An Accidental Sportswriter (16 page)

But progress was still agonizingly incremental, I thought. Bean was disappointed, too. “I talk to too many kids who decide not to go out for the baseball team or the football team, they'll be found out,” he told me in 2009. “They're aware of the ramifications, they hear the gay slurs from the stands, and those are mostly straight guys yelling at other straight guys. I've spoken at thirty schools—mostly Division III colleges—and I've met one out person in baseball. A lot of guys still go out for cross-country instead.”

Chapter Fourteen
My Driver

I
n my naiveté (Cosell was right about that), I had thought the gay athlete stories would have a more visible impact. But they just rolled off the table. Was I the only straight journalist interested? What was wrong with those sycophantic dummies, too busy fluffing upcoming events and godding up or beating down athletes to follow real issues? Was Jock Culture that impenetrable?

I felt stuck. The
Times
column read stale to me. Like Ishmael, I was feeling “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” Where's Moby Dick when you need him? As usual, I turned to Neil Amdur, the
Times
sports editor, a pinwheel of ideas. As usual, he had an idea for me. He tossed me the keys to the car.

Speed thrills.

The Charlotte, North Carolina, racetrack was hosting ride-alongs for journalists, and on Thursday, January 11, 2001, I maneuvered into a line for a driver who seemed a little steadier, more careful than the others, although I have no idea how I could have made such a judgment on my third day covering NASCAR. I had never heard of Mark Martin. I was also attracted by the sponsor for his blue Ford Taurus: Viagra. Even if I hated the ride, I figured, I'd get a few paragraphs out of the brand-new drug, at that time a late-night joke more than a staple of late-night life.

Martin, small, wiry, leathery, at forty-two already old to be the contender he was, barely looked at me as I was stuffed through the window into the seatless passenger side of his car. Hands reached in to fasten a makeshift seat belt and push a red helmet down over my head. The number 6 Viagra growled into life under Martin's foot. The sound, abrasive at first, became comforting as it enclosed me. By the time we burst onto the track, I felt part of the car.

The first one-and-a-half-mile lap, the warm-up, was faster than I had ever gone before, perhaps 100 MPH, but still slow enough for fantasy. I imagined the Speedway skyboxes filled with corporate sponsors eager to bankroll my NASCAR campaign, the 150,000 seats filled with hard-core fans screaming through the roar of forty-two other cars for me to find a hole in the snips of air between our metal skins and drive around them, through them, before I was crushed by the looming wall.

And then we were at speed, the qualifying lap, and I gave myself up to sheer pleasure. My body pressed back against the seat on the straightaway, but my mind lifted out of my head, a balloon freed of thought, and I felt an exhilaration so intense it seemed a white light. At each corner, as Martin braked and the car slipped down the banked track, I thought, Faster! Faster! and then he accelerated out of the curve and I lived again.

Into the last lap, approaching the checkered flag, Bob (Lippy) Lipsyte in the number 6 blue Ford about to make his move, passing the leader on the inside . . .

Martin's hand was out the window as he slowed into the third and final lap. I felt satisfied yet incomplete as we rolled back into Pit Road. The rush had lasted less than two minutes. I wanted more. I thanked him. He nodded and looked for his next passenger.

Back at the garage, I was told that we had averaged 163.64 MPH on that second lap, probably somewhere between 175 and 180 on the straightaways. Someone looked into my eyes. “You okay?”

I raised a thumb. I wasn't ready to talk. I had sensed what NASCAR was all about, and I thought, I am spoiled forever. I have known speed. I want to drive!

Amdur was delighted by my experience, and quite a few readers and colleagues turned out to be closet NASCAR fans, but most Manhattan friends were bemused by my enthusiasm. Some were merely ignorant, some judgmental. Why was I helping to promote a wasteful “sport” of no social value, environmentally destructive, dangerous, obscenely commercial? Isn't oil the root of all international evil? I tried not to be too defensive. After all, did you have to love war to cover it? In truth, I was loving NASCAR for jump-starting my stalled column.

What was supposed to have been another short-term
Times
hitch had already lasted ten years. For six of those years I had also written a column for the
Times
' weekly City section called “Coping,” whose conceit was that one man's neighborhood was the city writ small and in my daily rub in the Union Square–Gramercy Park area of lower Manhattan with neighbors, tradespeople, the bureaucracy, I could explore the life of the city.

The two columns, so different in content and tone, created a wonderful professional balance for me. The city column was so much warmer and more intimate than the sports column that I felt like two Bobs. Or Bobbin and Lippy. Readers thought so, too. I'd meet couples at parties who claimed to be fans of mine. The husband would glance at his wife. “Since when did you start reading sports?” and she would say, “Oh, he doesn't write sports.” I loved that, and I loved the opportunity to merge the personal and the political in “Coping.” But I came up against a wall because another marriage, my third, was falling apart. Though I could write about my mom's slow death in 1998 and what I learned about the health care system, I couldn't write about the central issue in my personal life, and “Coping,” this purportedly personal journal, felt bogus. So I quit it.

I'd been through illness and divorce and raggedy times before, but the sports column—or the new book or the TV show—had always been the guideline that led me through the storm. As Billie Jean King said, no matter what was going on in your life, at least you could lose yourself in the game. But this time I wasn't losing myself in the game. I needed a new game.

Back in 1992, Amdur had suggested I spend an academic year following the boys' and girls' varsity teams of a big, diverse high school in Elizabeth, New Jersey. I met the remarkable former football coach turned principal, Frank Cicarell, who opened all doors for me. I vividly remember being taken by a sixteen-year-old football player to the school's day care center so I could see the baby son he had sired with his former girlfriend. He was trying to impress me and his new fifteen-year-old girlfriend with his manhood.

A year later, Amdur deemed that ice hockey, a sport that I and most
Times
readers thought we knew enough about not to want to know more, was worthy of my intermittent attention. I spent two glorious seasons sporadically hanging out with the amiable roughnecks of the New York Rangers, including the Beowulf of pro athletes, Mark Messier, and came away with enormous admiration for their hardiness, professionalism, and decency. Unlike most baseball, football, and basketball players, who tend to answer simple questions with something like “Why the fuck didn't your editor send someone who knows something?,” hockey players seemed delighted to educate a reporter. Besides the obvious fact—that the sport was hungry for major-league publicity—I think the attitude also reflected the traditional, dad-driven, Canadian/midwestern/Eastern European families in which most players had been raised. And I was their dads' age! The two seasons ended in a made-for-Lippy finish—the Rangers won their first Stanley Cup in fifty-four years.

Then, under pressure from soccer fans, Amdur thought we needed to pay some attention to the world's most popular game. That turned into years of stories about the teams of immigrant West African, Caribbean, and South American boys who had turned Martin Luther King, Jr. High School in Manhattan—otherwise known in the tabloids as Horror High—into a nationally ranked power. The coach, Martin Jacobson, a former drug abuser and petty criminal, took control of his life by creating opportunities for his players. As long as they showed up, played hard, and eschewed the hip-hop life around them, Jake would be their father, guidance counselor, college guide, immigration adviser, nutritionist, dating consultant. “We are so good,” a Trinidadian player once told me, “ 'cause Coach Jake got no life but us.” It wasn't true, but Jake had created an environment in which greenhorn kids felt safe. Being with Jake is like running inside a hurricane. He is still a recurring character in my life.

For 2001, Amdur came up with the most excellent of our adventures, a sport most
Times
readers were content to know nothing about. Amdur believed, rightly, that NASCAR would be the new century's hot sport. We thought I'd write about stock car racing every six or seven weeks, features, tutorials, a little dilettante anthropology.

But as I had been thirty-seven years earlier on the exotic island of boxing, I was soon enthralled. I met Dale Earnhardt, Sr., the crusty John Wayne of wheels, learned about restrictor plates and drafting, marveled at the layers of sponsorship and the autocracy of the France family, which had created and owned the sport. From owners to mechanics, everyone was glad to see me, eager to explain their sport to a Yankee from Moneyworld. It felt like hockey, only easier: better weather, more free food and drink, more publicity people, many of them northern corporate operatives. I was surprised to find how interested I became in the economics and the technology. And in the traditional Christian family values, a NASCAR theme. Generations of fans rooted together in the stands, and generations of mechanics passed wrenches in the garages. I was particularly interested early on in the relationship between Dale and Dale, Jr., who was expected to become an even better, and more popular, driver than his dad.

Less than a month after my Big Ride, I went to Florida for the Daytona 500, the first and most celebrated race of the season. It was scheduled for February 18, the same date I'd met Ali and the Beatles in Miami Beach in 1964. The race week buildup felt just like the buildup to a heavyweight championship fight. I was renewed. The Kid Comes Back!

On the eve of the race, the first person I went to interview at length was Mark Martin. It would be his seventeenth 500. He had never won one. I wanted to talk about the love of speed.

“I don't particularly love anything about the sport except winning,” he snapped. “Racing's not about speed for me, it's about being better than other people.” The drum-tight skin on his pale, sharp-featured face creased with a humorless smile. “You're the one who liked the speed. What did you feel?”

I told him about the pleasure of becoming part of the machine when he hit 175 MPH on the straightaway, about an exhilaration so intense it had become a white light.

“You weren't scared?” He looked skeptical.

“I picked your car because I trusted the way you drove, very methodical, precise. I sensed it was a chore for you, but you were going to do it right, you weren't going to embarrass NASCAR and get me killed.”

Martin's smile softened then, and the pale blue eyes seemed to lose some of their locked-in focus. “That's true. I'm compulsive about everything I do. I hate testing cars, it's boring because you're not racing against anybody, but once I start I do more laps than anybody else. I block out the world. Always like that. Tropical fish, ceramics, motorcycles, going from thing to thing until I found stock car racing when I was fifteen.”

Martin, I had been happy to find out after our ride, was a NASCAR stalwart, popular with fans and other drivers, steady, a clean racer. He was known as the best driver never to have won the championship. The word around the garage was that Martin was unlucky and that he lacked the killer instinct of the three superstars to whom he had finished as championship runner-up: Dale Earnhardt (twice), Tony Stewart, and Jeff Gordon. Jeff and Tony might wreck you if you were in their way. Dale would wreck you just because he could. Martin might not even wreck you to win. Some people I talked to about Martin seemed disdainful of his innate decency. I admired him for it. He had a prickly integrity. He wouldn't answer a question if he couldn't be honest. The chip on his shoulder from old personal and professional defeats, from too much drinking and the early death of his father, his racing mentor, had been sanded and painted over the years as he made himself sober and competitive. But it was still there as time ran out for him. He said he knew he was old, that he was not the future of the sport. I could put myself in that category, too, I thought.

Earnhardt at forty-nine was pretty much past a prime in which he had won seven championships. Dale—“The Intimidator”—was one of the last of the laconic, hard-charging carburetor cowboys with whom southern workingmen could identify. They flew Confederate flags with his face superimposed. They wore hats and shirts with his number 3 and grew imitations of his push-broom mustache. And they plastered their pickups and rec vehicles with pictures of his main rival, the California-born Gordon. There would be a red slash through Gordon's pretty face and the words “Fans Against Gordon” (FAG). It was the worst they could throw at Gordon, who drove as hard as Earnhardt, who liked and mentored the younger man.

I didn't get Dale. I had spent a little time with him that week in Charlotte. He was gruffly charming, and I found what I considered his contradictions amusing. Here was a rural populist hero whose North Carolina office/race shop complex, the so-called Garage Mahal, contained a curated display of his hunting rifles, mounted animal heads, and pictures of his executive chef cooking up his kills. I was simply too new to the sport, maybe too New York, to appreciate his mythic place and how what seemed like contradictory excesses for a country boy were aspirational to his constituency; someone like them could make it big, could have the northern suits begging for his time.

Dale seemed like a bully to me on and off the track and not a particularly winning father—the tough love he'd practiced with Dale, Jr., wasn't making the kid into a great driver. Did Junior even want to race? He was twenty-six at the time and seemed happier with his video games, his pals, his guitar.

A
Times
reporter had been sent down to cover the Daytona 500. I was doing a long piece on the crowd, the drivers, the scene. Introduce
Times
readers to the smell of NASCAR Nation, gas fumes, sizzling ribs, beer sweat. I'd spent most of the night roaming the infield, the area inside the 2.5-mile track in which thousands camped out in fancy double-wide trailers and the beds of rusty pickups. There were jolly four-generation family groups and packs of surly, stringy, tattooed rednecks. There were concession stands, a lake, tubs of iced Bud. Everybody seemed wasted by midnight, when girls were eager to lift their T-shirts at demands to “Show your tits!”