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.'
Interpretation
Sportswriting is rich with characters and stories, but has lost its essence over time.
In this quote, Frank Deford reflects on the evolution of sportswriting, acknowledging that while there are many talented sportswriters producing work today, the depth and richness that once characterized sports stories—such as the intriguing characters and emotional narratives—have diminished. He emphasizes that the elements that made sports a compelling subject for writing, including humor and personal struggles, have largely been overshadowed, suggesting a need for a revival of these essential qualities.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of storytelling in journalism.
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.
Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.
Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.
I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'
What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.
It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .
THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.
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