Award-winning Journalist and Sports Commentator Closes Out Lecture Series at Elmhurst College

Described by GQ as "the world's greatest sportswriter," Frank Deford provided a perfect end to a family weekend that saw the Elmhurst College football team end their 31-year losing streak against Augustana College. 

Deford, a master journalist, respected broadcaster and accomplished novelist, concluded The Rudolf G. Schaed Lecture Series Nov. 7 with a talk titled College Sports: The Hype and the Hypocrisy.

"We are the only nation that mixes up academics and athletics," Deford, a senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated said.  "Unfortunately college athletics were never pure.  The system was just inherently corrupt."

That may be due to Americans' distinct passion for sports, Deford said. 

"We love sports more than anyone else," he said.   "It is a great point of pride.  What is the worst thing that you can tell somebody about where they live?  You're a bad sports town.  It's like a dagger to the heart."

This passion for sports that can sometimes create a set of blinders.   

"We are so inclined not to question things in sports but to just take them at face value," Deford said. 

One of the "grossly hypocritical" topics, something that is never questioned, is the implementation of athletic scholarships, especially for college football and basketball players, he said. Pressure is put on these athletes to create the budget to fund the school's athletics, but in return they are not allowed to have reputable agents or even share the money. 

"They are precisely the ones who are supposed to act as unpaid entertainers, ideally to support the entire athletic budget of the school," he said.  "For my money, they should get paid.  They call them revenue sports, don't they?  Why is it that the athletes, the hired hands, don't get a share of the revenue?"

Deford noted that on the other side, athletics that are not involved in "revenue sports," such as track and field or ice hockey, still receive scholarships. 

"Why are athletes the only ones that get scholarships for their extracurricular work?  I have never met a president or an athletic director of a big time school that can justify why a tennis player should get a scholarship but a piano player shouldn't," he said. 

Deford said he believes that in the United States sports seem more important than art or music or literature. 

There is also a different attitude when dealing with athletics compared to the arts. 

"I don't imagine a music faculty hanging around the admissions office saying 'Hey, there is this wonderful tenor from Kentucky. No, he hasn't passed a course in three years and he is in jail now on assault charges, but we sure could use him in the college choir.  If you could make an exception,' " Deford said. 

The United States has dropped to No. 12 in the world on the percentage of college graduates for which sports might be largely responsible, Deford said.    

"This year, for every 100 males graduating from college, 185 females will," he said.  "Now I know there are an awful lot of possibilities for this, including the dread possibility that they are simply smarter than we are.  But don't tell me that at least part of the reason for the failure of our boys to do well in the classroom is because they concentrate so much on sports from an early age."

Sports has such a hold, Deford pointed out, that there are more college students majoring in sports management than engineering. 

"Is the emphasis on college sports ever going to change?  No.  First of all there is too much real estate in those great, modern American cathedrals that we call stadiums and arenas.  There is too much money, too many that care nothing for academics and only about sports," he said. 

Hypocrisy aside, Deford did make sure to note some of the key elements sports has brought to the forefront, including teamwork.  The United States has been able to mold the individual as part of a group, with everyone coming together and working together. 

Stories from the Trenches 

Deford also touched on a few memories from his early years as a sports journalist. He talked about covering the Las Angeles Lakers, a trip to the Vietnam memorial with Muhammad Ali and a soccer game in Cameroon.     

"If you had a few dollars you could go to the bar and have a beer and watch the game there. That is where I was when Cameroon scored the first goal of the game," Deford said. "There was this short, fat lady standing next to me and she grabbed me and started dancing with me.  The photographer that was with me took a picture.  That is the only sports picture that I keep in my office—such unbounded joy.

 "Our team losses but it is just a game, life goes on," he said.  "But the people in Cameroon probably never really understood the power of sport until that moment. Sports could never matter as much to those people as it did on that day."  

Despite the abuses in sports, Deford noted the importance of sports in life. 

"Sports is truly a unifying element," he said.  "And I am proud to have been one of its true adorers for so much of my life."

Deford has been elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters.  He has been twice voted Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review.   Two of his novels, Everybody's All-American and Alex: The Life of a Child have been made into movies.  Two of his original screenplays, Trading Hearts and Four Minutes, also have been made into motion pictures.   

Deford can be heard every Wednesday on Morning Edition on National Public Radio.