Frank Deford

I think there are more good sportswriters doing more good sportswriting than ever before. But I also believe that the one thing that's largely gone out is what made sport such fertile literary territory - the characters, the tales, the humor, the pain, what Hollywood calls 'the arc.'

So much about big-time college sports is criticized. But the worst scandal is almost never mentioned: the academic fraud wherein the student-athletes, so-called, are admitted without even remotely adequate credentials and then aren't educated so much as they are just kept eligible.

Sport is an art: it has incredible appeal everywhere on this earth, and it fills so many human hearts with passion that it's impossible to dismiss.