![]() ![]() So he earned a modest living as a secretary for a porcelain and enamel business.īenjie Deford and his wife, Louise, nonetheless sent Deford to private school at Gilman, where he played basketball and wrote for the campus newspaper and literary magazine. His father, Benjie, was from a well-off family, but the leather business responsible for the Deford fortune had fallen on hard times. 16, 1938, and grew up in north Baltimore as the eldest of three brothers. I think if you grow up in a bland place, maybe you don’t have as good an eye.”īenjamin Franklin Deford III was born Dec. I think it made me more aware, even if I didn’t use all the material from Baltimore. It’s very distinct and very unusual in many ways. “I also think Baltimore is a very idiosyncratic city. I think that was very important to me growing up. “All of us in Baltimore felt a certain defensiveness, and sometimes defensiveness can be good because it makes you strive to work harder to show yourself. “I’ve always said that coming from Baltimore made me a different person than if I’d come from Washington, or New York, or Boston, or someplace like that,” he said in a 2002 Sun interview. Though Deford built his career and lived most of his life in other places, he always referred to Baltimore as home. “Understand that the National Sports Daily was a newspaper that cared about good writing and sought to live by the premise that sports and good writing deserve to go together,” Deford wrote later. But the National never overcame distribution troubles and closed in June 1991, after less than 18 months of publication. As the publication’s editor, Deford unleashed a gifted staff of writers to bring literary-minded coverage to everything from the NBA to professional wrestling. ![]() The National was Deford’s grand midlife experiment, handed to him by Mexican-American media magnate Emilio Azcarraga. Pierce, who worked for Deford at the short-lived but revered National Sports Daily. “RIP Frank Deford, who made us all want to be sportswriters and who was my boss for 18 glorious months,” wrote Charles P. “He was my writing idol, a writing craftsman beyond measure. “This one really hurts,” wrote longtime Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan. Several generations of writers took to social media Monday to express how much Deford meant to them and to the profession. In 2013, he received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama, who praised him for “reaching beyond scores and statistics to reveal the humanity woven into the games we love.” Deford remained a leading advocate for cystic fibrosis research for the rest of his life. “Alex: The Life of a Child” became the basis for an Emmy-nominated television movie in 1986. In addition to his magazine pieces and NPR commentaries, Deford wrote more than a dozen books, including a poignant appreciation of his daughter, Alex, who died of cystic fibrosis in 1980 at age 8. His wife, Carol, told The Washington Post she did not know a cause of death but said he had recently been treated for pneumonia. “Nothing has pleased me so much as when someone - usually a woman - writes me or tells me that she’s appreciated sports more because NPR allowed me to treat sports seriously, as another branch on the tree of culture,” he said. He recorded his last NPR dispatch less than a month ago, equating his own retirement after 1,656 commentaries to the shuttering of Ringling Bros. ![]() His look and sonorous speaking voice made him a memorable figure during long stints as a correspondent for HBO’s “Real Sports” and as an NPR commentator. With wavy hair and a dark mustache, Deford cut a dashing figure, draping his 6-foot-4 frame in stylish jackets, often with a vivid handkerchief stuffed in the breast pocket. Frank Deford, a master of deeply written Sports Illustrated profiles and later a courtly commentator for National Public Radio and HBO Sports, died Sunday at his home in Key West, Fla. ![]()
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