An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  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 interview
s, 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 Timesian 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.

  Scott, who had connections in the Bay Area radical community, was seized by the opportunity to get a piece of the action, as a journalist or a deal broker. He would tell me coyly that whatever he had done was “to save lives.”

  In Portland that week, he had been evasive, although he had dropped enough hints to lead me to believe he had indeed been involved in Patty’s escape from L.A. after the shoot-out. I wasn’t alone in that belief. Scott’s older brother, Walter, stayed in the house for a few days, adding a frisson of danger. Walter, friendly yet sniper-eyed, was recuperating from nasty wounds on his body, suffered, he said, when a grenade had been thrown into his Phnom Penh hotel room; he had been one of several hundred civilian gunmen flown in to provide security for the U.S. Embassy’s withdrawal from Cambodia. Walter, whose story of being a government assassin we had no trouble believing, told me he thought he had been targeted by leftists who were concerned he would rat out his kid brother. Which he probably did. Later, he told the FBI that Jack and Patty had been lovers while on the lam.

  Maybe he even did it that week. Short-haired men in suits and ties were watching the house in cars across the street, and they followed us on trips to the gym and the vegetable markets. Once, when I was in the house alone, they rang the bell and showed me FBI credentials. I told them who I was and started asking them questions. They backed away; I figured they didn’t want to be in my story.

  After a few days, my notebook was fat, and Scott thought we deserved some R & R. On an unusually lovely summer day, we drove to his favorite pool in Eagle Creek, a fast-moving, gin-clear stream that sliced through a lush green thicket. We scrambled down a steep bank, stripped, and dived into shockingly cold water. After a while, we climbed onto flat rocks and dried in the sun. Scott said that after working so hard on the story (I let pass the implication that we were partners in my assignment), this was our time to relax and commune with nature. And what could be more natural than yerba buena?

  So I found myself lying naked on a large flat rock above a rushing stream, baked by a noonday sun and the fat joint I was sharing with the subject of my story, similarly unclad and supine. My notebook and pen were out of reach. Off in the bushes, in their suits and ties, the FBI watched. I could imagine the silly smile on my face, but I knew I was also thinking, What the fuck am I doing here?

  I’d been conditioned since nineteen to believe that for “a gentleman from the Times,” objectivity extended to a detached deportment. Chopping vegetables was bad enough, but doing dope? With a subject, yet? That had to be even worse than dressing badly while representing the paper. Even stoned and naked on that rock, I knew I was too comfortable to be doing my job properly, that I should be beside myself, at a remove, as controlled by boundaries as any shrink or lawyer. I should be spying from a distance like the feds.

  I was mildly surprised at not being struck dead by the Jehovah of Journalism and that my piece was accepted and published (although my account of getting stoned with Scott didn’t make it into that counterrevolutionary magazine). I had gotten too friendly with Scott, who became the main focus of the piece—I spent more space on his subsequent legal issues than on his relationship with Walton. Yet all that access led to a story that did not totally please Scott, especially my suppositions that his political activities came out of the same driving ambition that had made him a stand-out athlete.

  I never wrote about the last time Jack and I talked on that trip, in a men’s room at the Portland airport as I was leaving. He turned on a water tap to foil any FBI listening devices, lowered his voice, and asked if we could talk strictly off the record. I said that would be dangerous if something came up that immediately affected my story. He promised it wouldn’t, and I was intrigued enough to agree.

  He said he was in a position to supply me with enough information about Patty Hearst, her kidnapping, her time with the SLA, her fugitive life, to make a best-selling book. We could figure out later the financial terms of what would surely be a million-dollar-plus advance, but basically I would split it with a famous left-wing lawyer, possibly William Kunstler, who would use his share to pay Jack and to defend me when the FBI wanted to know where I had gotten my information. Obviously, I wo
uld have to be ready to go to jail to protect my source.

  I asked Jack how much time I had to think about it. He said he needed an answer before we left the men’s room. I washed my hands, peed, washed my hands again. Finally, I said yes. With one proviso: I had to meet Patty.

  Jack’s eyes got hot. “You don’t trust me?”

  “Think of it as due diligence,” I said. “I’m ready to go to jail on your word. I just want to meet Patty.”

  We went back and forth a few times. I asked him if he had harbored and transported her. He repeated the line that whatever he had done was to save lives. I said that wasn’t good enough now. He said, “You don’t trust me,” and stormed out of the men’s room.

  He was right, of course. I didn’t trust him. Ultimately, I don’t completely trust anyone I write about. Our interests are different: mine to find what I can consider truthful as well as readable, theirs to be presented in the best light. But there always seemed an undercurrent of hustling with Scott, even if it seemed to be mostly for the right causes. That undercurrent made me uneasy. I am always alert to being conned. As Dick Gregory would say, “Too hip to be happy.”

  By the time Scott died in 2000, at fifty-seven, of the throat cancer he’d been battling for years, I had been through the first recurrence of a testicular cancer originally diagnosed in 1978 and had written a book about it. I admired the focused, jock way he dealt with his disease. He had long ago forgiven me for rejecting his book deal and told me the rest of the Patty Hearst story: with herohood and that book contract in mind, Scott and his parents had driven Hearst cross-country from California and hidden her in New York and Pennsylvania. Two of his close friends, Phil Shinnick, an Olympic long jumper and university professor of social psychology, and Jay Weiner, a promising young journalist, had also guided fugitive members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. They eventually went to jail. But Scott, the guru, the mastermind, did not.