Frank Deford is a good writer; a novel about what becomes of an All-American football player after the football ends is a good idea; Everybody’s All-American is not a good book. It did not make for a good movie, either, but having seen the movie I assumed it had to do with the casting (if anyone could put it over, it’s Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lange, except if the story requires them to play twenty years’ worth of ages starting with college, which EA-A does). It isn’t the casting. It’s just built wrong.

The story might have worked better as just that — a story instead of a novel. (In his review of the film, Roger Ebert mentions a John Cheever short story in which an over-the-hill athlete lines up furniture to hurdle at parties; it’s a sad fact of writing life that a lot of grand ideas got done faster and better by Cheever.)

Deford spends much too much time on Gavin Grey in his heyday, and the bulk of that is spent telling us that Gavin is bigger than Elvis and better than Namath (when he’s not reassuring us yet again that Babs, Gavin’s intended, is the most beautiful creature ever to float to shore on a half-shell). Deford’s intention here is to nail down some truths: about the weird intensities that college football inspires in its partisans; about bygone folkways of the South, mourned and not; about the nature of fame and its effects.

That subject matter is, again, solid enough, but in addition to downright embarrassing renditions of Southern accents (none more cringey than those of the black characters — “jes'” this, “yes’m” that, “chile”s all over the shop), Deford uses as his narrator an overawed nephew of Gavin’s, Cake, who, despite idolizing Gavin and nursing a tent-pitching crush on Babs for most of his life, is an academic as an adult and thus apparently possessed of the critical distance necessary to deliver the narrative. The naive/”country” narrator — who, as he grows up and becomes more sophisticated, begins to discern the central situation’s true outlines — is a time-honored device, and it is possible to execute it elegantly (see: Sophie’s Choice), but instead of allowing that process to occur organically, Deford installs an older character, a judge no less, to lecture Cake on everything from race relations to what will become of Gavin after the cheering stops.

That sort of exposition feels like homework — not just for us but for Deford, who evidently opted to take a list of insights he’d been saving for a while and insert them into the plot, so said “plot” does not develop so much as hop hither and yon across 25 years like a child crossing a hot parking lot barefoot. Ditto the characters, who come across as archetypes, supplied with the occasional convenient mot that points up Judge Pace’s abstractions — it’s not bad, exactly. It’s just unsatisfying. …Well, sometimes it’s bad. There is, you have probably deduced, a Magical Black Man; worse, Gavin is The Only White Man Who Respects The MBM Despite The Racism That Surrounds Them Both. The sequence is twice as long as it should be, and Deford could have saved it by critiquing the mildewy prose that often attends matchups between titans of sport, but he perpetrates it instead. And he goes for a big finish that doesn’t work either — it’s rushed, and Deford hasn’t spent the necessary time setting it up, either plot-wise or character-wise, so it felt like I’d picked up another book.

Deford can write; he can get at the heart of the story in his non-fiction. Maybe he thought that, because Everybody’s All-American is not a “true” story, he didn’t have to take as much care with the shaping of it, because it’s art and not reporting; maybe his editor likes that kind of thing…who knows. I do know two things: 1) the title means “the All-American who belongs to everybody,” not “everybody is an All-American,” as I had always assumed for some reason; and 2) there’s a good yarn in there, but Deford didn’t tell it, not this time. Disappointing.

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