An Accidental Sportswriter

An Accidental Sportswriter

a memoir

ROBERT LIPSYTE

For Lois, my format

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

—Dylan Thomas, “Should Lanterns Shine”

Contents

 

 

Introduction: Accidents Happen

I
lined up a summer job in 1957 as helper on a city water truck that would cruise Manhattan filling troughs for the dwindling number of working horses in the city. I had just graduated from Columbia and was headed to Claremont College in California, which was as far from the borough of Queens as I could imagine myself. I had sent a dorm deposit. Once out there, I would fulfill my destiny as a novelist, either starving on the beach because my fiction was too avant-garde or luxuriating by the side of my pool because I had sold out. Both scenarios involved dangerous women. I was an English major.

But I needed a summer job to raise cash for the trip. When the water truck job fell through—it was canceled, I think, for lack of funding—I bought my first copy of
The
New York Times
. I'd heard the paper had good classified ads and quickly found one for “editorial assistant” at the
Times
itself.

The personnel people at the
Times
were pleasant enough when I showed up at West Forty-third Street that June morning, but patronizing. These jobs are extremely coveted, they said, because you assist
New York Times reporters and editors
. You get to share their air. It sounded as though I were applying to be a squire for King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. One of my interviewers waved toward the invisible line of Rhodes Scholars, Fulbright Scholars, and Ph.D. candidates waiting for a job and implied that my B.A. was a dime a dozen. But my last interviewer suggested I fill out an application anyway. Who knows? Something might come up in a few months. I almost didn't bother since I would be going west in a few months. But I was a polite boy then, and I filled it out.

I went a block south to seedy old Forty-second Street and saw a cowboy double-feature. I loved Westerns. When I was a kid, my dad and I went to a shoot-'em-up every Tuesday night in the summertime, and the Lone Ranger has been a role model of mine since childhood. He protected weaker people by beating up bullies without becoming a bully himself. (I still love Westerns. In some ways, I think, sports have replaced Westerns and jocks have replaced gunslingers in our national imagination, not necessarily to our advantage.)

After the movies, I took the subway to Rego Park. I had moved back home after graduation. My mother looked up from the stove to say, “You got a crank call, Bobby. A man said if you show up tomorrow and pass a physical, you can start work immediately at
The
New York Times
.”

The physical consisted of showing up.

That “editorial assistant” job was copyboy in the sports department. It seemed like an odd place for me, and I wondered if I could handle it. I didn't know much about sports. A fat boy growing up, I didn't even start playing sports seriously until I was in my teens. My dad was no fan; we never talked sports at home. I was, at best, a casual fan, enough to understand what my friends were talking about. (I actually didn't become a fan until I left daily sportswriting for the first time in 1971 and could watch a game without having to think about covering it.) And not only had I never read the
Times
sports pages, I had barely read the
Times
at all. (My parents, being public school teachers, got the
New York World-Telegram & Sun
, which had an education page.) But I needed a job.

My shift was 7
P.M.
to 3
A.M.
My nights off were Tuesday and Wednesday. My first night on the job, I almost stopped the presses.

The copyboy who broke me in was in a hurry to get out for a long dinner break at Gough's, the bar across the street, to talk sports with the printers and pressmen. What he was supposed to train me to do was simple enough: hover near the copydesk—actually a dozen dirty blond cigarette-charred wooden desks lined up so the cranky old bullies could face each other and chuckle as they butchered reporters' stories—until one of them yelled “Boy!” This could be a call to get coffee, sharpen pencils, refill pots of library paste, or, most important, snatch a page of edited copy, roll it up, snap on a rubber band, and slip it into a plastic-and-leather canister that would be launched like a mortar round up a metal pipe in the pneumatic system to the fourth floor, where it would pop out of the pipe and thump into a rubber well. Someone would unsnap the leather strap of the canister, pluck out the copy, and hand it to a Linotype operator, who would turn it into lines of hot metal type to be fitted into the frames of printing press pages on huge stone tables.

Whether it was a failure of communication in the five-minute training session or, more likely, one of my enduring techno screw-ups, I skipped the stage in which I was supposed to slip the copy into the canister. I slipped the rolled-up paper directly into the sucking mouth of the pneumatic pipe. There was a whoosh, and the lid of the pipe snapped shut.

After a while, the sports makeup man on the fourth floor began phoning down:
“Where's the fucking copy?”
The head of the sports copydesk screamed back,
“Look up your ass!”
This was common, but the long absence of copy was not. As deadline approached, someone thought to check the system, actually put an arm up the pipe. It was lined with paper. Most of that night's sports report was stuck in transit.

Had it happened a few minutes later, they might have had to stop the presses or release part of the first edition with no sports section. Small loss, I say in retrospect, but unthinkable then (not unthinkable now, of course, when the
Times
apparently has toyed with the idea of further downsizing the sports report, even dropping the section entirely, as did the
Washington Times
, to save money). With the exception of Gay Talese's pieces, the
Times
sports section in 1957 was at best mediocre, perhaps by design. The editorial side of the
Times
seemed faintly embarrassed by sports, although Business appreciated the car and boat ads it anchored, and everybody enjoyed the free tickets that flowed in. A survey later revealed that
Times
readers interested in sports took a second paper, usually the
New York Post
or the
Daily News
, to satisfy their jock jones.

But on my first night, the pipes were jammed with the faux Homeric mythmaking of rosy-fingered Arthur Daley, the “Sports of the
Times
” columnist; the plodding game detail of the ambassadors to baseball, John Drebinger, Roscoe McGowen, and Louis Effrat; John Rendel's yacht-racing stories with their long tails of agate-type results; and the symphonic tennis summaries of the courtly Allison Danzig. All were respected students of their games, all were determinedly dulled down in the style of the
Times
. Years later, writing feature sidebars to Danzig's coverage, I was impressed (and, yes, proud) at how tennis stars lined up at the press table after their matches to respectfully ask what
Mister
Danzig had observed and how well or poorly they had played.

But that first night at the
Times
, I was made to feel as though I had almost let the only illuminated pages of Genesis slip out of my hands into a fire.

The pneumatic system was shut down until the pages, some still rolled, tumbled and fluttered back into the sports department. I stood there dumbly as the deskmen glanced at me, rolled their eyes, and shook their heads. Smirking, one of them, with exaggerated movements, filled the canisters and fired them upstairs. They chuckled, then asked me if I understood what I had done, how close we had come.

I felt like crying, but didn't know how anymore. I was nineteen. Should I walk out into the night right now or wait to quit until the other copyboy returned?

I'm not sure why I decided to wait. It was not as if this were going to be the start of a career. Was it because I thought it was the right thing to do or I wanted to hang tough or I was frozen in place? After the other copyboy returned, I decided to finish my shift because I didn't want to slink off. The next day I decided to go back because I didn't want to let the bullies win. All night I had brooded over that deskman's smirk and his elaborate gestures. I went back that next night with a stony look and my fists in my pockets. No one mentioned the incident that night or ever again. Old news.

Fifty-three years later, time contracts. The humiliation of that first night is more vivid than today's breakfast. And the lesson as well. Don't quit. Gut it out. Try to hold on till the buzzer. It will work out, somehow.

Doggedness was the first of many lessons I learned as I began, accidentally, my career. I'm sure I would have learned many of them as a doctor (in my mother's dreams) or as a college professor (my dad's). Mine came from a lifetime ducking into and out of locker rooms chasing Muhammad Ali, Mickey Mantle, Billie Jean King, myself, and, ultimately, my dad.

In the protective environment of the
Times
, in those days more powerful than most of the sports organizations the
Times
covered, I got the chance to develop a distinctive voice that has drawn supportive fans and furious critics. Some thought I was a clear voice of reason, some thought I was a clueless contrarian. The label
cynic
often cropped up; I saw myself as a
skeptic
. I came to despise the common practice, in the great sports editor Stanley Woodward's term, of “godding up” the ballplayers.

Some in friendly fashion (Bob Costas, Dick Schaap), some not, wondered why I couldn't kick back and enjoy the games. Why couldn't I appreciate the joy? Why couldn't I accept these accomplished men and women in sports as my heroes? Why did my work have to be so relentlessly political? (At first, perhaps defensively, I would try to trace that question back to the discussions about social justice at my parents' dinner table. Then I thought—now I always think—why isn't everyone else's work more political?)

The question begs, Bobby:
What held you in sports for so long, and what kept bringing you back?

For starters, I fell in love—with the paper. Though I never liked the copyboy job or the grumblies on the desk, I came to love the
Times
, especially at 9
P.M.
, when the giant presses in the subbasement roared to life with the first edition. More than fifty years later, the hot-type presses long scrapped, the paper now housed in a glass skyscraper a few blocks south of the Disneyfied Times Square, I can feel the old building shuddering in its nightly rebirth. When the tremors reached the sports department on the third floor, I could feel them in my loins. Maybe it helped to have read too much Romantic English poetry, but I felt connected to something grand and important. I had dabbled in journalism as an ironical columnist for the Forest Hills High School
Beacon
and as a lackluster reporter for Columbia's
Daily
Spectator
, which I quit, bored, after a year or so
.
Truth was in the sweep of fiction, I thought, not in a string of little facts. But at the
Times
, there was a sense of mission to find the Truth.

There were heroes at the
Times
who had that calling, role models you could actually talk to: the great war and civil rights reporter Homer Bigart; the artistic, compassionate cityside columnist Meyer Berger; the bold foreign correspondents Harrison Salisbury, David Halberstam, and Gloria Emerson. There was also Charlotte Curtis, whose incisive, witty dispatches on society and fashion transformed the style pages; she proved you could make your points and launch a big-league career from a
Times
department that was considered secondary to Foreign or National. Her example certainly helped me. I rejected offers to move to other departments at the paper or to the Washington or Tokyo bureau.

There could be no denying, even if not always understanding, sports' hold on me. It was heady to interview my heroes' heroes (“What's Yogi Berra really like?” Halberstam asked me) and attend the front-page games and fights. But after a few years, that was no longer glamorous. Other people's envy of my job wasn't enough. I'm still figuring out how much of what kept me on the job was the pull of sporting events themselves and how much was the perspective that sports gave me on the larger world. I could enjoy the Kentucky Derby, for example, as a great horse race, a splendid party, and a vignette of Americana only the first couple of times I covered it before issues of class, race, and equine exploitation became impossible to ignore. The first two Super Bowls I covered (II and III) were bang-up football games. What fun I had, drinking with Coach Vince Lombardi, hanging out with Joe Namath, meeting sportswriters from all over the country! But after that, the glorification of real and symbolic violence in a time of war, the corporate involvement, and the defining of manhood through the game seemed at least as compelling as the play-by-play.

Eventually, in all the events I covered, I began to perceive the shape of a social infrastructure that at first I called SportsWorld, now Jock Culture, because it is based on a model of manhood in the arena and it extends into business, politics, and family life. I'm more and more convinced that Jock Culture is a defining strand in American life and has helped create many of its values—positive ones such as hard work, bravery, and fellowship, as well as negative ones such as intimidation, domination, and cheating to win. In Jock Culture, the opponent must be beaten but ultimately respected. Contempt is reserved for those who are not of the team, not one of the righteous, focused, disciplined insiders who play or cheerlead or comfort or boost. Contempt is reserved for the Outsiders, the nerds, wimps, burnouts, band fags. The English majors.

In this company of men, male sportswriters are honorary jocks, their manhood certified by their locker room access (which has been diminishing for years). At first I preened in my faux jockhood, but that got harder when I realized that what we did was hardly manly, sniffing around athletes for news crumbs, boosting them when they were winning, kicking them when they were down, dismissing them when they no longer mattered for our stories, meanwhile convincing ourselves and others that the outcomes of games were important. The games
are
important, as Jock Culture dramas, as signifiers of a time, as definers of values. The scores aren't important.