Frank Deford's candid, often self-deprecating memoir, Over Time, has the flavor of a congenial evening spent hanging out at one of the Manhattan watering holes he frequented with his Sports Illustrated colleagues in the '60s and '70s. Interspersed with brief profiles of sports legends like his close friends Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King are snippets of autobiography--from Deford's days growing up in Baltimore to his college years at Princeton to his rise as a sportswriter.
After covering the NBA in the '60s, Deford realized he'd rather be writing about sports personalities than about the games that soon would be ubiquitous on television. That decision launched him on an odyssey along the back roads of American sport, into the twilight world of roller derby and tractor pulls. Deford also includes wry glimpses of his role as a participant in the Miller Lite ("Tastes Great! Less Filling!") ad campaign and of his trip with SI swimsuit models.
He ruefully describes the 18 months he spent in 1990 and 1991 as editor of the ill-fated National Sports Daily, when he helped burned through $150 million of the fortune of a genial Mexican billionaire trying to start a USA Today-like sports paper. "We went out of business on our own before the Internet could do it to us," he writes.
As free of illusion as it is rich with wit and insight, Frank Deford's memoir reveals the life of a man whose talent is every bit the equal of the great athletes whose stories he's revealed to us. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer