The McGarr Symposium on Sports and Society, April 25 and 26
An Evening with Frank Deford, LBJ Auditorium
TPSM and the LBJ Presidential Museum and Library will host An Evening with Frank Deford on the occasion of the publication of his memoir, Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter in the LBJ Auditorium on April 25 at 6 pm. The event promises to be an enlightening and insightful dialogue about his insights on the function of sports in American culture. The conversation will be moderated by Sports Illustrated Executive Editor Terry McDonnell. The event is free and open to the public, though reservations are required. Please email friends@lbjlibrary.net to confirm attendance.
Deford is the 2012 winner of the Red Smith Award for excellence in sportswriting, an honor won six other times in his distinguished career. As a journalist, Deford has been elected to the Hall of Fame of the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. The American Journalism Review has cited him as the nation's finest sportswriter. Twice he was voted Magazine Writer of The Year by the Washington Journalism Review.
On radio, Deford may be heard as a commentator every Wednesday on NPR's Morning Edition and, on television, he is the senior correspondent on the HBO show RealSports With Bryant Gumbel. In magazines, he is Senior Contributing Writer at Sports Illustrated.
Deford is the author of 16 books, including his forthcoming memoir Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter. Two books—the novel, Everybody’s All-American and Alex: The Life Of A Child, his memoir about his daughter who died of cystic fibrosis—have been made into movies.
The Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism, SAC 2.302
TPSM and the School of Journalism host the 2012 Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism with a campus appearance by Wanshington Post Associate Editor David Maraniss, who will give a talk entitled From Lombardi to Clemente to Obama: Sport as Politics and Politics as Sport. The lecture will be held in the Student Activity Center room 2.302 on April 26 at 4 pm.
Maraniss has written nine books, including When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton, October 1967, Clemente – The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero, and Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World.
Maraniss is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, winning in 1993 for national reporting in his coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton. He also was part of The Washington Post team that won a 2008 Pulitzer for the newspaper's coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting.
Maraniss has won several other notable awards for achievements in journalism, including the George Polk Award, the Dirksen Prize for Congressional Reporting, the ASNE Laventhol Prize for Deadline Writing, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Frankfort Book Prize, the Eagleton Book Prize and the Ambassador Book Prize.
Join the community
TPSM is developing a local community of faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students with an interest in sports, media and society. The emerging field is broad and deep, replete with questions and issues that require a diverse and interdisciplinary community of scholars to address in a meaningful manner.
TPSM posits that:
- Sport precipitates beneficial social change and economic development.
- Media stimulate human engagement and inter-connection.
Sports and media are two sides of a common coin, revealing (for better or worse) human nature, culture and community in a manner that no other aspect of society can touch. TPSM engages these issues at UT-Austin by supporting curriculum, research and programming within the related disciplines of the College of Communication: Advertising/Public Relations, Journalism, Radio-Television-Film and Communication Studies. TPSM also supports an interdisciplinary discourse across campus with departments and faculty that share an appreciation of stories from sports.
In addition to this website, TPSM maintains a Facebook pageand a Twitter stream to stimulate and sustain this dialogue. If you would like information pushed out to you, please join our email group for the latest on curriculum, programming and research initiatives.
Spring 2012 events
For an expanded listing of these events, please see this webpage. All events are open to the university community and the general public.
Texas Sports Group (recurring weekly)
Mondays—7 to 8:30 pm in PAR 306
UT’s undergraduate sports business networking organization meets regularly on Monday evening throughout the semester with programming on varying topics related to profession opportunities in the sports industry. For information about the group and specific events, please see www.texassportsgroup.com.
McGarr Symposium: A Conversation with Frank Deford
April 25—6 to 7 pm in the auditorium of the LBJ Presidential Library and Museum
One of the most versatile writers in America, Deford began writing for Sports Illustrated in 1962, and has been a correspondent for HBO's "Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel" since 1995 and a weekly commentator for National Public Radio since 1980. He is the author of 15 books, including the novel "Everybody's All-American," which was named one of Sports Illustrated's Top 25 Sports Books of All Time and was later made into a movie. He has been voted "U.S. Sportswriter of the Year" by his peers six times.
McGarr Symposium: the Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism
April 26—4 to 5 pm in SAC 2.302
David Maraniss will deliver the 2012 Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism. An associate editor at the Washington Post, Maraniss is the author of nine books, including his most recent, Into the Story: A Writer’s Journey Through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss. As a reporter, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his stories about the life and career of candidate Bill Clinton in the 1992 campaign for the U.S. presidency.
The Frank Deford Lecture in Sports Journalism is an annual celebration of the sportswriter’s craft, established after Deford’s address to the UT-Austin campus in 2010. It is held annually as an event anchoring the McGarr Symposium on Sports and Society.
John Sugden lecture
April 27—TBA
TPSM and the Center for Public Policy and Dispute Resolution present a lecture by John Sugden, historian and professor at Brighton University in England. Sugden is the author of three books including biographies of Francis Drake and Tecumseh, the native American chief. Sugden is also a director of Football 4 Peace International, which uses soccer as a vehicle to create a space of dialogue and understanding between young Palestinian/Arabs and Jewish Israelis. The project began in 2001 bringing together two communities and 100 Jewish and Arab children. Today the program in Israel involves 24 mixed communities with over 1000 children.
Previous events
The Texas Review of Entertainment and Sports Law Symposium
February 24—9 am to 5 pm in
The School of Law's Texas Review of Entertainment and Sport Law will be holding its third annual symposium. Topics will include ethical challenges in online gambling, the rise of the global branding phenomenon, and panels on international entertainment litigation and modern sports broadcasting.
Complete detail on the symposium schedule and scheduled speakers can be found on TRESL’s website. To stay up to date on the program, follow TRESL's Facebook page, or Twitter feed.
A Conversation with Sharon Robinson and Branch Rickey III
March 7—6 to 7 pm in Atrium Room at the LBJ Presidential Museum and Library
TPSM welcomes Branch Rickey III and Sharon Robinson to the UT-Austin campus to address the unique cultural legacies that Branch Rickey Sr. and Jackie Robinson left to subsequent generations of Americans, sports fans or not. The two will speak in a forum moderated by Sports Illustrated Senior Editor Kostya Kennedy.
Dr. Harry Edwards lecture
March 28—2 to 3:30 pm
Dr. Harry Edwards, professor emeritus of sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, will offer a campus-wide address on the subject of sports, media and society. Author of numerous books and scholarly publications, including The Revolt of the Black Athlete, Edwards has taken vocal and dissonant positions on the relationship of African American athletes to American culture. He is the architect of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which led to the Black Power Salute protest by African-American athletes at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City and has long been a proponent of black participation in the management of professional sports organizations.
