An Accidental Sportswriter (14 page)

Chapter Twelve
The Onliest (Part Two)

T
urns out Ali and I weren't done with each other after all. Though I hadn't forgiven his betrayal of Malcolm X, with time I came to understand how it could have happened. Ali was twenty-two years old, in the bubble of a magical universe beyond all his dreams—he was the heavyweight champion of the world, a sex god, the “onliest boxer that people talk to like he's a senator,” and under the fatherly protection of a religious cult's leader, Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. Ali felt safe and important. The apostasy of Malcolm, cold and real, threatened to prick that bubble. So Ali ran out on him.

Through the early 1970s, while I wrote fiction and then
SportsWorld
, I found myself wondering what he was like now. After he beat George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle to regain his heavyweight title, I decided it was time to return to the story that had jump-started my career.

After four years away from him, I was fresh and he was fun again. It was 1975. He was less dogmatic—he was more comfortable in his religion—and more relaxed. He could be kind; I remember almost missing a flight because he'd noticed that a little old lady had left the cap on her camera lens, and after plucking it off he posed for her again. He could be an outrageous hound; at a middle school award ceremony he MCed, he tried to pull a teen queen into our limo. She was willing, but the principal blocked her. “Does he always do this?” the principal asked me. “I'm not always with him,” I said.

That was a stop on a weeklong Florida exhibition tour I tagged along on for a freelance
Times
magazine piece. The tour ended in a high school football field near Daytona Beach. He had just finished a jokey charity boxing match, and now he was back in the motor home he used as a dressing room, changing clothes while his bodyguard shooed everybody out, Jake LaMotta, Angelo Dundee, me, everybody except three foxes he had picked out of the crowd. Then two of the foxes were released, and Ali grinned at us as he closed the door behind himself and the chosen fox.

I watched for a while, until the motor home began to jiggle on its springs. I imagined that the champ was floating and stinging.

Members of his entourage looked at their watches—there were planes to catch—and then at me. “Don't even think about it,” someone said, and Angelo said, “Don't write about this, Bob,” and one of the press agents said, “Not if you ever want to interview him again.”

I thought about the scene in
Madame Bovary
when Emma and Leon did it in a carriage that jiggled on its springs. Could I steal from Flaubert? It would be homage, right? Show off that “smooth literary touch” that Talese had mentioned. Eventually, in the
Times
magazine piece, I described the scene clearly enough to ensure that I would never be able to interview him again. This was no discreet quickie, it was in public, part of his performance. I felt a twinge of regret. Too bad. It was over between Ali and me before it really got started again.

The
Times
titled my article “King of All Kings.” I thought it was a good enough piece to go out on, my last word on my Big Story. Time to move on.

Yet I wasn't all that surprised that the first thing Ali said a year later when he saw me again was “‘King of All Kings,' right!”

Then he invited me to come listen to him some more.

“Nat Turner and Wyatt Earp,” he said dreamily, “they was dead a hundred years before their pictures was made. And of course they didn't get to play themselves.”

This was in Miami, and he was lounging on a couch in the stern of another motor home, dressed for a morning run in a black sweat suit and black army boots. But he was also wearing makeup for his title role in his autoflick,
The Greatest
. That's why I was there. The
Times
' Arts and Leisure section had sent me down to write about Ali playing himself. I had figured that even if Ali wouldn't talk to me, there would be plenty of people on the movie set who would.

“After this picture I'm going to play Hannibal, hundreds of elephants. I got to have roles equivalent to my life. This face”—he sat up and touched it reverently—“is worth billions. My roles have always got to be number one. I can't be the boy in the kitchen. Some big football star plays the waiter in the movie while some homosexual gets the lead role.”

I probably should have known better than to quote him, but it was such a great line and not untrue. Hadn't the closeted Rock Hudson taught my generation how to bag chicks? Ali had always made homosexual jokes, wouldn't this be a way of showing character, much like the jiggling motor home? I didn't care about protecting him. This quasi-accurate movie was based on his quasi-accurate autobiographical book. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., told me, “What made the script difficult to write was the facts. We decided not to be inhibited by the facts, to change them if necessary, to adhere to the truth.”

Two weeks after Ali's quote about homosexuals in leading roles appeared, the National Gay Task Force, in a letter to the editor, called “Ali's bigotry . . . unconscionable” and wrote that “an interviewer should not let such prejudice ride without comment.”

I think the Task Force was right; I should have put that quote into the context of Ali's mindlessly casual and mostly unreported racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic remarks. But still it rankled that, under some pressure, I replied, “I made an error of judgment. My consciousness stands raised.” Who wants to admit a mistake? Or have to avoid writing truthfully because of what has come to be called political correctness?

While I'm remembering getting ticked off about that, I remember something else I perceived—in a selfish, careerist way—as a professional humiliation.

That was on a day in 1986, in Atlanta.

“Hello, stranger,” murmured Ali. He was sitting on a hotel room couch in the official headquarters of King's Dream, a heavyweight fight between Tony “TNT” Tubbs and “Terrible” Tim Witherspoon for which the new King, Don, had paid the old King of All Kings walking-around money to drum up some press.

But Ali was not walking around. His bare feet were in a plastic pan of water that also contained electric massagers. He was trying to jolt his numbed appendages back to life. It might have been an early symptom of Parkinson's disease. In those days, no one wanted to deal with the possibility that he could be seriously ill or, for that matter, even mildly punch-drunk. He slurred words when he was tired.

I was feeling sad and nostalgic. I hadn't seen much of him, and although friends had commented on his physical deterioration, it was new to me. I was still at
Sunday Morning
. I had come to this warm city for a proposed twelve-minute segment on Ali. With me was a talented young producer, Brett Alexander, a six-foot, four-inch African American I worked with often.

After the usual chitchat to cover the interminable setting of lights and camera angles, I conducted what turned out to be the shortest and worst interview Ali and I have ever had. I started it by referring back ten years, when Ali had been talking about being on a divine mission and . . .

“I have nothing to say,” said the man who never had nothing to say. His words were slurred. “Not talking about that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

It went on like that for a few minutes. I was hurt and embarrassed. I was supposed to be the Ali-ologist, and it's expensive to send bodies and equipment out of town for a TV story. So I pressed on.

“You are a tricky man, a wise man,” he ranted, “and you been sent by the power structure to make me look bad. And they sent along the biggest, darkest nigger they could find.”

Now I was angry. We shouted at each other for a few minutes, but it was not even good television, at least not for an artistic, mild-mannered program. After a while, Brett signaled the crew to pack it in and we left. I was furious, but they were nonchalant, concerned about where we would go for lunch. Brett was sympathetic; he figured the poor guy was down on his luck, hurting, and probably a little paranoid. I asked about being called “nigger,” and he shrugged. Blacks are allowed.

But I couldn't let it go. I had to go back. The hell with the “I don't have to be what you want me to be” stuff. One thing he has to be is a decent interview for me. It had been part of our social contract for twenty-two years.

It was a bad moment that still makes me squirm. Why should this be all about me? Why wasn't I sensitive to what he was going through? The King of All Kings, down on his luck, vulnerable, having to put up with my egoshit. But I was still fuming. If he didn't come through, I was going to write about this, rip him up and down, expose him for what he was, a mindless pug available to be interpreted into a symbol of anything you need, a blank slate on which to write your own dogmas and dreams. Ultimately, Ali signified nothing.

I stormed back into the hotel room by myself. Two young women were giggling as Ali pulled them into the curtained-off area that was his bedroom. Just before he pulled the curtain, he grinned at me and said, “Just like old times, huh, Bob?”

With that the bad air whooshed out of me. I grinned back at him.

Every time he's seen me in recent years, Muhammad Ali asks the same question: “What's the difference between a Jew and a canoe?”

He starts laughing before answering: “A canoe tips.”

Ali knows I'm Jewish—in the old days he often informed me I was so intelligent because I didn't eat pork (wrong). Once he even asked the Jew-canoe question during a fund-raiser for his Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, then being referred to as the Museum of Tolerance. While his fourth wife, Lonnie, and his handlers winced, the other attendees, all white and mostly Christian, laughed uproariously. They told me later they knew he was kidding—in fact, they said, it was a brilliant send-up of intolerance. After all, Ali had quickly added, “If a black man, a Puerto Rican, and a Mexican are sitting in the backseat of a car, who's driving? Give up? The po-lice.”

He followed that with “What did Abraham Lincoln say when he woke up from a two-day drunk?” While his audience blinked, he answered, “I freed who?” and rewarded himself with laughter before they did.

By then Ali was getting the benefit of the doubt as a cartoon saint, nonthreatening and mostly mute. Many of the people who had hated him in the sixties—and there had been plenty, black and white—had come around to admiring his courage and lack of self-consciousness as a Parkinson's patient. Those who loved him most were those who had not wanted to serve in the army during the Vietnam War—his refusal had helped justify theirs and removed the stigma of cowardice—and African Americans, who saw him as a powerful race man who stood up to the white establishment.

His critics say, with some validity, that he has benefited from projection. They point out how his admirers assign him progressive political and social views that he does not hold. His admirers point out his sacrifices for principle; had Ali remained a Christian, jockstrapped through the army giving exhibitions for the troops, and kept his sexual affairs private, he might have become a major corporate endorser.

I can go both ways. I wept in 1996 when he lit the Olympic torch with a shaky hand (he burned himself but never let on), and six years later I cursed when he refused to condemn Al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks because “I got business interests in that part of the world.”

A Muhammad Ali revisionism is under way. Right-wingers see bashing Ali, whom they consider a liberal icon, as a way of bashing liberals. Ali's mocking of Joe Frazier through the seventies as an “Uncle Tom” and a “gorilla” was certainly an Ali low point, whether or not it was merely to hype the gate of their fights.

Yet whatever Ali was or wasn't personally, he made people brave.

I found it hard to believe that he'd actually pull off that museum of his, although I was in awe of Lonnie's drive and intelligence. She had an MBA and an icy discipline. I should never have doubted the power of Ali's name combined with Lonnie's ambition. In recent years, not only did the Ali Center open but 80 percent of his commercial rights were sold for a reported $50 million to the same company that markets the Elvis Presley image. A book was published called
GOAT
(Greatest of All Time, his corporate name), a gorgeous gallery of photos that weighed seventy-five pounds and sold for $3,000 (the autographed “champ” edition, with a Jeff Koons plastic sculpture attached, was $10,000). I had contributed an essay and was thus a guest of the publisher, Taschen, which launched the book during Art Basel, an international show of the hot, the hip, and the hustling, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, the site of that first fight with Liston.

So there I was at ringside (I was one of many to make a brief speech), possibly sitting in the same seat I had sat in some forty years earlier for the fight. Only this time I was sitting near Ali and Will Smith, who had played him in the movie
Ali
. It was December, and just like the very first time we met it was cold where I came from but warm here and the popcorn man was making money and I had something to write about. It doesn't get better than this.

Chapter Thirteen
Queer Studies

I
n the summer of 1999, a
Times
marketing executive, Tom Kulaga, called me with a hot tip off the gay grapevine. In a lifestyle piece about a new restaurant, the
Miami Herald
had outed one of the owners, Billy Bean, a former major-league outfielder. Kulaga thought Bean would be an excellent guest for a series of panels on gay athletes that I was moderating for the
Times
. I'd been back at the paper since 1991.

I called Bean on August 19. He was pleasant but hesitant at becoming a public spokesman while he was barely out of the closet. He had allowed a gay reporter to include his sexual orientation in her story because he could no longer live a furtive life. A former college teammate had recently died in a car crash, and none of their mutual friends had been able to call Billy in time for the funeral. No one had his telephone number or e-mail address. He had pulled away from them to preserve his secret.

We talked about his baseball career. “The whole nine years,” he said, “I had one foot in the major leagues and one on a banana peel.” We made a date to talk some more.

Two days later, I called again. We agreed that a panel discussion might not be the best next stage of his coming out. I suggested a big
Times
story first. Lay out his life so that when he did appear in a public forum—on that
Times
panel, of course—he wouldn't have to explain himself. He sounded interested, but he wasn't sure, he needed to think about it. We agreed to a third telephone call in a few more days in which we'd talk about the possibility of meeting face-to-face.

I wanted that story. I'd been leading up to it for years. I thought about my bully Willie and the Halsey Junior High hoods kicking our “fag bags” out of our hands, about all the coaches using words like “pussy” and “sissy” to keep straight boys in line. A major-league ballplayer! This would be a chance to crack open the cynical homophobia of Jock Culture.

Ever since the publication in 1977 of
The David Kopay Story
, the autobiography of an NFL running back, I'd thought that gay athletes could provide fascinating insights into masculinity in Jock Culture. An aggressive player nicknamed “Psych” for his ferocious running and blocking, Kopay had written movingly about the terrible shame of homoerotic thoughts in a sport outwardly contemptuous of homosexuals; the emotional isolation; the need to prove “manliness” through heterosexuality, drinking, and reckless play; and the awareness that football itself was a sexual release.

Not only did the
Times
not review the book, but Pulitzer Prize winner Dave Anderson's thoughtful sports column about it was killed. The incumbent editor, Abe Rosenthal, and the publisher, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, were considered homophobic. Gay
Times
editors and reporters were deep in the closet.

Kopay's book became an underground bible for gay athletes, who had few confidants who could understand their two worlds. As eye-opening as the book was for nongays, the book had little early traction; sportswriters enjoyed gossiping about suspected gay sports stars but shied away from writing about homophobia and homoeroticism in the locker room. I was freelancing when Kopay's book was published, and I pitched my agent a book called
Gay like Me
, playing off John Howard Griffin's best seller
Black like Me
, for which he had temporarily darkened his skin and traveled through the Deep South. I would “come out” and observe the response. My agent thought that not only would my book make no money, it might darken the rest of my career. Soon afterward, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer, a manliness test of its own. I didn't get back to gay athletes until 1986, when I did an NBC News piece on the unconquerable Tom Waddell, a decathlete on the 1968 Olympic team. Before he died of AIDS, Waddell created the Gay Games (until the Olympic Committee sued, it was called the Gay Olympics), a sports and cultural festival with no qualifying restrictions. You didn't have to be gay to play.

In 1988, during the lead-up to the Seoul Olympics, I hung out with Greg Louganis, the world's best diver. I use “hung out” advisedly; it was in a restaurant bathroom, away from my producer and crew, that I asked him about his sexual orientation. There were constant rumors, and the man he was living with in Malibu was gay. Greg seemed to enjoy being playfully evasive, neither answering my question nor shutting me down.

Louganis had spent his life fighting slurs; he'd been called “retard” (he had a learning disability) and “nigger” (he was part Samoan). He didn't need “fag.” And what more did we need than his courageous performance? At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, I watched him crack open his head on the diving board, then come back a few minutes later, bloody and stitched, to nail a gold-medal dive.

Five years later, now back at the
Times
, I went to see him in an off-Broadway play,
Jeffrey
, in which he played a chorus boy dying of AIDS. I returned the next day before showtime to tell him how much I had liked his performance. “So does this mean you're out?” I asked.

Louganis laughed and recalled our last conversation. Then he said, “You know, the way I deal with my feelings is that if I'm afraid of something, I'll face it. When I was growing up, I had nightmares about snakes biting me. So when I was around ten, I got a boa constrictor. The pet shop guy said it was a girl. We named her Rosie. She was only about four feet long. She lived in my room. And my sister was really terrible about this. She would come in and bother Rosie, and Rosie would start biting me. So I've been bitten, oh, countless times by a snake, my worst nightmare.”

“Is this some kind of metaphor for me to figure out?”

“I guess you could also say this play is my Rosie.”

The
Times
held the column for a few days, concerned that I was outing Louganis against his wishes. The climate at the paper had changed radically; Punch Sulzberger's son, Arthur, Jr., was a champion of gay rights (as was Abe's son, Andrew, later the editorial page editor). Editors eventually decided to run the column, figuring that Louganis was outing himself, which he confirmed to me several years later and in his autobiography. As usual, my subject was at least a beat ahead of me. Though I thought Louganis was finally declaring himself gay in my column, in fact he was also declaring himself HIV positive. (Which created a brief, retroactive controversy: what right did he have to dive into that Olympic pool with a bleeding wound and endanger others?)

Despite my interest in the subject, particularly as a tool to pry deeper into Jock Culture, it was difficult to write about male homosexual athletes; other than Kopay, no members of a big-league sports team had come out. Then I met Ed Gallagher, who at twenty-seven, in despair over his homosexuality, had rolled his body off the highest point of the Kensico Dam in Westchester, a New York suburb.

Gallagher had presented himself to the world as “meat man,” a six-foot, six-inch, 275-pound former offensive lineman who loved to hit hard, drive drunk, and use women like Kleenex. He'd been all-state in high school, gone to the University of Pittsburgh on a football scholarship, and had a tryout with the New York Jets. After he was cut, it got harder and harder to maintain his identity to himself.

“I was a sports hero, but please don't look beneath the surface, I can't handle it,” he told me. “No one ever got close. I was moody, sometimes I lashed out. I was so confused: Who am I? What am I supposed to do? I've got these thoughts and feelings a jock isn't supposed to have and these sexual fantasies about men as well as women.”

In early 1985, “tanked up on wine,” he cruised Greenwich Village bars until he found a man who “coaxed” him into his first homosexual experience. He liked it. But the next morning he felt “filthy.” Twelve days later, at the dam, he attempted suicide, two miles from his high school football field. At the bottom of his 110-foot “fall from grace,” Gallagher broke his neck.

Later, he would say that in losing his body he gained his soul. He felt liberated as a quadriplegic in a wheelchair. “I used to be emotionally paralyzed, Joe Macho, John Wayne. I tried to match my image to the beer commercials. The jock.

“I feel sorrier for the person I was than for me now. If I could reach back, I'd hug me and say, ‘Kid, you're a human being of which there's a wide variety. So just go find people you can share your feelings with and love.'”

By the time I met Ed in 1992, he was thirty-four years old, loud, handsome, bearded, driving his wheelchair like Ben-Hur's chariot. He lived on full disability in a subsidized housing project. In the seven years since his suicide attempt, he had become a local resource for suicide prevention groups, giving talks at schools, producing and hosting a weekly cable show, and directing a nonprofit self-help group, Alive to Thrive.

“Don't tell me that life stinks,” he'd tell a high school audience. “Tell me what part of your life stinks. You don't throw away an apple because it has a bruise. You cut out the bruise and eat the rest of the apple, right? I tried to throw all of myself away.”

Ed was smart and open, and his insights into Jock Culture led me deeper into the homosociality (the latest preferred academic phrase) of the locker room, the meaning of all that naked horseplay, dick grabbing, ass slapping I'd seen even in the big leagues. Were these guys so sure of their hetero masculinity that they could mock it, or were they exciting themselves with homoeroticism?

“Both at the same time,” said Ed, laughing.

By the time Billy Bean arrived in 1999, I was ready with my questions and comfortable asking them.

For that third phone call, the one in which we were going to discuss a face-to-face meeting, I flew to Miami and told him I was around the corner. There was a slight pause, he laughed, and we made a date to have dinner that night. I knew I had my story.

Bean was simply one of the most charming and engaging people I've ever interviewed, boyishly model handsome, funny, warm. I could easily believe one of his big-league teammates who later told me, “Billy could have been a great player, but he tried too hard to make everyone happy, wanted everyone to like him, he put too much pressure on himself.”

Bean's story of isolation and subterfuge may have been familiar to countless gay men and lesbians, and his passion to play big-league ball was shared by countless high school and college baseball players, but, as I wrote in a front-page story, “the combination of those two struggles offers a rare window into the fiercely competitive and hyper-masculinized arena of major team sports.”

“I never dated another major leaguer, and I have no idea whether or not there are other gay ballplayers,” said Bean. “One would think so, but if they were as deeply closeted as I was, who would know? I went to Hooters, laughed at the jokes, lied about dates because I loved baseball. I still do. I'd go back in a minute. I only wish I hadn't felt so alone, that I could have told someone, and that I hadn't always felt God was going to strike me dead.”

High school quarterback, point guard, valedictorian, college baseball all-American, handsome, thoughtful, and a celebrated “babe magnet,” Billy Bean was his family's golden child. Yet he was nagged by the feeling that something was missing, that there was an emotional hole at the center of his life. His mother would later describe it to me as “a sadness in him I couldn't reach.” Bean had long suspected that he was homosexual despite being heterosexually active since high school. He was married for three years. He didn't have his first homosexual experience until he was twenty-eight.

By that time, the pattern of his baseball career was set. In nine years of bouncing onto and off major-, minor-, winter-, and Japanese-league rosters, Bean logged less than four years of major-league pension time for three different teams. Six feet tall and 200 pounds, he was not considered fast enough to be an everyday center fielder. Left-handed, he was a sound defensive player in the outfield and at first base, but he didn't have enough power to start in those positions. His career big-league batting average was .226 in 272 games. He hit only five home runs. He rarely played three major-league games in a row.

He described himself as one of those “scrappy scrubs who will do anything to stick in the Show,” from running extra wind sprints to cheerleading from the bench, even giving teammates free clubhouse haircuts (sixties-style astronaut cuts called “beanies”) to boost camaraderie and morale.

His Dodgers experience overwhelmed him. With most of his friends and family in southern California, he was barraged with requests for tickets, for inside baseball gossip, to show up at parties. His parents remember him trying to please everyone. He was thrilled when the Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully acknowledged his existence by dubbing him “Guillermo Frijoles” on air, then crushed by the avalanche of phone messages he felt he had to answer.

The chilly Dodgers culture was particularly tough on a backup player with a secret fear. Manager Tommy Lasorda considered himself the only true star of the team and was not the warm father figure of his publicity. Bean was told that young players had to knock on the manager's door, and then only when it was open. Bean regarded the nameplaces over the lockers as symbolic—they were erasable chalkboards. He batted .197 in fifty-one games.

When Bean's biological father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1991 at forty-four, Bean says, he felt a sense of mortality that motivated him to deal with his sexual feelings. Within a year, he had left his wife and had his first homosexual experience. He says he still regrets not having told her the truth at the time.

“Something was just drawing me to that other side. I've had good sex with women and good relationships, but something was missing, even with my wife. I wasn't fulfilled, I had a fear of not being understood, not being totally accepted. I was looking for a soul mate, someone I could let my guard down with. I only found that with men.”