There’s a Deford in your future… talking about his past.
You write about of the all-time best scenes of Ted Williams. He’s 80 years old, preparing to speak to the Society for American Baseball Research, championing Shoeless Joe Jackson for the Hall of Fame. He’s using a walker and you write, “He raised himself up as tall as he could, thrust out his chest, and in that great bombastic voice, this is what he hollered as an introduction: ‘Are there any ####### Marines in here?’”
Oh, yeah. I love that—“Are there any ####### Marines in here?” Williams just blew these little nerdy guys out of their seats. At first they were astounded, but then they loved it.
Bob Feller was with him.
Yes, and I remember Feller looked on like the master sergeant ready to take names. [laughs]
(...)
What’s your assessment of Keith Olbermann, whose tumultuous broadcasting career began in sports?
Keith needs a good woman. When he comes home, he needs a wife there who can say to him, Hey, take it easy. Calm down. I love you, darlin.’ Sit down, have a martini, let’s talk about this. You don’t have to get mad. Everything’s going to be fine. Back when I was doing commentaries on CNN in the 1980s, Keith was just starting out there. Even then, people were saying, This guy’s really good. But, man, is he a piece of work. He’s trouble.
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1. Morty Causa Posted: May 12, 2012 at 04:48 PM (#4130317)Deford gets taken down here, and he deserves it, for the most part, as to the matter in question, but he once was a great writer and commentator, and writers are just like athletes. They, too, have a life cycle. Just because Orson Welles ended his life making commercials for Paul Masson doesn't nullify Citizen Kane or Touch of Evil. A little sympathy might be in order.
I am also an enormous fan of Mr. Deford's SI collection, The World's Tallest Midget.
Those commercial outtakes are one of his career highlights, sir.
Around the same time that Welles was doing the Paul Masson commericials, John Huston did some that were a trip, too. It was in his best Chinatown sepulchral tones, and he was as drunk as Welles was in some of them, but it made him more deliberate. It was great. I can't remember what the ad was for.
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