Postscript: Frank Deford

The distinguished sportswriter Frank Deford was tall, lean, and sideburned, with a Clark Gable pencil mustache, well-tailored clothes, and often a frisson of purple silk at the neck or breast. He looked the way he wrote and spoke, combining the folksy, conversational idioms of classic Dempsey-age sportswriting with a sophisticated searching curiosity about what impels people—makes them the way they are. He began writing for Sports Illustrated in 1962, at age twenty-three, and his accounts of athletes such as the basketball player Bill Russell, with his wary, intelligent distance; the tennis star Jimmy Connors, who was unusually attached to his mother and grandmother; and the coach Bob Knight and the complexities of his rage changed Deford’s profession—made games into culture.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Postscript: Gregg Allman, 1947-2017
“What a Pair of Lungs!”: Denis Johnson’s Ecstatic American Voice
Remembering Denis Johnson