An Accidental Sportswriter (4 page)

I read the letter while he answered a phone call. When he came back, we started talking about something that led to my laughingly saying “But you never went into therapy” and his surprised “For years, years, I was in therapy, I told them everything. But I would tell anyone anything. Any derelict on the street. Therapy wasn't worth it.” Once, he said, he saw Jann Wenner, the founder of
Rolling Stone
, come out of a therapist's office, and the next week he read that Wenner had left his wife for a boyfriend. Gay said he thought he was spotting a new gay trend at the time, “Hey, I'm really on the ground floor of something here.”

There was something surreal about the eight hours I spent with Gay that day and night. How could I have been so anxious about calling him up, this chatty, friendly narcissist? He needed people to talk to. He talked about his new book, a portrait of his fifty-year marriage to Nan, the beautiful and successful book publisher; it included at least one secondary “marriage,” long absences, continuing friendships with women he often slept with. What about rumors of Nan having such relationships? He shrugged that away; she was much more private than he was.

Why was he writing this?

“I'm seventy-seven years old,” he said, “and this is the only story I have left.”

It took me a while to get to the Big Question. He did not remember the $5,000 proposal. He was making about $200 a week then. His highest salary at the
Times
was $315, although he always made extra money writing for magazines. He was a saver. He'd come out of the army with $10,000. He'd been an officer.

I pulled the conversation back to me. “Could it have happened?” I asked.

“It would not have been uncharacteristic.” He leaned forward and peered at me. “Does that sound greedy to you, ten percent?”

“No, no. You know, I don't think you quite understand the impact it had on me, it was so inspiring. You need someone to believe in you so you can believe in yourself. It's a major lesson of my career.” After a moment, I asked, “Is there any possibility you could have been kidding around?”

“Sure,” he said.

My career had been piped.

Chapter Three
My Center Fielders (Part One)

O
n May 30, 1960, after a Memorial Day double-header at Yankee Stadium, some fans jumped out of the stands and raced across the outfield to surround Mickey Mantle. One of them punched Mantle in the jaw. It was shocking for the time. Recreational violence had not yet become commonplace in American sports.

The Yankees went off on a road trip on which Mantle was observed drinking his meals, which was not uncommon. But his jaw was swollen. The
Times
' regular Yankees beat writer would never have troubled the twenty-eight-year-old center fielder by actually asking him what had happened, so the following Friday night, after the Yankees returned to the Stadium, an expendable twenty-two-year-old was dispatched from night rewrite. I was thrilled with the assignment, the kind that Talese would have gotten had he still been in the sports department.

(Actually, two years earlier, almost to the day, Gay
had
gotten that same assignment. He'd been sent to the Stadium for Mantle's reaction to the fans who had been heckling him. They booed from the stands and squirted ink on his clothes if he didn't stop to sign autographs. Talese described Mantle as “smoldering” when asked if he minded the abuse. Talese wrote that Mantle had answered, “ ‘If they bothered me I would not be where I am.' Then he turned away.”)

Mickey and Yogi Berra were playing catch in front of the dugout when I politely introduced myself before the game. I'm pretty sure I was wearing a suit and tie that night, possibly a matching vest. I'm sure I called him Mr. Mantle when I asked if I might inquire about what had happened.

Mickey glanced over his shoulder and casually said . . . well, over the years, as this story became another one of my personal creation myths, I'd say, depending on the audience, “He made a rude and impossible suggestion,” or, during the Bush II years, “He quoted Vice President Cheney to Senator Leahy,” and sometimes I'd just flat-out quote him: “Why don't you go fuck yourself.”

Now, I had heard such words before, but never from an American hero. I read the papers, I knew his story. The golden boy from the golden West had arrived as a teenager in New York in 1951 with muscles in places most people didn't have places and a country-fresh grin despite his damaged legs and a genetic black cloud: early fatal cancers ran through the males in his family. Another burden was Great Expectations: Mickey had been touted as the replacement for Joe DiMaggio if not Babe Ruth, and he had yet to come close except for his two Most Valuable Player award years, 1956 and 1957. Fans booed him now because he hadn't sustained the pace. Despite it all, according to the scribes, The Mick was a lovable gamer.

So I assumed I had asked the question incorrectly and rephrased it. Mickey signaled to Yogi, and they began throwing the ball an inch above my head. I was scared at first of being decapitated, then in awe of their control. They weren't going to hit me unless I failed to understand that the interview was over. I scuttled off.

I felt humiliated. What had I done wrong? How had I offended The Mick? Should I even be doing this work?

I waited until other reporters arrived to chat with Mantle, then lurked outside their circle and eavesdropped. They didn't bring up the punch directly, although someone asked how Mickey's jaw felt and he cheerfully told them he was eating lasagna now and expected to be biting into a steak soon. They all guffawed. No follow-up questions. In my story, I only alluded to his remark by writing that he had “grunted away” a question about the attack. I decided that he had reacted the way he had because he didn't know me and I had interviewed him too directly. My bad technique.

It was almost two years—in a Florida bar during the relaxed atmosphere of spring training—before I told the entire story to a more experienced reporter. He laughed. That's our Mickey, he said; we never write about him acting like a red ass because our editors know our readers don't want to read about it. And we don't want to lose access. Offend The Mick, and you're dead in the Yankees' locker room. You should see him spit at kids who want autographs. Welcome to the club. Don't let it get you down. Happens to all of us.

That should have made me feel better, but it only changed shame to anger. I didn't want to admit to myself that I had been bullied, that I was once again a junior high school victim, an S.P. fag. It was painful to realize that it was all too close to the feelings that women have when they are sexually harassed and made to feel that it was their fault, that they brought it on themselves.

I had arrived on the scene a naïf, unprotected by fandom or experience, and I think now that the Mantle episode loomed too large for too many years. Just get over it, Bobby. Had I adored him as a fan, I would have excused him—he was in pain, stressed out, just kidding. Had I been an insider, knowing that Mantle had his bullying moments, I would have stepped more carefully. I would also have known that there would be a lot more tense moments in my career.

Sportswriting isn't the oldest profession, although it is sometimes conducted that way. I like to imagine it began its modern era around the turn of the twentieth century, when Sheriff Bat Masterson, bored with shooting up Dodge, rode into New York City looking for action and became a sportswriter. He discovered that the pen is mightier than the pistol, especially when you promote such sporting events as boxing matches and horse races, then gamble on them, and then cover them for a newspaper.

By the time Bat died in 1921, at his
New York Morning Telegraph
desk while writing his column, Grantland Rice and the mythmakers of the Roaring Twenties had begun their conscious “godding up” of an American pantheon, the likes of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, and Knute Rockne. Rice is best known for comparing the Notre Dame backfield of 1924 to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, also the title of a popular 1921 silent movie about World War I starring Rudolph Valentino.

In the vernacular of the time, Rice was a “Gee whiz” sportswriter, relentlessly positive, a booster, a jock sniffer. His contemporary W. O. McGeehan was the best known of the “Aw nuts” school, the rippers who snidely mocked the demigods, but in such a way as to make them seem important.

Those were the two main approaches to sportswriting when I showed up, although two spirited tabloid writers, Jimmy Cannon (the most socially conscious of his generation and a man who called sportswriters “the vaudevillians of journalism”) and Dick Young were leading the way down from the Olympus of the press box to buttonhole athletes and coaches for quotes and explanations. Young was also running blind items in his gossipy New York
Daily News
columns that alluded to jock shenanigans, on and off the field.

But we were still in the shadow of the corrupt old Damon Runyon era. Brown envelopes with cash inside were still being handed out to sportswriters, along with free tickets and expensive Christmas presents. I was lucky to work for a paper that paid all my expenses; most other sportswriters got their travel and meal money from the teams or the promoters. An honest reportorial job could be considered an ungrateful act, to be repaid with loss of access.

There was emotional corruption as well. Players and reporters stayed at the same hotels on the road and traveled together, on trains and later on chartered planes. “Sports of the
Times
” columnist Arthur Daley referred to his newspaper colleagues as “lodge brothers,” which was accurate. They were all male and white, and, with the exception of the few athletic and journalistic superstars, pretty much all the players and reporters were in the same struggling economic class. There was a community of interest. The fans were the rubes at the carnival.

For systemic criticism of sports, one would have to read a Communist, Lester “Red” Rodney, in the
Daily Worker.
Red Rodney, who died in 2009 at the age of ninety-eight, had been one of the most outspoken advocates of racial desegregation in major-league baseball. By the late fifties, he was gone in an internal Communist purge.

The professionalization of sportswriting didn't happen overnight (it's still in process, I hope), but my generation likes to point to an incident that began the expulsion of player and scribe from their sweet, sweaty Eden.

The crab apple of knowledge seems to have been Leonard Shecter's report in the
New York Post
that Yankees coach Ralph Houk and pitcher Ryne Duren had scuffled on the train coming back from winning the 1958 American League pennant. Such family squabbles or drunkenness or screwing around were never reported. Shecter, like the other reporters, tacitly agreed to turn a blind eye at first. He was young and happy to be on the beat; he had yet to become a beacon of hard-nosed honesty, the curmudgeonly scourge of entitled jocks. But when a rival tabloid reporter ran an item about the Yankees siccing private detectives on carousing players, Shecter was under pressure to come up with something as good or better. He told his editors what he knew about the Houk-Duren fight. Duren, probably drunk, had gotten rowdy. Houk, while subduing him, had accidentally cut him over the eye with his World Series ring. The
Post
editors blew the story into a torrid melee. There was a front-page headline as well as a back-page piece without a byline.

“With one dispatch,” wrote Alan Schwarz in the
Times
, fifty years later, “Shecter had violated a sacred code that had existed in the 100 years of newspaper coverage of baseball.”

Actually, sacred codes were being broken all over SportsWorld by then. The Giants and the Dodgers had jilted a city, and black players were emerging as stars in baseball, football, and basketball. Soviet bloc teams, often chemically enhanced, were dominating many Olympic sports. The concept of amateurism—playing for the love of the game—was under siege. And television was pushing its snouty eye everywhere, giving athletes the direct access to their fans that broke the pencil press.

The shaky trust between player and scribe—and among scribes—was shattered just in time for me. I don't think I would have functioned well in the old clubby atmosphere. Former fat boys never do. We're too suspicious, too used to watching from the sidelines. By the time I got my first major assignment, a certain wariness had set in and the climate was more businesslike. It was nowhere near as adversarial as it is today, but athletes were careful until they knew you, and writers kept score of which athletes other writers were talking to. Writers tended to move in packs, as on class trips, and get nervous if someone was missing.

Shecter was in St. Petersburg, Florida, for the first spring training of the New York Mets, and so was another of the new breed of sportswriter, Stan Isaacs, the sunny, funny, slyly subversive columnist from
Long Island Newsday
. They befriended me. Among the older writers were Milton Gross of the
New York Post
, the first of the press box–shrink columnists, and the fiery Dick Young of the
Daily News
, whose “Clubhouse Confidential” column, with its radioactive combination of sexual innuendo, right-wing demagoguery, and hard-core baseball knowledge became a must-read for players, as well as fans and other writers. Also there was the most important sports journalist of my era, Howard Cosell, a tall, dorky radio reporter who once made room for himself at a press conference by slamming his tape recorder into me. Who knew it would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

Among the greatest innovations of this group was actually interviewing ballplayers and doing real reporting. They were all generously helpful to me as a twenty-four-year-old newcomer. Some were good guys, some understood that I was no threat. Yet.

I was still too busy competing with Talese.

Gay's spring training pieces were my yardstick. Though I never came close to his easy breezy style, writing against my memory of his work was better for me than running with the pack. It was great fun, looking for stories the other reporters had missed (or, more accurately, dismissed). I even thought I had a major scoop once. The Mets had declared the hotel pool off limits to players. The official explanation was that swimming strained baseball muscles. But I heard that several guests had complained about Negro players being in the water with them. I cornered the Mets' manager, Casey Stengel, a man whose face I had variously described as “creased as a pleated skirt” and “carved from imperfect Mount Rushmore stone.” (Worse yet, I described his walk as that of an “arthritic chimpanzee.”) Stengel was seventy-one, the same age I am as I write this (walking like an arthritic chimpanzee), but he seemed truly ancient. He was bitter at having been recently fired from the Yankees after twelve glorious seasons that had included appearances in ten World Series. I phrased my question about the pool fairly directly. I was two years past my Mantle moment, an army veteran now, thicker-skinned, narrower-eyed.

“Thass right, pool's off limits,” he snapped. “And I told 'em they couldn't fuck either. All season. Now print that.”

Hanging around Stengel, on the field, in the clubhouse, at the Colonial Inn bar until closing time, was entertaining and an endless source of copy (Casey told rookies, “Get yourself in shape now, you'll be able to drink during the season”) and of stories illuminating baseball history—he had played in the time of Babe Ruth, and he had managed Joe DiMaggio (whom he called “The Dago”). I also got to understand the news pack through Stengel.

Columnists and baseball writers from newspapers outside New York (and the likes of Daley of the
Times
) would sweep into the Mets' camp and plug into Stengel's never-ending monologue. If you stayed long enough, the references would be clear, the story he was telling would make sense, and sometimes the insights would be brilliant. But fifteen minutes of “so this here feller on second base, let me tell you he was not as horseapple as he was in Kankakee, which was amazing for a left-handed dentist which I did not get to be” was enough to anchor a column about “Stengelese,” the private language of an eccentric who might well be losing his marbles. It was a lot easier than logging time and listening. Stengel was probably a baseball genius in his game tactics and use of players. You could get a graduate seminar on the game at his elbow at the bar.