Frank Deford Quotes

It wasn't really until the 10th or 11th grade when I started to play well, and football took the place of baseball, which was my love when I was five years old. I don't know what happened; baseball just got boring to me, I guess.

Traditional cricket has gone out of the window. It's gone. T20 cricket has changed the game.

I turned six in 1977. Youth athletics then was nothing like this, and I wondered how things changed so much. I started looking at our societal emphasis on sports, using the most tangible metric by which we measure emphasis: money.

Look at the NBA players back when Magic and Kareem played in the early 80's with the short shorts, look at what Michael looked like when he first came in the league compared to when he left. Every sport evolves. Every sport gets bigger and more athletic, and you have to keep up.

First of all, in any sport where you can measure distance, height speed and all of that, you see how athletes have changed their sport and made it better. I believe, with every generation, the sport has improved. Certainly, in the men's game, that has been the case. I think that I played Pete [Sampras] at his best, I played Roger [Federer] at his best.. I believe wholeheartedly that Roger and [Rafael] Nadal have pushed the game much further than myself or Pete ever did. Their options on the tennis court are considerably more than ours.

Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human.

I got into a few games after they were hopelessly won or hopelessly lost, you know, when they put the substitutes in, and finally the water boy, and then me. That is the way it worked.

I think Mixed Martial Arts is going to be a huge thing coming up in pro wrestling, and I like to think of myself as one of the first guys to try and implement that into my style.

I know how difficult my rookie year in the NFL was and I know how competitive this sport is.

The players today reflect how much the game has evolved and changed both in style and culture. [...] The game now has a wider appeal to a larger market.

What's the game coming to? Evidently the guys making all these rules never played the game of baseball.

Hitting in a game is no different than hitting in a home run contest. It pisses me off to say Barry Bonds is the greatest hitter. He's playing in a wussy era. The game is soft. You never get thrown at today. Last thing a hitter has to worry about today is getting hit. The first thing Hank Aaron had to worry about is: Am I going to survive this at-bat because I'm black.

In a generation or two, or maybe sooner, young golfers of true sporting instinct will wonder why all this handling of the ball is necessary. It will seem to them that the game is not as good as it might be.

Although the world proved not yet ready for the brotherhood of baseball, that would be only a matter of time, baseball magnates believed.

The home run became glorified with Babe Ruth. Starting with him, batters have been thinking in terms of how far they could hit the ball, not how often.

There was a day when you could identify a NASCAR Ford, Chevrolet, or Dodge and they actually looked like "stock cars." Now they are pod machines, slick on the outside but still powered by the same Neanderthal carbureted pushrod V-8s that have been under their hoods for half a century. If this is real auto racing, then the WWF ought to be part of the Olympics.

Boxing is not coming back. There's not going to be a new Ali or a new Tyson. What's happened to movies is happening to boxing-that is, too much availability of alternative, similar entertainment. Movies started to become diluted with the advent of television; that has been mirrored by the dilution of boxing, with kickboxing and absolute, extreme homicidal fighting.

We were like farm animals compared to today's players who are treated like thoroughbreds.

The invention of basketball was not an accident. It was developed to meet a need.

When I was playing, we didn't have to compete against everybody in the world. Now it's a truly global sport, so the competition's much greater, just like it is for our children in every other area, whether it be in science or technology or whatever you talk about.

Football's another sport I absolutely despise. Along with baseball. Really, for me, basketball's the only real sport, the only one that matters.

I know what happened to cycling from 1999 to 2005. I saw its growth, I saw its expansion.

Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull and Jean Béliveau probably looked at us in the '80s and said, "These guys are soft. We used to take the train."

Sport is a loathsome and dangerous pursuit.

Golf is fluid. It's always changing. It's always evolving. First of all, you never master it.