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" Pete Rose may not make the Hall of Fame, but a statue of him is going to be erected outside the Cincinnati Reds ballpark. "
Frank Deford
Statue
Fame
Going
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" Nothing made me happier than to hear from literally hundreds of listeners who would tell me how much the commentaries revealed about a subject they otherwise had never cared much for. "
Frank Deford
Nothing
Tell
Never
" I don't think there are many kids who sit around and want to be actors. I don't think there are many kids who want to sit around and want to be senators. But so many of us want to be athletes, so we're envious of them, and we put them up on that pedestal. "
Frank Deford
Want
Senators
Us
" How did females become 'guys?' How did everyone become 'guys?' Remember, too, that a male guy was something of a scoundrel. And a wise guy was a fresh kid, a whippersnapper. In its most other famous evocation, men in Brooklyn said 'youse guys.' Damon Runyon referred to hustlers, gamblers, and other nefarious types as guys. "
Frank Deford
Brooklyn
Remember
Men
" 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
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Famous
Sports
Summer
" You have to do what the market requires of you... You either keep swimming, or you sink. "
Frank Deford
Keep
Swimming
You
" All sorts of famous sports people have been suspended for extended periods. "
Frank Deford
Been
People
Sports
" I can remember going to see the minor league Orioles. Until I was 15 years old, we'd go down with 3,000 people to watch them play the Syracuse Chiefs or the Jersey City Little Giants. That's what passed for Baltimore sports. "
Frank Deford
Play
City
People
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Earth
Me
Sports
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Owners own teams so that they might move them to another municipality with better luxury boxes. "
Frank Deford
Own
Luxury
Boxes
" 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.' "
Frank Deford
Football
Great
Game
" 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
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Child
Me
Experience
" I think, in accepting the amount of money that athletes make, I think that fans accept that now. It's the nature of the beast; that's the way it is, so they understand it. All, I think, fans have changed - because the price of tickets has gone up so much - that they feel a certain sense of entitlement when they go to a game. "
Frank Deford
Money
Nature
Think
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Military
More
Now
" We start 2016 with a command: that the subject of Pete Rose and the Hall of Fame is over, finis, kaput forever and ever. As sure as we will no longer discuss whether Lindsey Graham or George Pataki can be president. "
Frank Deford
Over
Fame
Will
" I think we have enough trouble finding community in this country, and sport does provide that. It is a mediocrisy, the greatest mediocrisy. If you're the best, it shows in sports. Nobody can say, 'Well, he's only there because of his connections,' or whatever. In that sense, I suppose it upholds democracy and the best in us. "
Frank Deford
Community
You
Best
" 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
" She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. "
Frank Deford
Memory
She
Eyes
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Beer
Statistics
Stand
" 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. "
Frank Deford
Love
Television
Sports
" 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
" Statues of sports stars are all the rage - especially in baseball. "
Frank Deford
Baseball
Stars
Sports
" 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