An Accidental Sportswriter (10 page)

Billie Jean, twenty-nine years old, the best female player in the world, had trained ferociously for what she believed would be her most important match. Her opponent was Bobby Riggs, a fifty-five-year-old hustler whose life up to then had been the prelude to his biggest con. He had already beaten a top-ranked woman, Margaret Court, who had not prepared well enough and had been easily psyched out. That was seen as a setback to the second wave of feminism, led by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, among many others, and to Title IX, the 1972 law barring discrimination by sex in federally funded educational activities. Billie Jean
had
to win. The movement needed a warrior.

Billie Jean was carried into the arena by half-naked male “slaves” and Riggs by a “harem” of underdressed young women. I thought the hoopla and the match were absurd, yet I held my breath for her—and for myself. I had a stake in the outcome. I had come to believe in equality for women, not only because it was fair and because I had a sister, wife, and daughter whose dreams I wanted fulfilled, but because I thought it was good for men like me; if women had equal professional opportunities, the men in their lives would have more of a chance to fulfill
their
dreams instead of spending all their energy making money to support a family. It seemed pragmatic. For me, it would mean more time to take chances writing fiction, a big book, going for the killing. Two years gone from the
Times
and from daily sportswriting, I was a scrabbling freelancer. It was easy to see Billie Jean playing for me as well as for Margie.

More than anyone else, Billie Jean made it clear to me that the women's movement wasn't just for women. In her push for equality in tennis, she revealed the way male tennis players were controlled through the draconian rules of “amateurism.” (Hard to believe now how players were forbidden to accept money beyond the under-the-table payoffs from promoters and sponsors that kept them in a kind of serfdom.) She was as responsible as anyone for “open” tennis, in which professionals and amateurs could compete together, and then for the honest professionalization of the game for everyone.

This made male sportswriters uneasy. Gender was very important. We were complicit in keeping women out of press boxes, much less locker rooms. When women sportswriters began showing up, male sportswriters were less welcoming than male athletes. Women diminished the prestige of our tree house, the men-only access we gloated over to friends and neighbors. Equal access reminded us that in Jock Culture most of us were treated like girls, lesser species to be bought, used, toyed with, dismissed by most athletes, officials, and owners. We could get back at them by refusing our services or spreading nasty tales, but boys were the ones with power.

In 1973, when Billie Jean beat Riggs, Margie and I were both writing from home and making an attempt to share housekeeping and child care. We were trying to edge toward 50–50. I was trying to become more than a
theoretical
feminist. I took my turn shopping, cleaning, getting up in the middle of the night to feed a baby, later taking the two kids to and from school. As long as I acted like a committed participant, not someone
helping out
Margie, it worked. Of course, I slipped now and then, and sometimes I needed to go out on a magazine or newspaper assignment to bring in some fresh cash. I came to like the sharing, especially the closer relationship with the kids. Billie Jean's “liberated” relationship with her husband was a supportive model.

What I didn't know at the time, despite the standard Jock Culture rumors of Billie Jean's lesbianism, was that her seemingly modern marriage—which included being “open” to experimentation—was one of traditional convenience. Billie Jean and her husband, Larry King, whom she often described as the “better feminist,” were in more of a business relationship than a marriage. They slept with other people, in both cases women. It didn't all come to light until 1981, when Billie Jean was sued—in a sense blackmailed—by a former lover and the story erupted in open court. (She had also been on a 1972
Ms
. magazine list of prominent women who had had abortions; Billie Jean claimed she thought she was merely signing a petition in support of choice. Eventually she admitted to the abortion, which enhanced her feminist cred and for a while checked the lesbian rumors.)

I was disappointed, not about her lesbianism but about the false example of a successful modern marriage. She had told us that Larry and she were not only on the same page politically but mutually supportive. He was cool with her as the major breadwinner and himself as the man behind the woman. And they still had dynamite sex! Meanwhile, so many of our friends—like Margie and me—were struggling with the new demands in male-female relationships. We thought that if the most famous woman in the world (at least in my world) was able to juggle career and marriage, maybe we could, too. Hey, what are role models for?

In retrospect, the big lie seems less hypocritical than poignant. She was terrified, she told me later, at the prospect of coming out to her conservative southern California blue-collar parents. And she had no professional choice. The conventional wisdom, probably true, was that even a hint of lesbianism would scare off fans and corporate sponsors. Billie Jean's coming out would have wrecked the nascent women's pro tennis tour of the seventies. That tour was precarious enough; the only sponsor willing to take a chance on it was Big Tobacco, eager to expand the women's market for cigarettes.

As time went on, I needed to compartmentalize my negative feelings about her Virginia Slims (“You've come a long way, baby”) tour. It was crucial to the growth of women's tennis and a boost to all women's sports. Yet was it complicitous in the spike in teenage female smoking and later in women's increased incidence of lung cancer? If so, was it worth it? How can you make that equation, even assuming the lives saved and enhanced by women's sports?

By the time of her forced coming out in 1981, Billie Jean had been supplanted as tennis queen by Chris Evert and then Martina Navratilova, so it had little impact on the game. Her parents embraced her. But the major endorsement deals she and Larry had begun to line up fell away, and she needed to continue playing past her prime. No telling what she might have accomplished as an entrepreneur with money and time.

Nevertheless, I believe that Billie Jean was the most important sports figure of the twentieth century. Not only was she the symbolic leader of a movement representing half the world's athletes and potential athletes, she had also been a leader of the revolution that had overthrown the most oppressive concept in sports, amateurism, a dictatorship in which sports officials, well-paid executives if not wealthy aristocrats, controlled unpaid athletes. Early on, the control came through class—only athletes rich enough to support their training and travels could compete in tennis, golf, and Olympic sports. Later, as working-class kids like Billie Jean rose, the control came through doling out money surreptitiously. By cracking open tennis to professionals, Billie Jean helped create a climate of player power that would sweep through all sports, eventually leading to free agency in baseball.

Billie Jean and Muhammad Ali were the mom and pop of the so-called Athletic Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, even though neither of them was political or intellectual in the way of the academic commandos of that movement. But leaders such as Jack Scott, Richard Lapchick, and Harry Edwards, among others, found models for courage and action in the superstars' principled stands.

Billie Jean was a populist visionary. I admired her concept of World Team Tennis, which would not only make the game more accessible to spectators but bridge the gap between player and fan. She created a league in which top pros played on traveling teams in small venues and afterward gave clinics to local players. They helped create community-based recreational coed teams of all age groups, much like bowling leagues. It's a terrific program that still exists, although nowhere near what I think it might have been had Billie Jean not lost so much influence, money, and momentum in the wake of her palimony trial.

For all my scholarship in women's jock studies, I failed my first important exam. In 1988, my seventeen-year-old daughter, Susannah, was playing high school field hockey, a beneficiary of the Title IX surge in women's sports. I was a fan on the sidelines, thrilled to watch Susannah racing downfield, red-faced and roaring, “Get outta my way!” She was an all-state forward. Sports was our tenuous connection. Her mother and I had just separated, our marriage a casualty, in some ways, of the changing rules. With Sam away at college and Susannah a very independent high school senior, 50–50 wasn't hard in the day-to-day running of a household. Now the problem was our emotional balance.

Margie was writing and editing at a local feminist newspaper. I thought I was being enthusiastic and supportive, while she thought I was being patronizing and pedantic. Maybe I just missed print journalism. She also thought my interest in her fiction was a form of pressure. In 1980, she had published a roman à clef about the
Times
,
Hot Type
, which I liked, but a chauvinistic review in the
Los Angeles Times
and disappointing sales had depressed her. She kept starting and discarding new novels. I wanted her to work harder. And make some money.

In the late eighties,
The
Washington Post
Magazine
offered us a weekly column about the contemporary minefield of middle-class, middle-aged male-female relationships. My friend Jay Lovinger was the editor, and serious money was involved. I was wildly excited. Margie turned it down. Since I was a TV correspondent then, the heavy lifting would be hers, she said. Less time for her work. What work? I might have shouted. I didn't know how to deal with my anger and disappointment, the last straw in a pile of discontents, and eventually I left the house.

So we would stand on the sidelines of Susannah's games, barely talking. But my discomfort was quickly swept away in the pride of my daughter's team and the pleasure of watching her play. I was a fan! I loved those games. Too bad they were so fraught. Susannah was playing field hockey because the Northern Valley Regional High School at Demarest had no soccer team for girls, the sport she had played passionately for years in a local recreation league. Susannah and her friends had complained. They had been upset and talked about a petition, but there was no strong organizing support beyond their group. They had given up, found other sports, or stopped playing sports. We didn't talk about it much at the time. The split-up in the family absorbed most of our attention.

Susannah still loves soccer and plays when she can. It still upsets her to think about not playing high school soccer. When we recently talked about it, she said she found it ironic that I could have been writing about Babe Didrikson, Althea Gibson, and Billie Jean King in the eighties and not have been at all involved in the gender inequity right in front of me. When Susannah and her friends asked the school for a soccer team, they were told that they already had field hockey; they couldn't have a second fall field sport.

They could have used a sportswriter, a male TV sportswriter at that, to remind school officials that the boys had both soccer and football in the fall. Title IX, anyone? The law was sixteen years old then and still not being rigorously enforced. In retrospect, I feel ashamed. And stupid. What a chance to put into practice all that abstract reporting, that pose of liberated macho, make a fuss, challenge the school, create a soccer team. Be useful.

In 2009, I interviewed Billie Jean for a weekly PBS show I was hosting,
LIFE (Part 2),
about aging and renewal. She had just written a book,
Pressure Is a Privilege
, in which she offered a new spin on the 1973 Battle of the Sexes. Now it was the Battle of the Ages, and the late Bobby Riggs was her current role model for successful aging, for never giving up. Her victory, she said, had come about because she respected what he had done in the past. He wasn't just a fifty-five-year-old hustler to her, he was someone who had won the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles at Wimbledon in 1939 and so must never be taken for granted. Respect history and your elders. That's why she had prepared so hard.

I thought that was good (certainly good for the show), but Billie Jean has always had a second serve that can surprise you. She also said that she had come to a number of new thoughts through long-term talk therapy. For example, she understood how sports competition can be used as an escape from everyday life, as a way of putting off all the issues that need eventually to be addressed. You don't have to face your fears when you can focus on the next match. Once she stopped playing regularly, she said, she found herself substituting binge eating for the addiction of competitive matches.

It was a fascinating insight, but we didn't have a chance to develop it. Next time, we promised. Billie Jean has always been a mind in motion, one of the smartest athletes I've known, and I left with unanswered questions. How many athletes find in sports an avoidance of responsibility and stay in sports to defer adulthood? We easily understand the adrenaline rush of competition; what about the narcotic of dissociation from everyday life?

Covering sports, particularly on deadline, can offer a similar rush, and during the absorption of chasing a story it's easy to justify not fulfilling the obligations of a relationship, of a family. Maybe I'll get to the next Thanksgiving with the in-laws, the next school play or teacher meeting, the next meltdown, drug scare, college application. Can't make this one, I've got to file my story.

Chapter Eight
Jock Liberation

J
ust as the feminists were going to make my life as a man easier, the Athletic Revolutionaries of the 1960s and '70s were going to bridge the gap between the jocks and the “pukes”—the label a Columbia University crew coach had slapped on anyone in 1968 who wasn't on his boat, which included hippies, pot smokers, antiwar demonstrators, bearded weirdos, guitar players, and, yes, English majors. (When the coach, Bill Stowe, used that word in an interview, he looked at me with a cheerful condescension that made clear which side of the gap I was on.) In hindsight, I don't think any of the Revolutionaries could have bridged that gap because they were jocks—enlightened but still entitled, ambitious, focused, driven, able to dissociate from everything but the path to the goal. Compared to them, even while ruthlessly plunging ahead on a story, I feel woolly, distractible, sometimes handicapped by the lack of certainty that nothing matters except winning. Sort of puke-ish, I am.

Maybe I was attracted by their certainty that sports was important and was being perverted by the establishment. That reinforced my own growing sense that professional and big-time college sports were merely an extension of the reigning power structure, those pale, male, straight preppies who made money and made war. They were jocks. They were big bullies.

Thus the story that most interested me when I became a columnist in 1967 and could pick most of my own assignments was the growing resentment among athletes, particularly black college football players, at their exploitation by authoritarian coaches who dictated their lives on and off the field. A player could lose his scholarship for growing an Afro or a mustache in defiance of rules, for dating a white woman, for just acting uppity. Meanwhile, he was subject to “stacking,” a practice in which black players were forced into nonleadership positions (many black high school quarterbacks, for example, were turned into running backs and defensive backs in college) and to playing while hurt, risking their careers, even permanent injury, in the interests of their coaches' game plans.

The players' discontent was supported by the revolutionary campus climate. Big-time college sports (basically football and basketball), though traditionally shady enterprises, had yet to become the corrupt conglomerates they are now. So-called student-athletes were not yet living, eating, and studying in jock quarters, isolated from student-students. So they could pick up the antiwar, antiracist, antiestablishment excitement while strolling from their dorms to their classrooms (so many foxy chicks handing out leaflets, chanting!), and they were stung by the reproof of their classmates—“Dumb jock, can't you see how the oppressive patriarchy is fucking you over?” Few athletes joined the demonstrations and risked being cut from the team, but they began to catch the spirit as it applied to them—they
were
being fucked over. “And look what the pigs did to Muhammad Ali!”

With its political, racial, and social justice aspects, that story—which would also lead me into a corner of the biggest tabloid tale of the time, the Patty Hearst kidnapping—seemed like a natural progression from covering Ali, now in his period of exile from the ring. I checked in on him intermittently as I got to know the leaders of the so-called Athletic Revolution, mostly bright academics whose sensibilities were much closer to mine than were those of the hard-core coaches I usually interviewed. I liked the Revolutionaries. Some became friends as well as subjects, which was unusual for me, and troubling. What would happen if I came up with negative information about them? Would I betray my friendship or my professionalism? I had always been contemptuous of reporters whose cozy relationships with their subjects included advising and protecting them. I hated the idea of becoming any subject's “bobo,” or toady, even if I agreed with him. I felt I needed to be careful not to get too friendly, to lose professional perspective. In retrospect it seems quaint and righteous, even a little paranoid. But I also understood the journalistic symbiosis (or Faustian bargain): I was one of their few major media outlets, and they gave me the chance to write about issues that interested me.

The most enduring of the Athletic Revolutionaries was Richard Lapchick, accurately referred to these days as the “social conscience of sports” (his annual racial report cards have been critical in keeping the media sensitive to biased hiring practices, especially in college sports). The son of a famous player and coach who helped integrate pro basketball, Rich, a close friend, has connected academia, the media, and corporations to college and pro teams in progressive programs combating sexism, racism, homophobia. His reformist missions are international.

One of the most visible of the Revolutionaries was Harry Edwards, whose Olympic Project for Human Rights led to the world-stopping black power salute by his San Jose State students, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, on the medal podium at the 1968 Mexico City Games. Eventually an important sports sociologist at Berkeley and adviser to pro teams, Big Harry (six foot eight, 300 pounds, a former basketball player and track star) was a stunningly eloquent speaker, quick thinker, and intimidating presence. In private, he was warm and funny; I enjoyed hanging with him and treasure his advice, even if I can't follow it: buy waterfront.

Probably the most polarizing was Jack Scott, scornfully dubbed “the guru of jock liberation” by the soon-to-be-disgraced vice president, Spiro T. Agnew. Still, it was an accurate moniker. Scott wanted to teach athletes to take control of their bodies and their games. He believed in discipline, hard work, fair play, civil rights, and equal athletic opportunities for women. Like Cosell, he was a true believer in the meritocracy of sports. Scott could admire the idealism of the Olympic movement, while despising the racism and hypocrisy of someone like Avery Brundage, the Nazi sympathizer who headed first the U.S. and then the International Olympic Committees.

Scott was farsighted, a hustler, and one of the most outrageous name-droppers I've met (“Fidel Castro turned me on to margaritas,” he once told me while drinking one). Scott fascinated me because I liked and distrusted him at the same time. He kept me guessing, on guard, a good thing.

The first time I saw Scott, a tall, lean twenty-seven-year-old, he was standing at the front of a University of California classroom wearing red running shoes, a baseball cap, and gym shorts, which in 1970, even in Berkeley, was not considered appropriate academic garb. He brought several hundred undergraduates to startled order by blowing a whistle. He did that, he later explained to them, because “Three hundred yards from here, men who are also supposed to be teachers act and dress like this all the time, curse their students, and impose arbitrary rules about hair, clothes, social life, and no one thinks twice about it.”

Scott could be more outrageous than that, at various times describing coaches as “soulless” reactionaries or implying that many lusted for their players. It got him publicity but tended to distract from his message, which was basic democracy—sports was for the players, not the coaches, officials, and owners, and everyone, regardless of age or gender or size or disability, should have cheap, easy access to participation—but was interpreted as socialism by a lot of people back in those Commie-haunted times.

Scott was no ivory-tower theoretician, no liberal philosopher who had grown up relegated to the sidelines. He had been a hard-hitting high school football player called “Chief” and a college track star. For better and worse, he brought those same jock drives to win, to be celebrated, to kiss the cup, from the field to the revolution. In some ways it may have undone him; it certainly led him to become involved with Patty Hearst, the fugitive heiress who was implicated in robbery and murder.

Scott had only about five years as a besieged and beloved guru. He wrote the seminal
Athletics for Athletes
and
The Athletic Revolution
, noisy, contentious books that outlined his philosophy, which he was able to put into practice as athletic director at the liberal Oberlin College. He created a prototypical Title IX program, gave athletes a voice in the selection of their coaches, and, four years after Tommie Smith's Olympic gesture, hired Smith as track coach. But Scott was soon fired along with the progressive president who had hired him.

Scott helped prepare for publication several countercultural sports books, including Dave Meggyesy's
Out of Their
League
, the memoir of a blue-collar stud's political awakening as he played big-time college and pro football. It is justifiably one of
Sports Illustrated
's best sports books of all time. He and Meggyesy, who remains a friend of mine, fell out during the process, which was not atypical of Scott's relationships with athletes he tried to mentor.

Though I agreed with most of Scott's views on repression and exploitation in sports, I didn't share his worship of athletes. He once told me that the violence at the 1969 free Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in northern California as well as at other rock concerts at that time would never have occurred if more athletes had been present. “What bullshit,” I said. “What about all the jocks on campuses who beat up fellow students?” “You're right,” he said unconvincingly and tried to move on.

But I couldn't stop. What about that überjock Avery Brundage, Scott's ideological opposite in sports? Brundage, the Olympic dictator, had himself been a former standout young athlete (he had lost to Jim Thorpe in track events at the 1912 Olympics). But the restrictions he imposed on athletes' freedom to earn income had led to the nickname “Slavery Avery.” For Brundage, it was always about the games, not the gamers. His determination that “the Games must go on” no matter what else was happening included downplaying Hitler's treatment of German Jews before the 1936 Berlin Games. In one of its most trivial yet cautionary manifestations, the prelude to the Holocaust included barring Jewish athletes from the German team, which violated the Olympic charter. (Brundage's anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sentiments are well documented and were probably helped along by German contracts at his Chicago-based construction company.)

Brundage's personality and power exemplified what Scott was up against. Running Smith and Carlos out of Mexico after their mild, silent gesture was obviously Brundage's idea of affirming his grip. After a couple of interviews, I came to despise that arrogant sleaze, even before I knew about his Nazi connections and his relentless philandering, never attractive attributes in the righteous. The integrity of his amateur principles was a sham, too, always bendable when the Games were in danger of being superseded by other sports spectaculars or there simply was money to be made; see the nationalism, commercialism, and corruption (cities paid off Olympic officials to grant them rights to stage the Games) that marked the late twentieth century. By 1992, the basketball players were no longer amateurs and acted accordingly. When the U.S. Dream Team—including such stars as Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson—went to collect their gold medals, Michael Jordan actually wrapped himself in the American flag. He was a Nike endorser and didn't want to be seen on the podium in the uniform that Reebok had paid the U.S. Olympic Committee for the players to wear. I remember being overwhelmed by the symbolism. Or was it satire?

Brundage died in 1975, a few weeks before I flew to Portland, Oregon, on a
Times
magazine assignment to profile the relationship between Jack Scott and his housemate Bill Walton, the vegetarian Grateful Deadhead who had led UCLA to two national basketball championships and now was an NBA star with the Trail Blazers. Although Walton did not want to be interviewed at length by me (it wasn't personal, he assured me, it was the crass consumerism and counterrevolutionary nature of the
Times
), Scott convinced him that I was a fair and sympathetic major media outlet by showing him a copy of
Nigger
. Walton had recently demonstrated with Dick Gregory and César Chávez, the Mexican-American farmworkers' union leader.

So I spent most of a week living with Walton, Scott, and their womenfolk, Susie and Micki. I puzzled over Scott's relationship with Walton. In the course of a day the thirty-two-year-old Scott could be the twenty-three-year-old Walton's political tutor, editor, athletic trainer, bobo, sidekick, and mooch, a posse of one. The “Big Red-Head,” as Walton was called, seemed kind of goofy and did not have all that much interesting to say. He was mostly busy rehabbing his bad legs and eating—he was almost seven feet tall, and it took a heap of veggies to fill his protein needs. I often pitched in, scraping and chopping in the kitchen. Since I was eating, too, it didn't seem to be violating any
Times
ian rules of objectivity and distance.

It soon became clear that Scott was far more interesting than Walton, even more interesting than their relationship. This was in the waning days of an athletic revolution that was turning out to be less of a rebellion than a temporary mood change. The big shoe companies were buying up athletes, coaches, college teams, and professional leagues. TV money flowed. Jocks were beginning to get rich. The Vietnam War was over. African-American athletes were beginning to dominate pro sports, and they could wear their hair any way they wanted and screw indiscriminately. What was there to demonstrate against?

A man of his times, Scott had moved on, into the violent belly of radical politics.

He had recently emerged from six weeks underground to face charges of harboring and transporting Patty Hearst and surviving members of the Symbionese Liberation Army after a bloody shoot-out in Los Angeles. The SLA was a ragtag group of radicals and criminals, a violent, cultish gang that had kidnapped Hearst, then a nineteen-year-old college student, from her Berkeley home in 1974, a year and a half earlier. It had offered to release her first in exchange for several imprisoned members, then for a multimillion-dollar Bay Area food distribution program. It was a sensational story, made more so as the SLA robbed, murdered, and released tapes of Patty espousing their revolutionary line under the
nom de
guerre
Tania. She was seen in a bank security video brandishing a rifle and barking commands at the robbery victims. The pundits debated whether she was a true revolutionary or a brainwashed subject of the Stockholm syndrome, in which captors become emotionally attached to their captors.