Who out there remembers Frank Deford, the sportswriter and commentator who used to be a regular voice on NPR’s “Morning Edition” as the Sports Curmudgeon, growling out a fresh list of pet peeves the first Wednesday of every month? When he died in 2017, NPR reported that Deford had recorded 1,656 curmudgeonly commentaries over 37 years, in an audio series sarcastically titled “Sweetness and Light.” He read his own writing aloud on the radio in a comical, snarling voice of not-quite-mock outrage.
I found Frank Deford really funny, even though I rarely knew what he was talking about. (My sports fandom peaked in the late 1980s when I dated a Mets fan and went to Shea Stadium a lot to see Dwight Gooden throw a 100-mile-per-hour fastball and to shout encouragement to Daryl Straw-w-w-w-berry. I still do love baseball, but the last football game I ever saw — indeed the only football game I have ever seen — was at Dartmouth College during my dad’s class of 1954 reunion in 1979. I’ve never seen a professional basketball game, not even on TV.)
Frank Deford was dissatisfied with all sorts of trends in sports, and for whatever reason, his crankiness filled my heart with joy. Frank Deford hated soccer. He detested the practice of renaming ballparks for banks, airlines, or insurance companies. He was not happy when Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus went out of business. He compared Babe Ruth to Winnie-the-Pooh. He was very irked by jingoism in coverage of the Olympics, stars and stripes swimming trunks and chants of “U.S.A.!” He had zero tolerance for sports clichés: “If they really gave 110 percent, shouldn’t they be hospitalized by now?”
A curmudgeon is someone who hates change when change is for the worse. A curmudgeon is someone with congenital allergic anaphylaxis in reaction to trendiness when the trend replaces something that was better before. IMHO, we may be pains in the rhymes-with-sass, but we occasionally play a useful (self-appointed) role as irritable watchdogs, a necessary counter-push. I cannot put my finger on why I find the attitude of the crank so funny, but I always have. I remember being a little kid and giggling to myself when I first heard the word “crosspatch” and trying to work “crosspatch” into conversations.
King Charles is the king of curmudgeons, the literal king, and that is why I remain Team Charles while the world laughs. He was resolutely curmudgeonly all through the 1970s and 1980s about terrible modern-architectural schemes for “urban development,” for example, and history has proven him oh so right.
(And, as an aside, did you notice the masterful power-whammy our surprisingly sneaky Charles played on the president of the United States two weeks ago? King Charles manipulated Donald Trump into changing his stance on Russia and Ukraine. He did! You don’t believe me, but history will again prove it’s true, I swear as I wave my rhetorical cane. Everyone wondered why Britain was hosting our president for a second state visit so soon, and why the Windsors were seemingly debasing themselves before him, but it was all because Charles had thrown himself on his ceremonial sword to orchestrate a masterful power play: He rode the Donald up and down in that ridiculous gold carriage and brought all the pomp of Buckingham Palace to bear on the president’s gold-obsessed psyche, and then repeatedly and pointedly shared his private thoughts about Zelensky versus Putin. We wondered why President Trump so abruptly changed his rootin-tootin’ Putin tune? That’s why. Our president is nothing if not a boot-licker, and so King Charles presented his regal, royal Crockett and Jones oxford lace-ups and beckoned “Come with me, to my side. . . .”)
My own life as a curmudgeon began around the age of 14, when I hit my stride as a hypercritical teen. If it’s true, as Malcolm Gladwell wrote, that in order to become an expert in anything you need to have practiced for 10,000 hours, I calculate I became an expert by the age of 50, putting in five hours and 12 minutes of practice each week for 36 years.
Human progress just keeps delivering causes for complaint, as the years roll by, and so the list of criticisms does naturally grow as the crank ages and the changes-for-the-worse compound and accrue. Hence, the correlation between the words “old” and “curmudgeon,” even though some of us, like Charles and me, were born this way. We just keep getting better with age.
Among my curmudgeonly complaints for the first week of October 2025 are: the disappearance of distinctions between vowel sounds among Americans a generation or more younger than me, so that the words “weary” and “wary,” for example, are almost inevitably mixed up by anyone under the age of 40, sometimes even in print; self-checkout; the proliferation of plastic signage around the village; the disappearance of chocolate almonds and Goldenberg’s Peanut Chews from the candy concessions of the movie theaters of America; the ornamental lighting of trees and shrubs; concrete curbs when curbing is not strictly necessary; Belgian blocks, of course, and driveway gates; the planting of annuals on public greens; the over-frequent use of the unnecessary word “shiplap,” and those little talking screens at the gas pump and in taxicabs trying to get you to eat at Applebee’s. I won’t go on . . . and on and on . . . but you know I’m right.