An Accidental Sportswriter (2 page)

As an ambitious sportswriter on a major-league paper, I acted like a jock in pursuit of victory, which in my case meant filing the best story. Yet I felt like an outsider among most of my subjects and even some of my colleagues. I rarely cared who won or lost, except for how it affected my travel plans or the drama of my story.

Covering orchestrated commercial spectaculars such as the Final Four college basketball tournament, I felt I was wasting my life. Covering the political and racial aspects of Muhammad Ali or the paradoxes of Sandinista baseball in Nicaragua, I felt like a real reporter. Once I became a columnist in 1967, ten years after the happy accident, the job became a lot more fun. Not only could I express my own growing opinions, I could follow stories off the beaten track—lacrosse on an Indian reservation, a youth league in Brooklyn, gay athletes coming out. Even while covering the mainstream events I could filter the story through my own developing sensibility. Sometimes I tried too hard and became tiresome and didactic. But I couldn't help myself. At the Olympics, at the World Series, at the heavyweight championships, I kept looking for a story beneath the story, always sure that if I found it I would be able to enlarge my own and my readers' understanding of our world.

I never understood until I began to write this book that sports would also reveal my own story to me. And maybe that was what I was looking for all along.

Sports helped confirm my sense of myself as an outsider, a lurker in the shadows, a spy gathering intelligence in an alien world for people who want to know the truth. “That's pretty gaudy,” as Jim Roach, the sports editor who nurtured my early
Times
career, would describe the most overheated of my most painfully know-it-all prose. But outsider was the way I had come to feel as a fat kid, and as a sportswriter. I also thought of myself as smarter and a better writer than my colleagues, free to leave for higher pastures when I felt my mission of wringing truth from the locker room was completed.

Because of this sanctimonious attitude, I knew, I would never be a universally beloved scribe. In the 1960s, after I wrote about boxing's cynical use of racial and ethnic rivalries to boost the box office, Madison Square Garden demanded that the
Times
take me off the beat. I was thrilled and thought of President John F. Kennedy demanding that the
Times
bring Halberstam home from Vietnam—his boots-on-the-ground reporting was giving the lie to the generals' falsely optimistic press conferences. I didn't equate my judgmental stories with David's brave dispatches, but the Garden's reaction confirmed my belief that there was a calling in sports journalism.

(Forty-odd years later, in 2008, I had a welcome flashback when the Professional Golfers' Association of America mounted a campaign to have me removed from
USA Today
's Board of Op-Ed Contributors. I had written what I thought was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece about the Masters tournament being “all that's retrograde in American life.” Fortunately,
USA Today
, as had the
Times
, seemed gratified by the attention.)

I wonder now if that outsider armor was something I wore as psychic protection in the planet of the jocks. Or did I stay a sportswriter because I felt more comfortable as an outsider?

In 1971, I left the
Times
to write fiction. After twenty years that also included television journalism, screenplays, and young adult novels, all unforeseen opportunities, I was called back to the paper. Joseph Lelyveld was about to become the executive editor and Neil Amdur, another friend, the sports editor. They wanted an edgy voice among the columns. That was 1991, and I thought I'd write the column for a year or two, tops. Another summer job. But I fell in love with the
Times
all over again and was entranced anew by the looking glass of sports. That time, the summer job lasted twelve years and ended with another lesson in Jock Culture.

In the summer of 2001, soon after he was named executive editor, Howell Raines invited the sports department upstairs to an executive dining room for lunch. He contemptuously dismissed the Lelyveld administration (“wussies” was the implicit criticism) and promised a new era of hard-driving, zone-flooding, competitive tension in which he would run the paper the way Coach Bear Bryant had run the University of Alabama football team. College sports, he said, was the mortar that held America together.

Being sportswriters, we assumed that this Coach Bullfrog was merely trying to out-jock us. Sportswriters are used to that, and, like jocks, we tend to offer sly servility to alpha males. We were wrong. Raines was serious. He was ruthless, capricious, and inaccessible, and for all his micromanaging, he was careless. Maybe he was scared, in over his head. He ignored warnings about a young reporter, Jayson Blair, who was ultimately fired for plagiarisms and fabrications. Using that as a weapon, the newsroom rose up and drove Raines out of the arena. But not before he got me. At the end of 2002, Raines, who may have felt personally defied by my columns on the corruption of college football, refused to renew my thirteenth consecutive annual contract. Hurt and angry, but not surprised, I slinked off.

Less than six months after I left, right after Raines was fired, Lelyveld returned as interim coach and the
Times
sent me a new contract. I never signed it. I had moved on again, back to young adult fiction and TV, ahead to online sportswriting. But I never stopped thinking about Jock Culture and manhood, about the psychosocial-political aspect of games, and about the people, most of them subjects, whose stories had informed my career and my life. Their stories begat my story.

Chapter One
My Bully

A
t Stephen A. Halsey Junior High School 157 in Rego Park, Queens, New York City, I belonged to a group that was a bully magnet. We were members of the Special Progress (S.P.) class, selected for our above-average IQ scores (120 was supposedly the threshold), a fact we flaunted like a varsity letter. Not only were we smarter, but we were too cool for this school; we would leave for high school after completing the three-year curriculum in two. There were some good athletes among us, but we were clearly nerds.

We were easy to spot. We moved from class to class in a clump and were individually identified by heavy brown leather briefcases filled with books. The non-S.P. boys called our briefcases “fag bags” and tried to kick them out of our hands. They also shouldered us in the halls and pushed us around on the streets.

There were ways to minimize the damage. Most S.P. boys kept their mouths shut and heads down when the bullies called them “fag.” I thought that was giving in to them. You could also join them. One of my S.P. classmates was notorious for holding their jackets while they beat us up. He went on to become a famous television executive. (Twenty-five years later, when I worked on a show under his supervision, he turned away when he reached me in a group waiting to shake his hand. I had his number, which did me no good.)

I became a particular target of the bullies because I compulsively talked back and was too fat to run away afterward. My weight has always been higher than my IQ.

I hated getting beaten up, hated having friends, especially the girls, be sorry for me, hated feeling my scabs harden and my insides shrivel, but it seemed preferable to giving in or sucking up or hiding. I don't think I was principled. I just couldn't help myself from sneering back at them when they kicked my bag or pushed me down or called me “Lippy” or “Lippo the Hippo.” I couldn't stop myself from making some asinine retort and then trying ineffectually to defend myself. What a fag!

Though the school tended to separate us from the general student population, it didn't protect us. The principal of the school, Dr. Nussey, who taught Latin to the S.P. class and ran the schoolwide softball tournament, apparently believed in survival of the fittest. He would allow a little roughhouse as long as his own authority wasn't challenged. Boys will be boys.

Our S.P. homeroom teacher, Mrs. McDermott, made an effort to stop fights before we were hurt, but she couldn't be everywhere. The school enforcers, the beefy gym and shop teachers, would wait until the fight was nearly over, then peel the bullies off their victims and boot them down the street in a tough, humorous way that did nothing to condemn the ritual—in fact, probably reinforced it. The bullies loved the attention, the contact with bully teachers. They would posture while we slunk away.

The conventional wisdom in those days, dispensed by older friends and relatives, was that bullies would back down if you stood up to them, that they were basically cowards. This was not true. I think I sensed even then that fighting back was about finding out that the beating was bearable, that bullies couldn't kill you. Simply by standing up to them and surviving, you won a small victory that would give you the courage to keep challenging, to keep standing up, until they eventually left you alone and went after easier prey. Or, less likely but always possible, you could actually win.

Nowadays, when a bully may be packing a gun or a knife (or crouched in ambush behind a computer), the conventional wisdom is very different. Run, or return to school with an AK-47 and wipe out the cafeteria. I wrote a
Times
column suggesting that the arrogant, entitled behavior of high school athletes, encouraged by the adults who lived vicariously through their overhyped deeds, had created an everlasting divide between bullies and victims, often jocks and nerds.

The response was overwhelming, thoughtful, and sometimes emotional, mostly from middle-aged men who remembered high school with pain and in some cases guilt. There were hundreds of letters, calls, and e-mails. Two typical examples:

When I attended high school, I had so much built-up anger from being treated unfairly that, if I had access to guns or explosives, I would have been driven to do a similar thing to take revenge on the Italian and Irish white bastard jocks who dominated the school and made those 4 years miserable for me. After high school, I was not surprised to hear that a handful of these jocks had either died as a result of drunk driving and drug overdoses, or had spent a little time in jail for violence or drug possession. As for the dead ones, I would probably pee on their graves.

and

We really did get special attention both from the students, and from the teachers. We also did cruel things to other students. I have a 20th school anniversary this summer and plan on seeking forgiveness from the people I know I helped terrorize.

In the late 1940s and early '50s, the Halsey bullies, whom we called “hoods,” affected outlaw garb such as dungarees, muscle T-shirts, and leather jackets, but in our striver neighborhood they weren't even petty criminals. They tended to be the better schoolyard athletes—bigger, stronger, quicker, more aggressive, more excited by the chance to intimidate. Those who went on to organized contact sports would be encouraged in those traits. That never changed.

Nor did the tone of language. In Halsey days, the killer word “fag” had less of a homosexual connotation than one of “sissy” or, worse, “girl.” As we were taught to believe in the fifties, most women had no consequential professional futures; they might become teachers or even writers, but they would never get to do genuine men's work such as fly fighter planes, build bridges, kill bad guys, throw touchdowns. Fags wouldn't get that chance either.

That wasn't merely schoolyard talk. A book published in 1939,
You and Heredity
, by Amram Scheinfeld, had a chart that measured masculinity by your line of work. The top of the chart drummed with test pilots, engineers, explorers, pro athletes. On the bottom, clearly my future neighborhood, were clergymen, teachers, librarians, and writers.

By the time I found that chart, I knew I was going to be a writer because a writer could sit alone in a corner and control his universe,
create
his universe, by making up stories. In the stories I wrote in junior high school, skinny kids tended to die horribly. My dream was to publish a story in
Forest Trails
, Halsey's mimeographed literary magazine. The girl I adored from afar, Myriam, was the editor. She was brilliant and beautiful and had a French accent; I knew my only chance with girls like her would be as a star writer.

But writers, according to
You and Heredity
, were at the bottom of the masculinity chart.

I had found the book on one of the biweekly trips I took with Dad to the big Queens regional library. Dad and I, and later my sister, Gale, who is seven years younger than I, went to libraries the way other kids and their dads went to ball games. Dad never censored our choices, and he allowed us to check out as many books as we could carry. I'd been snooping in the Science section for a book with pictures of naked women and found instead that masculinity chart. I couldn't even discuss the chart with Dad because he was a schoolteacher. I didn't want to make him feel bad.

Now, of course, I wish I had. He could have taken it. I would have learned something. Maybe I was less concerned about his feelings than about appearing soft and weak to him. I saw Dad as a tough guy. He may have loved to read philosophy, but his career—from middle school English teacher through principal to director of the city's several dozen schools for troubled kids—had been in rough neighborhoods bristling with switchblades and zip guns. He usually worked several jobs at a time. That's how he managed to get us to an apartment in a comfortable, safe Queens neighborhood, afford a weekend house in upstate New York, and send me to Columbia University and my sister to the University of Wisconsin. My mother was a teacher and guidance counselor, but she subordinated her own career to his. For years she was a stay-at-home mom, which was conventional then, but she still chafed at the role. They had met in the early thirties as lab partners while taking master's degrees in psychology at Columbia. Both of them harbored literary ambitions. The house was crammed with books. They read voraciously and encouraged me to read and write.

For such a bookish boy,
You and Heredity
was a psychic land mine. It blew me sideways. Years later, from photos and eyewitness accounts, I figured out I was nowhere near as fat as I thought I was. But that book was there, and so were the bullies.

My worst tormentor, my regular bully, was Willie, who had staked me out in elementary school and followed me to Halsey. At P.S. 139, teachers had been alert to predatory kids, and because I lived near school I could waddle home while Willie was being detained for questioning and then bury my shame in peanut butter sandwiches, Hydrox cookies, Three Musketeers candy bars, and a glass of chocolate milk.

But in the laissez-faire atmosphere at Halsey, where Willie found support among other fag bag kickers, I didn't stand a chance. At least once a week, he found me and pushed me around. Nothing that I ever reported or complained about—at worst a bruise, a little blood, a pocket torn off a shirt—but plenty to feel bad about. Willie may have been a pathetic dork who had found a scapegoat for his unhappiness, but at the time, he was Grendel and I was no Beowulf. I was a fat kid trapped at the bottom of the masculinity chart.

It was a book, of course, that sprang me loose.

After I returned
You and Heredity
, I began trolling in sections of the library I had rarely visited. It was some weeks later in Travel that I was drawn to the blue cover of
The Royal Road to Romance
, by the adventure travel writer Richard Halliburton. The book, a best seller, was published in 1925, when Halliburton was twenty-five, a slim little Princeton grad, apparently gay (an authentic fag!), who disappeared at sea at thirty-nine.

In rereading Halliburton recently, I realized he could be accused of being an imperialist and Orientalist, condescending toward women and indigenous folk, not to mention an extreme tall-tale teller, but when I was twelve, when it mattered, his energy and enthusiasm lifted my spirit. This was no writer you could keep at the bottom of your masculinity chart. He climbed mountains, stowed away on freighters, hunted man-eating tigers. It was easy to imagine him swimming across crocodile-infested waters with his typewriter strapped to his back and a knife in his teeth. He'd carve up anything that tried to stop him. And then he'd write about it.

Even then, I didn't totally buy his stories, and eventually they seemed as spurious in their way as that masculinity chart. But all I knew in 1950 and all I needed to know was that his stories filled me with possibility.

When I finally returned
The Royal Road to Romance
several months later—I kept renewing it, and it often traveled in my fag bag—I swaggered past Science and flipped
You and Heredity
the bird. Just try to put Richard Halliburton at the bottom of your chart. He'll carve his way to the top. And I'll be right behind him.

Richard and Bobby are on their way, bullies. Watch out! Someday . . .

And then the day arrived.

It seemed no different from any other day. The S.P. class was coming out of school at three o'clock with the usual mixed feelings. School was over, which was supposed to be a liberation, but school was where most of us found an intellectual arena and a sanctuary from the less forgiving world of the street.

Outside Halsey, the hoods capered around us, kicking at bags, calling us names. My bully Willie found me and said something routinely stupid. As usual, my smart-aleck reply made the other hoods laugh. Willie pushed me. I stood my ground and sneered at him. Willie kicked my bag out of my hand.

And then—was it because Rose and Barbara, two girls I especially liked, were watching, because my hand really hurt this time, because Richard Halliburton had truly given me hope?—I snapped.

I hurled myself at Willie, just launched all that butterfat, double blubber, right into him. I was a rotund rocket of rage. We both went down, and, incredibly, I was on top. Had I known the rules of engagement of the after-school fight, I would have sat on his stomach and slapped him until he cried uncle or he would have thrown me off and beat me up yet again.

But how could I, who had never had a fair fight, know the rules? There were no rules in my mind, just survival and payback. All in or don't bother.

I jammed my fat knees down into his chest until his lungs were bursting for air. I grabbed fistfuls of his greasy hair and yanked until he began screaming, and then I began to bash his brains in. Literally. I bounced his skull on the cold gray sidewalk as if it were a pink rubber ball.

I smile as I write this.

What release, what joy, what an out-of-body experience!

I never heard Mrs. McDermott screaming “Robert! You'll hurt him!” because I was bellowing “I'm gonna kill you!” and my friends were cheering and Willie was crying and the hoods clapped. Then a shop teacher peeled me off and laughed as he put a steel-tipped toe in my rear. Dr. Nussey grabbed me and hustled me away. I thought he was trying not to smile.

I kept looking back over my shoulder. A kid was lying on the ground. Where was the bully? My fury had clouded the moment. It took days and the accounts of my friends before I pictured what had happened and a long time before I understood it. Of course, Willie never bothered me again. Nobody at Halsey or high school ever did. Sometimes even now, when I'm taking a beating, hard times, chemo, a death, when scabs harden and my insides shrivel, I think of Willie. His memory reminds me that I survived then, I can survive now.

That same year at Halsey, my short story “Planetary War” appeared in
Forest Trails
. I was a published writer! It's hard to say which was the more important defining event. Three years later, as an unfat high school junior, I screwed up the courage to ask Myriam, by now the editor of
Forest Leaves
, Forest Hills High School's glossy literary magazine, to a school play and pizza. It was my first date.