You had the chance to talk to them, get to know them and really get to feel them.

res ipsa loquitor?

As an occasional NPR listener and former reader of The National, I sure would like to see Frank Deford spend a little less time offering his opinions and a little more investigating facts.

Wow, not a good night for me. I'm just now discovering that Frank Deford and Frank Gifford are two different people.

This is the ancient distinction between reporters and columnists, isn't it? And since we're in a century where reporting has become omnipresent and unobtrusive (anybody can see video of any game while it happens), columnists proliferate. Sounds OK to me.

Seriously, have you ever listened to a Deford story on NPR? It's almost impossible to tell what he's getting at. It seems more like he just enjoys hearing the sound of his voice go high and low, loud and soft...

This is the ancient distinction between reporters and columnists, isn't it? And since we're in a century where reporting has become omnipresent and unobtrusive (anybody can see video of any game while it happens), columnists proliferate. Sounds OK to me.

I disagree. The problem now is that with so much information at our fingertips, people acquire some superficial knowledge on a subject and all of a sudden think they're qualified to offer an opinion. Columnists should be people who have a particular insight into a topic (or at least a special ability to communicate what knowledge they do have), not just the group of people who in the old days would've been reporters.

Wow, not a good night for me. I'm just now discovering that Frank Deford and Frank Gifford are two different people.

Well, that didn't happen until a week or two ago.

Yes, all this information has given many people the illusion they can actually think. You might say they've been informed beyond their capacity to properly assimilate that information for the purpose of analytic thought. Instead, basically they simply engage in using knowledge and pseudo-knowledge to confirm their biases.

but he admits to some concern about the present state of the trade that made him famous.

I had to RTFA to parse that. It means the sportswriting career trade, not a trade of athletes between two ballclubs. I couldn't figure out how Deford would have gotten famous from a Rickey Henderson trade or something.

Yes, all this information has given many people the illusion they can actually think. You might say they've been informed beyond their capacity to properly assimilate that information for the purpose of analytic thought. Instead, basically they simply engage in using knowledge and pseudo-knowledge to confirm their biases.

This is a depressingly familiar-sounding description of graduate school.

Heh, yeah. Or law school.

Heh, yeah. Or law school.

I would say law school is the opposite. It's about learning to think critically and apply theories to facts, not about what the law is.

You can't judge Deford by his NPR work, he's been over the hill for a while now, and I've never thought much of his baseball stuff but his SI pieces in the 70s and 80s were really good.

12:

Yes, I take it back. I don't know why I wrote that--persiflage, I guess. Law school profs where I went were always telling students that it's more about making them a lawyer than it is about teaching law. Every time I heard that, though, I had this image from An American Werewolf in London with the bones cracking and the muscles tearing as the transmogrification made itself manifest.

Depends what field of graduate studies you're talking about. Literary studies are so inseparable from rhetoric nowadays that, even if students mainly aim to confirm biases, they are taught to construct convincing arguments in the course of doing so.

In sportswriting, I'd agree with Zipperholes' parenthesis (or at least a special ability to communicate what knowledge they do have). Columnists, classically, were all about style, not necessarily original opinion. Not many opinionists nowadays concentrate much on style – nor are there many editors around to filter for good style.

I can't find it anywhere on the net, but Roy Blount Jr. had an excellent piece from the late 70s called "How to Sportswrite Good"

Frank Deford on sportswriting? What's next -- Matt Millen on the state of football GMs? John McCain on the state of military pilots?

The problem now is that with so much information at our fingertips, people acquire some superficial knowledge on a subject and all of a sudden think they're qualified to offer an opinion. Columnists should be people who have a particular insight into a topic (or at least a special ability to communicate what knowledge they do have), not just the group of people who in the old days would've been reporters.

I don't think this is a new problem. With the hyper-specialization of information, it just dramatizes the effect.

Sports columnists, for example, were probably never as knowledgeable as I imagined them to be when I was twelve. They were coming up with an angle and entertaining their readership.

I think what we see when we are dissatisfied with sports writers is just a reflection of the changing values of our interpretive community.

As a former graduate student in English lit, when I went to law school I was struck by how similar writing a legal brief or paper was to writing a English paper.

the changing values of our interpretive community.

[snickers to self].

[snickers to self].

Apparently not a Stanley Fish fan.

Despite some dislike for Deford, I subscribe to the NPR podcast of his Wednesday piece. He is basically NPR's Andy Rooney.

Deford is full of hot air on almost everything. But he's absolutely right about this.

Regardless of what he's saying, Deford's always been one dapper sonuvabeyatch. When I think "sportswriter", he's who I visualize.

What's next -- Matt Millen on the state of football GMs? John McCain on the state of military pilots?

Steve Phillips on baseball ... oh wait ...

Deford is full of hot air on almost everything. But he's absolutely right about this.

Or both. I mean ... if somebody was up there pointing out that political reporting has gone to crap and that it's nothing but a bunch of snarky 24-year-olds hoping to become the next Maureen Dowd and this is a bad thing, well, I'd agree heartily with that.

But sports reporting? We need more folks writing game reports? Interviewing players and managers and writing down the stuff they say? What is the great value of sports _reporting_ that I'm supposed to be missing?

I suppose you could claim that in-depth profiles or a story about, say, Ali-Frazier fights are reporting but, in reality, the authors of such stories are almost always engaging in huge chunks of subjectivism and choosing the bits that fit into some larger theme they're trying to get at.

There is legit reporting to be done about the business of sports.

Which isn't to say that sports opinion or analysis necessarily adds a lot to the world either.

You can't judge Deford by his NPR work, he's been over the hill for a while now, and I've never thought much of his baseball stuff but his SI pieces in the 70s and 80s were really good.

He has a memoir coming out...I thought the bit on the 1960's NBA excerpted in SI was a fun read.

I think what we see when we are dissatisfied with sports writers is just a reflection of the changing values of our interpretive community.

That's part of it, but it also seems that with the way newspapers have gone, and with the rise of all the analysis on blogs, the few remaining beat writers end up trying to do everything. I don't know that to Deford's point that this interferes with reporting, but you have people who were supposed to be more on the "reporting" side the news now helping to make it by publicly evaluating the players about whom they're reporting. And it can be annoying because they may be qualified and even good at the reporting part but their analysis doesn't deserve the platform.

Maybe it was always like this, though. I know sports dept editors and headline writers could always be cutting.

My example is the Denver Post main beat guy, Troy Renck. Pretty good reporting, and he's very active on twitter if you don't want to wait for the morning paper to get the info. But his analysis is slapdash yet presented with the same level of authority as his reporting, and he often seems like he's the FO's mouthpiece.

Frank Deford on sportswriting? What's next -- Matt Millen on the state of football GMs? John McCain on the state of military pilots?

Huh, this is like grad school.

[25] But sports reporting? We need more folks writing game reports?

No, apparently not.

The New York Times
September 10, 2011
In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
By STEVE LOHR

“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 ... . ”

Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.

The clever code is the handiwork of Narrative Science, a start-up in Evanston, Ill., that offers proof of the progress of artificial intelligence — the ability of computers to mimic human reasoning.

The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.

But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.” ...

The Narrative Science customers that are willing to talk do fit that model. The Big Ten Network, a joint venture of the Big Ten Conference and Fox Networks, began using the technology in the spring of 2010 for short recaps of baseball and softball games. They were posted on the network’s Web site within a minute or two of the end of each game; box scores and play-by-play data were used to generate the brief articles. (Previously, the network relied on online summaries provided by university sports offices.)

As the spring sports season progressed, the computer-generated articles improved, helped by suggestions from editors on the network’s staff, says Michael Calderon, vice president for digital and interactive media at the Big Ten Network.

The Narrative Science software can make inferences based on the historical data it collects and the sequence and outcomes of past games. To generate story “angles,” explains Mr. Hammond of Narrative Science, the software learns concepts for articles like “individual effort,” “team effort,” “come from behind,” “back and forth,” “season high,” “player’s streak” and “rankings for team.” Then the software decides what element is most important for that game, and it becomes the lead of the article, he said. The data also determines vocabulary selection. A lopsided score may well be termed a “rout” rather than a “win.” ...

He was also impressed by the cost. Hanley Wood pays Narrative Science less than $10 for each article of about 500 words — and the price will very likely decline over time. Even at $10, the cost is far less, by industry estimates, than the average cost per article of local online news ventures like AOL’s Patch or answer sites, like those run by Demand Media.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/business/computer-generated-articles-are-gaining-traction.html?pagewanted=all

That's genuinely creepy. Too bad we can't replace a few overpaid CEO's with the same sort of robots and pass the savings down the food chain to people who actually need the money.

Shorter Deford: Lawn, off.

That's genuinely creepy. Too bad we can't replace a few overpaid CEO's with the same sort of robots and pass the savings down the food chain to people who actually need the money.

I've had it up to here with people like Andy, Ronald Reagan, and Albert Belle supporting trickle-down economics!

I had NPR on this morning on the way to work, as usual (the horrid week-&-a-half begathon seems to have concluded, thank god), & Deford was even more flesh-crawlingly horrible than usual. He was going on & on about how some horse (the favorite?) in the Kentucky Derby is white, & how My Little Pony is also white, as are unicorns & ... &... god, I have no idea. I had to switch stations after about a minute (even though the other preset options are so horrible in the morning that in such circumstances I usually just drive in silence; I presume that's what I did today, though I was so dazed by Deford's ghastliness that I honestly don't remember).

Maybe he was just being meta, though; maybe this was some sort of performance-art piece. Because there's no way NPR would let the guy get on a nationwide broadcast & basically dump his Depends all over the airwaves. Surely not.

If that's what someone who once came off as quite intelligent sounds like when older, I renew & reaffirm my prayers for death before 60.

'reaffirm your prayers for death before 60?"

Wait'll you get there; you'll be asking for another 10-20 years.

Like my father always said, "you don't like reading works by the author; don't."
If Frank turns you off as he fuddles around with his verbal descriptions, turn to the other station/channel.

We're all critics on some matter at some time in our lives; many of us are critical of many things at all times of our lives.

And for old guys like Frank; the modern times always pale in comparison with "the olden days", whenever those olden days actually occurred.

I had NPR on this morning on the way to work, as usual (the horrid week-&-a-half begathon seems to have concluded, thank god), & Deford was even more flesh-crawlingly horrible than usual. He was going on & on about how some horse (the favorite?) in the Kentucky Derby is white, & how My Little Pony is also white, as are unicorns & ... &... god, I have no idea. I had to switch stations after about a minute (even though the other preset options are so horrible in the morning that in such circumstances I usually just drive in silence; I presume that's what I did today, though I was so dazed by Deford's ghastliness that I honestly don't remember).

Maybe he was just being meta, though; maybe this was some sort of performance-art piece. Because there's no way NPR would let the guy get on a nationwide broadcast & basically dump his Depends all over the airwaves. Surely not.

If that's what someone who once came off as quite intelligent sounds like when older, I renew & reaffirm my prayers for death before 60.

I'm glad that Roger Angell didn't offer a similar prayer.

But don't worry, as long as you can keep your health and money it ain't really as bad as you think. If nothing else, you'll have even more time to waste on sites like this.

I can't find it anywhere on the net, but Roy Blount Jr. had an excellent piece from the late 70s called "How to Sportswrite Good".

Here's a copy, though the formatting is sub-par: How to Sportswrite Good (Esquire, Nov 1976)

EDIT: Well a semicolon was stripped out of the link, so try this one:
http://www.sportsjournalists.com/forum/index.php/topic,86437.msg3163704.html#msg3163704

thanks for tracking that down, Cris E

Wait'll you get there; you'll be asking for another 10-20 years.

Luckily (or not), given not only family history but certain chronic conditions already in play, odds are that'll have taken care of itself.