An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  DiMaggio died in 1999, at eighty-four, from lung cancer. He had been a chain smoker. There were some elegiac memories of him drifting under fly balls, but his time had passed. A year later came another nail in the coffin of his image, Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, one of the most absorbing and readable sports biographies in recent memory, as well as the most credibly demystifying and, ultimately, the most disagreeable. Cramer managed to diminish DiMaggio into a greedy, petty pig. It was hard to argue against his research, and his interpretation was his to make. I thought the book was provocative and mean-spirited, without humanity. I began to make the connection to Costas’s feelings about me.

  Until he died in 2004, my friend Roger never tired of talking about the Yankees, current and old. He thought Costas was a great broadcaster, if a little precious. He thought Costas was presumptuous to lecture me and I was pathetic to take it seriously. Roger’s bass voice would get very rumbly and he’d retell a Vietnam story, usually about strafing bicyclists who might have been armed. It was his way of telling me to be less introspective, to stay tough. Between the Mekong Delta and Yankee Stadium we pulled him through many bad nights. He’d call at 3 A.M. out of his mind with pain, and we’d go through the breathing exercises I’d learned in yoga. That would bring him down to a low moan, and he’d ask to hear my Mickey and Joe stories for the hundredth time. Roger always laughed when Mickey told me to go fuck myself and when Joe D called me Lippy. Then he’d fall asleep.

  Chapter Ten

  The Saint Wore Black Leather

  For all my hard line on sports heroes, I think I was looking for—at least willing to find—someone I could admire who did something of real value to justify my own version of godding up. Especially on television, it’s hard not to be promoting the subject of your story. The trick becomes picking the subject.

  That’s why, for three decades, I have had some version of the following conversation with Gerard Papa. This particular time, we were sitting in the kitchen of the Bensonhurst, Brookyn, house he shared with his mother when Papa suddenly said, “The only time Christ ever got hostile, expressed any kind of wrath, it was for the religious leaders of his day. The ‘whited sepulchers,’ He called them.” Papa took a breath and laughed a little bark of punctuation he uses to signal irony. “The Catholic Church taught me all this stuff.”

  The year was 1997, and he was preparing to battle the bishops in State Supreme Court.

  “So the bishops are evil,” I said.

  “I am not saying they are evil men, I say they are doing evil.” He gave me the baleful look he calls his ghetto stare. “You understand what I’m saying? How long do you know me?”

  “Fifteen years, Gerard.” I gave him my own version of a baleful look. “So you’re Jesus in this story.”

  “C’mon, Bob, I’m not comparing myself to Jesus. Any more than the kids on my team compare themselves to Michael Jordan. But you got to strive toward an ideal.”

  “You’re the good man in this story?”

  “I am not perfect,” said Papa. “No one is. But . . . yes.”

  I probably snickered then, but, yes, Papa is the good man in this story. Maybe the good man in this book.

  The conversation usually begins—in his house, my house, a gym, a schoolyard, a courtroom, a restaurant, walking the Coney Island boardwalk, or riding in his car—with the Flames, the name of a basketball team Papa founded in 1974 that eventually became an interracial youth organization that has served more than fifteen thousand kids. The conversation quickly broadens into discussions of good and evil and then on to Jesus as a role model. Papa insists that despite my Facebook declaration of being a “lapsed atheist”—my way of saying that even denying the existence of God is too religious for me—I am one of the most spiritual people he knows.

  I don’t snicker at that. Four years before I met Papa, I had a conversion of sorts.

  In August 1978, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer and began a two-year campaign against that bully. I needed to see the disease in that way to keep up my fighting spirit. There were two operations and a river of chemotherapy, which had just ended when my wife, Margie, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Those intense years in the country of illness topped off what I think of as my post-Times emotional growth spurt. Now I was a grown-up. The fourteen years at the Times, which began when I was a teenager, were in an environment that was as structured and sheltered for me as college or the army had been. My identity consisted of being a “Times-man” (Dad particularly liked to call me that). Rules and goals were clear. My last name was Of the New York Times. After I left in 1971, for the next ten years as a freelance writer, I was on my own in every way, especially financially, as the sole support of a wife and two little kids in the fast-changing social environment of the seventies. But in losing the protection of the Times, I also shed that arrogant entitlement of importance, that assumption of knowing better. I was more professionally vulnerable without the Times, and illness added an understanding of physical vulnerability. I like to think I gained a greater empathy for other people and an openness to their lives and experiences. I hope I became a better listener, a better reporter. Though none of that made me a religious man, I think it unlocked the possibility of sometimes thinking in more spiritual ways. I was ready for Papa.

  After leaving the Times, I had been mostly in the basement of a Closter, New Jersey, split-level, mostly writing fiction, including screenplays and four young adult novels. There were a few brief forays out for magazine pieces, about Ali, Jack Scott, and pro football coach George Allen’s relationship with Richard Nixon, and one big foray into tabloid newsprint. Around Christmastime 1976, Margie and I met the author and journalistic legend Pete Hamill and his new date, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, at a Harlem writers’ benefit. Pete, friendly and expansive, mentioned that he and Jimmy Breslin would be writing columns about the city for the Daily News. Wouldn’t it be great if I joined Murray Kempton as a city columnist at the New York Post? I mumbled that it would be great, and when Pete suggested I give the new owner, Rupert Murdoch, a call, I responded with a helpless shrug.

  Jackie O., that amazing face smudged with pencil lead (she had just come from her job as a book editor), turned to Pete and in her wispy voice said, “You’ll make the call for Bob, won’t you, Pete?”

  “Of course,” said Pete, shooting his cuffs.

  He did. A few weeks later, Murdoch, briskly friendly, was asking me, “How would you improve this paper?”

  Unintimidated because I didn’t need the job and because I didn’t yet know who he was, I pontificated, “For starters, I’d hire more women, blacks, Latinos, gays in the newsroom so the city can be properly covered.”

  He regarded me coolly. “Hmm, yes,” he said, “but instead I’m hiring a liberal like you.”

  I lasted seven months. Since that included the summer that David Berkowitz, the confessed serial killer of six who called himself the Son of Sam, dominated Post headlines, it was a fevered time. Like every other reporter, I was hunting for Sam. Such stories were fine with Murdoch. What got me into trouble was scrutinizing Mayor Ed Koch or Israeli-American politics or writing about marching with gay and women’s right demonstrators. Also, wearing the wrong shoes. Apparently Murdoch—or one of his overreactive henchmen—had spotted the beige Italian soft suedes I liked, and word came down that “the Boss wants you to lose those poofter boots.” Aussie homophobic bully! So I wore them every day. My column, supposed to run on page two, began drifting toward the back of the paper. Sometimes it was edited into incomprehensibility. I must have been whining around town because Dave Marash, then a news anchor on WCBS-TV Channel 2, told me I could quit the Post live on his eleven o’clock show. Murray Kempton, with whom I shared an office (that courtly, erudite, and disciplined man would come in to write his column carrying one bag of potato chips and one bottle of beer), advised me to concentrate on crime until things cooled down for me. He had some Mafia sources he could share.

  Finally, a
fter a column of mine (about Mayor Koch’s androgynous persona) was killed, I called Marash. Just before I went to his studio that night, I wrote a letter of resignation and went upstairs to Murdoch’s darkened offices to leave it on his secretary’s desk. As I felt my way in, a figure rose unsteadily from the floor. It was Steve Dunleavy, the Post’s Aussie tabloid ace, sleeping off another mythic drunk. He said, “Don’t do anything rash, mate.” Then he collapsed.

  It was a slow news night, and I led Marash’s show. More people saw me that night on TV than had ever read me at the Post. It occurred to me that there might be something in this new medium.

  But first, another little fling with print, an offer from the Times Publishing Company to write a book about the Son of Sam. They would even provide David Berkowitz. I was slipped into Kings County Hospital, where he was being held for psychiatric evaluation. Money must have changed hands, because a guard gave me a white coat to wear and ushered me into a small room with chairs and a couch. A shrink’s office. The guard stayed outside.

  David was small and soft, with a gentle, friendly face. He knew I was a reporter. I asked simple questions to get a feel for him. He said he was doing okay, people were nice, he wasn’t hearing voices at the moment. But he seemed guarded, stiff. It was a boring chat. Just keep him going, I thought, be cool and smooth. Obviously I wasn’t, because he asked, “Why are you so nervous, why are you pointing your pen at me?”

  I blurted out the truth. “In case you try to jump me. I’ll shove the point right into your throat.”

  He seemed to like that. “You think I’m dangerous?”

  “I do.” Emboldened, I said, “In fact, if you have the powers you say you do, how do I know you can’t reach out to harm my family?”

  He smiled, relaxed, told me he did have the power to send destructive forces into my home but would not. He would send forces to protect me and my family. After a few more minutes, he said he liked me and wanted to write a book with me.

  Turned out there was a touch of the Jack Scott bathroom deal in the setup. Though I would get the several-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, I would have to pay Berkowitz’s lawyers their hourly billing rate for interviews. It made me uneasy. Since I would thus be paying for his defense, he would be profiting from his crime (this was before the so-called Son of Sam law was created so he and subsequent criminals wouldn’t be able to make crime pay). While I was struggling with this, Times editor Abe Rosenthal pulled the plug—he didn’t want the paper involved in such a shady deal. He was right. A week later, when my agent at the time, Lynn Nesbit, moved the project to a much larger publishing house for much more money, I bailed out. Now I had another phantom blockbuster on my résumé.

  On to the new medium. CBS Sunday Morning. Again, I approached it as a summer job. I’d get some background for a TV novel, I thought. Or I’d stockpile money for a season. Pillaging again. I never expected to spend the next eight years on three different networks with Gerard Papa as my quintessential subject, as unlikely as he seemed to be at first.

  In his everyday costume, then and now—black Flames T-shirt, drawstring white ghetto bloomers, and red sneakers—he looks like a wannabe thuglet. He doesn’t read books, he tans himself on beaches all summer, he loves to cruise in his top-of-the-line luxury car. In his Brooklyn accent, he declaims, “There are always good and evil forces in any sea of endeavor. It is up to the leadership as to whether good or evil prevails. I see the world from the bottom up from the kids in the gym and from the interaction with everyday people. Kids play or fight, depending on who is in charge. The same people can do good or bad or be chaotic. It depends on their leaders.”

  When we first met, Papa was something of a curio to me, one of those “local heroes” occasionally discovered by the media and examined anthropologically. “Look at this,” goes the reporter’s message, “despite no money, no Ivy League connections, no professional training, and no political office, these natives have managed to do some good in their villages. How wonderful! A lesson for us all! Can you imagine if they had our advantages? They might be CEOs or senators! Or us!”

  But Papa had our advantages. Raised by his mother, a schoolteacher, he had a rigorous Catholic high school education and completed Columbia in three years, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He commuted but managed to be freshman class president, the advertising manager for the Columbia Daily Spectator, a lightweight football player, and an anti-anti–Vietnam War activist in 1968. In his third year at Columbia Law School, he ran in the Republican primary for a New York State Assembly seat. He lost big, and the campaign soured him on elective politics but not on public service through the Church.

  As Papa became less of an anthropological object—this guy went to my college, he was better educated than I was, probably made more money—he became a subject of troubling comparison. This guy was actually doing something useful in his community that could have citywide, nationwide impact. If I couldn’t do things like this myself, at least I could help spread the word. But what he was doing was in the service of religion. And who knew what he was really getting out of it? Dig out the story.

  The story began in a world I understood, trying to win basketball games. In 1974, at a local priest’s request, he began to coach an all-white team of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. He named the team the Flames, after one of his favorite quotations, “Stir into flame the gift of God bestowed on you” (2 Timothy 1:6). The Flames nearly guttered out, failing to win a single game in their first season. Papa took it personally. He had to become a better coach. He studied, talked with other coaches, planned his practices, and spent time drawing up plays. The following season, the Flames won half their games.

  By then, Papa, a tax associate at a Wall Street firm, was in what he calls his “innocent” phase; he believed that most people want to do good and that people who do things the right way will always triumph.

  Papa was ready to expand. He needed a parish to sponsor him in the Catholic Youth Organization’s prestigious basketball program and found the Reverend Vincent J. Termine, at nearby Most Precious Blood. A crusty, twinkly Brooklynite in his early fifties, a kind of movie priest (“Celibacy was never a problem,” he told me once, “and I didn’t take a vow of poverty. But obedience, ah . . .”), Father Termine seemed to have been waiting for Papa.

  He helped Papa paint white lines on the linoleum floor of his bingo hall and erected portable backboards. They held open tryouts. Black kids from the nearby Marlboro Projects ventured across Avenue X, the black-white borderline. When the team was assembled, it was more than half black.

  Racial integration was not the original goal. Blacks, Papa told me, “weren’t relevant to where I lived. I had essentially no contact with black people, and I didn’t really think about ’em too much.” Papa just wanted to win. He was surprised when the neighborhood freaked. At the first integrated practice, a van screeched up and a gang of young white men piled out swinging bats. One of them was the son of the local Mafia “man of respect.” The Flames piled into Gerard’s Thunderbird and raced off to Coney Island, figuring correctly that their attackers would not follow them into a black neighborhood.

  That season there were telephoned death threats, and Papa’s tires were slashed. His black players were beaten, and most of his white players were pressured to quit. But he refused to disband the team. He believed in his own righteousness. Apparently, so did Father Termine. Remembering a piece of advice from his own mother—“Better a dead priest than a bad one”—he stormed into the back room of the local social club. Cards and chips flew as Father Termine (“I can be dramatic when necessary”) roared about Jesus and justice. When he was finished, the team and Papa were promised safe conduct.

  Emboldened, Papa began swaggering into Brooklyn gyms in a black leather jacket, unshaven, wearing his “ghetto stare, where you look at people and show no emotion.” The stare fooled people. Papa was scared. “Most tough guys are actors anyway. You get them alone, and they cry just like you.”

  T
he Flames became a perennial winner in the CYO, and by the time I profiled Papa for the show, they were a league of their own—some three hundred youngsters from eight to nineteen years old on thirty-two “house” teams that played all winter in the bingo hall and on a handful of CYO traveling teams coached by volunteers. Over the years, thirteen teams from various age groups wearing the Flames’ emblem—a black hand and a white hand grasping a torch—won diocesan championships, and Papa personally coached three of those teams.

  Watching Flames games, I came to understand how sports can shape young lives positively (I had spent too much of my career in the big-time realms of gold). The style Papa imposed on his teams is a projection of his own personality. No jump shots allowed, no three-pointers, because you might start to depend on them, take shortcuts, and get lazy. Pass only if you don’t have a shot. His kids never stop running, with or without the ball, never stop driving to the basket. When they are cooking, the Flames are quick and brash, like Papa—slapping balls out of hands the way he snaps out demands and retorts, rebounding with their entire bodies the way he has elbowed his way through bureaucratic zone defenses. He found supporters, both white and black, in law firms, the district attorney’s office, the media, and enlisted them as coaches, advisers, contributors.