Frank Deford on his life as a sportswriter

In "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter," Frank Deford tells his own life story as well as the stories of the characters he's followed in just about every sport. Deford started writing for Sports Illustrated in 1962, was editor-in-chief of The National Sports Daily and now does commentaries for NPR's "Morning Edition."

"The hardest thing in the world is to write something critical about someone and then show up the next day in the locker room," he told NPR. "I mean that is not fun, and that takes an awful lot of guts."

From The New York Times review:

The author, who is now in his mid-70s, is aware that he's had it pretty good, at least professionally. He quotes a Hollywood agent who once said to him, "Deford, you are the last of the tall, white, male, WASP, Episcopalian, heterosexual, Ivy League writers." (Seventy five percent of big-city journalists are still most of these things, but never mind.)

Emotion, in "Over Time," is kept to a minimum. Mr. Deford is not the ruminative, cud-chewing type. He's more interested in relating tall tales and, in particular, in revisiting what he considers the lost heyday of American sportswriting. It was a time when, as he puts it, "men in cubicles pounded on Royal typewriters" instead of blogging at home in their footie pajamas.

Deford joined The Daily Circuit to talk about his memoir.

KERRI'S TAKEAWAY

Within five years, NCAA will have to change and schools will have to change how they do business.

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