Sail on, my Captain

It is fairly impossible to describe what Frank Deford meant to me — as a role model and friend, adviser and inspiration.

Sports Illustrated was just another piece of mail in a college kid’s cubbyhole when Frank appeared on the horizon of a gym floor, and I realized immediately what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be.

I guess I had read some of his early stuff and was sufficiently mesmerized that somebody so young could be so good. But one night, sitting high in the seats at a basketball game in Chapel Hill, N.C., I spotted him standing on the sideline merely observing the scene. A budding legend. In the flesh. Wow.

Latter-day Defordologists always point out Frank’s striking, moustachioed resemblance to Clark Gable. But, in his youthful post-grad years, recently out of Princeton, his look was by way of Elvis and Savile Row and Hollywood and Vine. His clothes, his style — even when taking notes he had some mysterious but obvious star presence — he was always the neatest guy in the sports room. Which of course made him the coolest guy on Earth. For me, that night seemed to foreshadow what he meant not just to the games and the sports and the people he would cover for the many decades to come, but to his profession itself.

(I wonder if Bear Bryant or Bobby Knight or Jimmy Connors ever came to realize what an honor it was to be profiled by this man.)

Anyway, I was hooked.

And Frank Deford became transcendent.

With four years and untold eons of talent behind him at the magazine, I somehow lucked into an office right across a narrow hall from Frank, whereupon I would nervously enter his space and pick his brain about writing.

Or living. I got so confused once when Frank compared putting typewriter to paper (look those up, kids) as thrilling as sex.

Our conversations often included some fond surprises — coming as always amid the decorative charms of dozens of those tiny cardboard hotel/bar/restaurant advertisements that Frank had scattered everywhere in his quarters. Right there, the most elegant wordsmith of us all was harboring his tacky, trashy side.

Then one night, this: “I’m doing a basketball story in Indiana,” Frank said. “But what’s really cool — I’m going to finally get to visit James Dean’s grave!”

Say what? Why of course. Frank Deford would plan such a pilgrimage.

East of Eden.

West of Weird.

As we pursued our SI careers, Frank became my best friend on the magazine. We were neighbors in Westport, Conn. We played tennis together and sometimes rode the commuter train to New York together.

Our young daughters, Sage and his treasured Alexandra, played together — sometimes alongside Alex’s oxygen tent as she battled the horrific cystic fibrosis that took her life at age 8.

I followed Frank on the basketball and tennis beats, and I couldn’t go anywhere without a Bill Russell or a Rod Laver devastating me with, “Nice to meet you, kid. Where’s Frank?”

Attempting to copy his style, I was cynical, sarcastic, occasionally nasty. My predecessor’s trademark “long form” pieces were transcribed with a grace and elegance unmatched still. He wrote deeply penetrating stuff on the likes of Knight and Connors, somehow remaining harshly accurate and commendably fair — always retaining the respect of his subjects. God, how did he do that? Probably the same way he established lifelong relationships with fellow giants such as Wilt Chamberlain and Arthur Ashe.

Messy and mean were foreign substances to Frank Deford, right? But wait. Combining on a story one year — I was reporting and interviewing, Frank writing — I went to his hotel room one morning to deliver some research.

Knock knock.

“What?” answered a sleepless Frank, opening the door to a veritable ransacked pigsty of pizza slices, sodas and scribbled notes . . . notes . . . and more notes on the bed, the floor, the desk, everywhere.

“Jeez, what happened in here?” I said.

“I’m working” he said.

On another masterpiece, it turned out.

Another year, another combo: This time I was writing and Frank was overseeing the entire magazine the week in 1986 that Ivan Lendl won another U.S. Open. Lendl was a stoic, mostly emotionless Czech who had few friends in or outside the locker room — a point I may have stressed in the story.

Frank’s cover billing read: “The Champion That Nobody Cares About.”

Thanks a lot, buddy. Only recently did Lendl ever forgive . . . me.

Frank Deford was and will always be my idol, my mentor, my hero, my champion.

The latter I will never forget.

In the late 1980s, long before it became fashionable for writers to appear on TV as often as Ryan Seacrest, CBS hired me to do some features and color work on college basketball. Understood was that I would always be identified as representing Sports Illustrated.

This worked out well for awhile until it didn’t — the managing editor suddenly changing his mind because he found a “conflict of interest” and didn’t think it helped the publication.

I was called in and given an ultimatum — SI or TV, not both. My office mate was in the meeting and he jumped to my cause. “Curry has given the magazine some 25 years. Now that his ship has come in . . . you do this?” said Frank Deford. I chose to stay at SI and didn’t leave for a few more years.

Ironically, Frank departed even before I did, in a failed attempt to establish a national sports newspaper. Of course the hierarchy at SI ultimately changed and he was welcomed back. You don’t gain much by quarreling with a national treasure.

I last saw Frank and his wondrous wife Carol — once a runway model, always — a winter ago on a visit to Key West. Though weak with illness, he was tall, straight, brimming with goodwill and rich wit and stories, so many stories. Still and forever, the coolest guy on earth.

Then last weekend, amid gorgeous weather on my beach on Hilton Head Island — Frank would invariably kid me “You’re always on a beach somewhere” — came the terrible news. I could only stare at the ocean.

High tide was coming.

The French have a phrase.

La mer s’est elevee avec les pleurs. The sea has risen with tears.

Farewell Frank.

Sail on, my Captain.

This story was originally published June 4, 2017 at 10:23 AM with the headline "Sail on, my Captain."