Legendary sports writer Frank Deford might have made his name in New York, but he never left Baltimore far behind.
Deford, who died Sunday at the age of 78 according to family members who confirmed the news to multiple news outlets, started out at the now-defunct Evening Sun before rising to superstar status at Sports Illustrated and branching out into broadcasting and best sellers. He helped launch the optimistic but impractical National Sports Daily newspaper and was a staple on National Public Radio and television shows such as HBO's "Real Sports."
He wrote for SI for half a century and just recently retired after 37 years at NPR, graciously thanking his colleagues and readers for a career that included induction in the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame, receiving the National Humanities Award from President Barack Obama in 2013, an Emmy and numerous other awards. He was a six-time Sports Writer of the Year.
"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," Deford wrote in a farewell column for NPR. "Well, someone had to stand up to the yackety-yak soccer cult.
"And perhaps just as important, I've been blessed with you, with a broad and intelligent audience _ even if large portions thereof haven't necessarily given a hoot about sports. 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 also treasured the childhood in Baltimore that shaped him and led him to a writing career that included both fiction and nonfiction. He wrote nine novels, including the popular saga of archetypal 1950s college football star Gavin Grey in "Everybody's All-American," which was published in 1981 and made into a movie staring Dennis Quaid.
Deford said he went with his mother to see the smoldering ruins of the original Oriole Park, which burned down in 1944, which was a pivotal event in the evolution of Baltimore into a major league city because it forced the International League Orioles to move into Memorial Stadium and prove that the city could support a big league team.
"It (the sports landscape) changed completely because Baltimore, of all the major cities in the country, had less important sports," Deford said in a 2012 interview with The Baltimore Sun. "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. We had Hopkins lacrosse. That was it.
"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."
During that interview with The Sun, Deford didn't hesitate when asked who he thought was the most important sports figure in the history of Charm City. He could have gone with Johnny Unitas or Brooks Robinson or Cal Ripken Jr., but he said it wasn't even close.
"Oh no, it would be Babe Ruth," he said. "If you were doing it for the country, it would be Babe Ruth. He was so much larger than the game itself. You could look up his statistics and he was so far ahead of everybody else. I'm not really a numbers guy, but I say Ruth. I just don't think there's any question."
If he had to make the same kind of choice regarding the greatest sports journalist born and raised in Baltimore, Deford would have been too humble to admit that it also was a slam-dunk.
