Stand Up
Stand
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Men
More
Way
" First and foremost, Howard Cosell is sports. There are all these people, these fans, who claim that when Cosell does a game on television, they turn off the sound on the TV and listen to the radio broadcast. Oh, sure. You probably know critics in your neighborhood who vow the same thing. Well, too bad for them. "
Frank Deford
Game
Know
You
" The NBA Schedule was made up by one man, Eddie Gottlieb, who had owned the Philadelphia Warriors. Eddie had a Buddha-like body and a crinkly smile, and because he had also been an owner in baseball's old Negro leagues, he was known as the Mogul. "
Frank Deford
Man
Baseball
Body
" Does each of us need to suffer agony to understand how brutal our gridiron entertainment is? Surely, seeing is believing enough. So, what is football doing to us as a people? How do we explain an America that alone in the world so loves this savage sport? "
Frank Deford
World
Alone
Football
" Bill Russell was the pivot on which the whole sport turned. "
Frank Deford
Which
Whole
Bill
" I think the four major leagues ought to set up a joint commission - say, of retired judges - to rule on athletes who are accused of doing bad things away from the game. Then each league would retain its independence in determining what penalties their players should get for infractions committed within the sport. "
Frank Deford
Independence
Think
Bad
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Los Angeles
Baseball
College
" If I'd grown up in Sao Paulo, I'm sure I would've been a great soccer fan. "
Frank Deford
Been
Fan
Great
" Because I lost a daughter, eight years old, to cystic fibrosis, I think that anytime that I'm dealing with people who, like Andrea Yeager, are trying to help those sick children, I identify very much with them. "
Frank Deford
Daughter
Children
Think
" I've been delivering these little homilies since 1980 - that's 37 years - and altogether, NPR statisticians tell me, my bloviation total is 1,656 commentaries - and I trust you've hung onto every word. "
Frank Deford
Little
Trust
Years
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Wind
Painting
Great
" So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren't educated so much as they are just kept eligible. "
Frank Deford
Fraud
Sports
College
" The dollar is a winner. The euro is a tie. Get off the dime, Europe, and play to win. "
Frank Deford
Winner
Dollar
Off
" She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. "
Frank Deford
Memory
She
Eyes
" It was not that long ago when the accepted wisdom in football was that the running game had to be established - that was always the obligatory verb: established - before passes could become effective. My, we know how that has changed. Now the pass is established from the get-go, and running is an afterthought. "
Frank Deford
Wisdom
Now
Long
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Someone
Never
Mean
" 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. "
Frank Deford
New
You
Time
" NPR allowed me to treat sports seriously, as another branch on the tree of culture. "
Frank Deford
Treat
Tree
Sports
" You're writing about young, vibrant people; there are wins and losses. In other words, it's great drama. "
Frank Deford
Writing
Words
You
" The wonderful thing about delivering sports commentary on NPR was that because it has such a broad audience, I was able to reach people who otherwise had little or no interest in sport - especially as an important part of our human culture. "
Frank Deford
Important
Culture
People
" As it happens, Cumberland was on the verge of bankruptcy and had to give up football. But the villainous Heisman made it play a game that had been scheduled when Cumberland still had a team, or Heisman threatened to demand a $3,000 forfeiture fee that could well have put the school out of existence. "
Frank Deford
Game
Well
Team
" It's almost impossible to explain how little the NBA amounted to when I started covering it in 1963. It wasn't fair to call it bush, although everybody did. It was simply small - only nine teams - and insignificant. "
Frank Deford
Only
Small
Fair
" Johnny U was an American original, a piece of work like none other, excepting maybe Paul Bunyan and Horatio Alger. "
Frank Deford
Like
Maybe
Original
" 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. "
Frank Deford
America
Know
Sports
" It costs a lot of money to deliver newsprint. It's so much easier to do it through the air, Internet, radio, television. The second easiest thing is to do it through the mail. But when you have to take something heavy and put it on someone's doorstep, that costs a lot of money. "
Frank Deford
Internet
Air
Television