Would You Criticize Monet for Using Too Much Yellow?

The article “Picking Nits With Frank Deford” (by Glenn F. Bunting, Jan. 11) is baffling to all who know Deford’s work. To indict him for using “breathtaking overstatement to portray athletes and their accomplishments” is miles off point for a journalist who, for more than four decades, has been touching readers with wondrous prose and clear insight. Bunting’s story was approximately 7,000 words; what a small piece for such a great newspaper. Shame on you.

Terry McDonell

Managing Editor

Sports Illustrated

New York

*

Taking Deford to task for his occasional bouts of hyperbole is absurd. It’s like criticizing Monet for using too much yellow in his sunlight.

Peter Richmond

Millerton, N.Y.

*

Many thanks to Bunting and Ed Coleman, his golf teacher, for finally exposing what I too have noticed for years: Deford’s rampant hyperbole and factual errors. For someone who started as a fact-checker and excoriates others for errors, Deford is hypocritical. Deford is right about one thing, though: “But you start throwing ‘great’ around, you devalue it.” Yeah, especially when someone is described as “the world’s greatest sportswriter.” Sports Illustrated should send Deford back to the fact-checking desk for a while. Maybe then he would develop some sorely lacking humbleness.

George Stevens

Los Angeles

*

Bunting’s ham-fisted skewering of Deford is ludicrous. Several of Bunting’s would-be “gotcha!” moments hinge on Deford’s ignoring athletic accomplishments from the distant past. Many fair, intelligent sports fans simply don’t care about achievements from bygone eras, when race and class restrictions too often rewarded mediocrity.

Nick Nicholas

Solana Beach

*

This is undoubtedly the worst article ever written by anyone, anywhere in the world, on any topic in the entire history of sports journalism.

Larry George

Santa Monica

*

Thank you for publishing an excellent and much-needed article. Deford certainly was ahead of the times in terms of overstatement and inaccuracy. Now everyone seems to do it, and ESPN doesn’t seem to recognize that there is history as far back as its own creation. When Deford complained that he always sees inaccuracies, he should have stopped defending himself and said, “We have found the problem, and it is us.”

Dennis Gilbertson

Palo Alto

*

I’m no mathematician, but by my reckoning, Deford’s documented errors and exaggerations come out to an average of about . . . oh, my! . . . one foible per year.

Karl Grubaugh

Cameron Park

*

Condemn Deford, and you must condemn the late Jim Murray and the late, great Damon Runyon. Sports is hyperbole. I’ve read Deford on tennis for years, and he is the greatest!

Dan Anzel

Los Angeles