The Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism
Sponsored by The McGarr Symposium on Sports and Society
Christine Brennan speaks on campus
USA Today Columnist Christine Brennan delivered the 2023 Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism. The speech, Title IX at 50: Past Successes and Future Challenges, was on March 1, 2023 at the Dealey Center for New Media on the UT-Austin campus.
Brennan is an award-winning national sports columnist for USA Today, a commentator for CNN, ABC News, PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio, a best-selling author and a nationally-known speaker. Named one of the country's top 10 sports columnists by the Associated Press Sports Editors multiple times, she has covered the last 20 Olympic Games, summer and winter.
In March 2020, Brennan was named the winner of the prestigious Red Smith Award, presented annually to a person who has made “major contributions to sports journalism.”
Brennan was the first woman sports writer at The Miami Herald in 1981 and the first woman to cover the Washington Football Team as a staff writer at The Washington Post in 1985. She was the first president of the Association for Women in Sports Media (AWSM) and started an internship-scholarship program that has supported 200 female students over the past two decades.
Brennan is the author of seven books. Her 2006 sports memoir, Best Seat in the House, is the only father-daughter memoir written by a sports journalist. Her 1996 national best-seller, Inside Edge, was named one of the top 100 sports books of all-time by Sports Illustrated.
Brennan earned undergraduate and master's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University. She is a member of the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame, Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism Hall of Achievement, Northwestern’s Athletic Hall of Fame and the Washington, D.C., Sports Hall of Fame.
She has received honorary degrees from Tiffin (Ohio) University and the University of Toledo. She is a member of Northwestern's Board of Trustees.
The Deford Lecture
The McGarr Symposium on Sports and Society has hosted the Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism annually since 2010. Created to honor the iconic sportswriter and carry his unique vantage point on the intersection of sport and society into the 21st Century, the Deford Lecture has hosted journalists, scholars and leading thinkers to discuss pressing cultural issues with the UT-Austin community.
Frank Deford (1938-2017) was amongst the most versatile of American writers. On radio, he was heard as a commentator every Wednesday on Morning Edition on National Public Radio. On television, he worked as a Senior Correspondent for the HBO show, Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. In print, he was Senior Contributing Writer at Sports Illustrated–– an association that dates back to 1962. As a journalist, Deford was elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters and named U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times, as voted by his peers. Sportswriter of The Year. The American Journalism Review has likewise cited him as the nation’s finest sportswriter, and twice he was voted Magazine Writer of The Year by the Washington Journalism Review. Posthumously, Deford received the inaugural Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting for his lifetime achievement.
Since the Center for Sports Communication & Media has been managing the Deford Lecture, speakers have included Bob Costas (2018), Andrea Joyce (2019), Mina Kimes (2020), Howard Bryant (2022) and Christine Brennan (2023). The Lecture was postponed in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Frank Deford, sportswriting icon
The author of eighteen books, Frank Deford (1938-2017) was a towering sportswriter, working in virtually every medium during his illustrious. He was senior contributing writer at Sports Illustrated, where his byline first appeared in 1962. A weekly commentator for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” he was also a regular correspondent on the HBO show “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.” He was editor-in-chief for the groundbreaking - and short lived - sports daily newspaper, The National.
As a journalist, Deford won the National Magazine Award for profiles, and was elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. Voted by his peers as U.S. Sportswriter of the Year six times, he was also cited by The American Journalism Review as the nation’s finest sportswriter and was twice voted Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review.
The Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism began at the University of Texas in 2010, with his campus address that year. Over the years, it has featured some of the most compelling voices, interested in the intersection of sports and American culture. Deford was presented with a Christopher Award and awards for distinguished service to journalism from the University of Missouri and Northeastern University. Deford and Red Smith are the only authors with more than one piece in The Best American Sportswriting of the Century, edited by David Halberstam. For his radio and TV work, Deford has won both an Emmy and a George Foster Peabody Award.
Frank Deford content archives
Frank Deford maintained a sizable and influential presence in print, radio and video over his storied career. Here are some of the archival resources for his work.