Frank Deford

Award-winning sportswriter, commentator and correspondent Frank Deford explores new territory as he tells two love stories from the perspective of a beautiful should-have-been Olympic champion named Sydney Stringfellow. With her the reader longs for an earlier time with its greater simplicity and honesty, when promises seemed to be forever but choices so dire in the enveloping shadows of a changing world.

The classic biography of America's first tennis star When he stepped onto the Wimbledon grass in 1920, Bill Tilden was poised to become the world's greatest tennis star. Throughout the 1920s he dominated the sport, winning championship after championship with his trademark grace, power, and intelligence. He owned the game more completely than Babe Ruth ruled baseball, making his name, for more than a decade, synonymous with tennis.   Phenomenally...

This book is as unconventional and wide-ranging as the author's remarkable career, in which he has chronicled the heroes and the characters of just about every sport in nearly every medium. He joined Sports Illustrated in 1962, fresh out of Princeton. They called him "the Kid," and he made his reputation with dumb luck discovering fellow Princetonian Bill Bradley and a Canadian teenager named Bobby Orr. These were the Mad Men-like 1960s, and he recounts...

"A contributing writer to Sports Illustrated for more than fifty years, and a longtime correspondent on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, these days Deford is perhaps best known for his ... commentaries on NPR's Morning Edition. Since 1980, Deford has recorded 1,600 of them, and in [this book] he brings together the very best, creating a ... wide-ranging look at athletes and the world of sports"--Amazon.com.

"The Best of Frank Deford: I'm Just Getting Started relates not only the specific and spectacular events that make up great sportswriting, but reflect through sports the larger world of American culture. The Best of Frank Deford features in-depth personal profiles of such legendary figures as Bobby Knight, Bill Russell, and Charles Barkley, and provides wry insight into the rapidly changing sports world."--Jacket.

A globetrotting journalist goes on assignment for the Central Intelligence Agency As the world's premier tennis journalist, Ronnie Ratajczak has a plush life. Like the professional players about whom he writes, he spends his life on the road, hopping from one glamorous locale to another and taking in the giddy atmosphere that surrounds pro tournaments. But unlike the pros, Ronnie operates under little pressure, spending his days pecking out copy and...

Fact and fiction are combined to tell what happened to Casey and the Mudville Baseball Team.

This is not as wholly outrageous or funny as that other Sports Illustrated editior Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough, but it's a nice post-season reminder of that all-American favorite game. Not Rosalie Start's--the wife of a rapidly ascendant Baltimore stockbroker (who launched the franchised barbershops Cut 'n' Run) whose fall is a season of utter discontent--Jerry's ""engulfed"" by pro football and their marriage is facing sudden death. Then there's the...