An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  Most golf writers tended to be quiet at first, soaking in their shame, I’d like to think. What a crew of house pets! All those years of Tiger’s remoteness, his often surly on-course behavior, the changes in his physical appearance were never adequately covered. Were they clues?

  When the depth of Tiger’s decadent life became apparent, there were the usual bleats of betrayal from “the lodge brothers” (as my old “Sports of the Times” colleague, Arthur Daley, called his press box brethren) but little about their own willingness to take Tiger’s world at face value. Or to make the connection between Tiger and Andre Agassi, whose compelling autobiography, Open, I was reading at the same time the scandal broke. The overwhelming message of the Agassi book was the tennis star’s hatred for his game and the life it had forced on him. I wondered if Tiger might have come to the same feeling. Both men were child prodigies driven relentlessly by fathers who lived through them. At twenty-one, already marked as the Mozart of the links (and a “chaser,” by the way), Tiger was complaining that he couldn’t live a “normal” life. (Famously, Arnold Palmer told the kid that if he wanted to be normal, he should start by giving back all the money.)

  Another story I blew. In the early nineties, while writing the Times sports column, I was approached by an old black golfer on a public course in Los Angeles. He told me to drop what I was covering (a women’s golf story) and track down this fifteen-year-old phenom who would soon overwhelm the game. The key to his success, he told me, was the furious ambition of his father, a former army colonel. The defining moment had come when the boy was five or six and Dad, in civvies, had taken him to a military course. Two white admirals had spotted the prodigy and said, “That’s some golfer you’ve got there, Sergeant.”

  By assuming that Earl Woods was an enlisted man because of his color, the black golfer told me, the admirals had reinforced Dad’s determination to send his little tiger out to dominate the world. Earl, who died in 2006 at seventy-four, once said of his boy, “There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don’t know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He’ll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power.” He sounded like Don King.

  I felt sorry for Tiger when he cracked up; he had never seemed quite human to me before. I wondered if the trail of voice mails and sext messages he had so carelessly strewn was an unconscious destructive urge, a cry for help. That will come out eventually, as have the mea culpas of the golf writers who never wondered too hard what Tiger was doing when he wasn’t on the course. Tiger was golf’s franchise player, and scribes learn early never to attack the sport that gives them work; you can trash most athletes, some officials and owners, a few rules and conventions, but systemic criticism is for “rippers” with other sources of income.

  No wonder that most big off-field sports news comes from police blotters and PR releases, not from the lamestream sports media. Mark McGwire’s whimpering sort-of admission of steroids use (it was to get healthy, he said, not to hit more homers) was no newshound coup, rather a media tour under the supervision of President George W. Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer. This was twelve years after McGwire’s steroid-fueled 70-homer season and five years after he told a congressional hearing on steroid use, “I’m not here to discuss the past.” The former St. Louis Cardinals slugger was taking his swing at salvation, an increasingly important theme in the media narrative, especially appreciated when it involves some jock groveling. Alex Rodriguez, never a lodge brother favorite, was thrashed in the media when they found out he had taken steroids. But a weepy confession and then, most critically, a terrific 2009 season that ended in a World Series championship, was all the redemption necessary, a complete A-Rod moral makeover.

  McGwire desperately needed a moral makeover in 2010. He wanted to get into the Hall of Fame with its perks, props, and profits after having been rejected by the electorate—veteran baseball writers. He wanted a soft landing into his new job as Cardinals hitting coach (what drugs would he be suggesting?), reuniting him with the manager who had seemingly been blind to his steroid use at Oakland and St. Louis, Tony LaRussa (the subject of admiring books by Bissinger and the conservative political sage George F. Will).

  Fleischer’s orchestration included a statement to the Associated Press, short interviews with the AP and selected media (the hometown St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the New York Times, USA Today, and ESPN), and then a sit-down TV interview with Bob Costas, who had left HBO to be the lead face on Major League Baseball’s own house network. As is his professed style, Costas interviewed McGwire “civilly and politely.” He never asked him exactly which steroids he had used and how McGwire knew they were “low dosage.” With a certain detachment (Costas often reminds me of straight actors who keep a distance from their characters while playing gay roles), he gently pressed McGwire on his assertion that his years of drug use had been designed to heal his injuries rather than bulk him up and enhance his performance. McGwire was adamant; drugs were only for healing. He sniffled throughout.

  The lodge brothers piled on, dismissing McGwire’s tears as phony and his confession as incomplete. Among the traditional mainstream media commentaries, I was most taken with a posting by Bernie Miklasz of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He wrote, “A lot of the holier-than-thou folks who suddenly have found religion on this issue—mostly media people—want me and others to forget the role they played as carnival barkers in 1998. As I have said many times before, at least I am willing to admit to my hypocrisy. I enjoyed the McGwire-Sosa show. And writing about it sold lots of extra newspapers and advertising in the newspaper. I didn’t ask any tough questions. I didn’t follow up on my suspicions. I had fun writing about the homers; I didn’t want to be the gadfly on the clubhouse wall. But at least I acknowledge that today. Pardon me, however, if I snicker just a little at colleagues across our industry who write and say all of these tough, hard-hitting things about McGwire these days. These are some of the same people who were all but cheering in the press box in the summer of 1998. Some wrote books or freelance pieces and actually made money off McGwire. What, did they forget?”

  Take that, Mike Lupica! And as for you, Bernie, admitting your hypocrisy is too easy. You ate your cake; did you forget you can’t have it, too?

  Since 2003, when I stopped practicing daily newspaper journalism and began consuming it, I’ve felt increasingly disappointed by my old trade, its failures, its cowardice, its emotional corruption. (Not that I think political and business reporters have done much better.) But I can also understand the problems and empathize.

  When Coach Bob Knight was annoyed by the best-selling book about him, A Season on the Brink, he called the writer, John Feinstein, a pimp and a whore. Feinstein’s famous response was “I wish he’d make up his mind so I’d know how to dress.”

  This was in the eighties, the book was terrific, and Feinstein, a Washington Post sportswriter, was and still is an indefatigable reporter. It seemed he was speaking for all of us, bitch-slapping the bullying, sneering bad-boy coach. Yet, over time, I’ve wondered if Knight hadn’t made a point that applied to us all. Just who do we think we are?

  There are all kinds of sportswriters, simply because we are not sure if we are supposed to be reporters, critics, analysts, investigators, fabulists, moralists, comics, or shills for the games that make us possible. That identity quest has become more complicated as many of us shuttle among competing platforms—print publications, the Internet, and radio and TV shows, often on networks that have financial relationships with the leagues.

  In spasms of bravery and timidity, we sportswriters lurch back and forth between breaking valid news stories about drugs, sex, and college recruiting violations and then rewriting publicity releases for upcoming blockbusters that always seem to sound something like a grudge rematch between smack-mouth regional rivals overcoming the tragedies of heartbreaking defeats. Somewhere in between are reports of games our audience has already seen a
nd quasi-racist feature stories about fatherless delinquents who rose from ghetto hellholes to become vicious linebackers who, off the field, played bass guitar, surprised Mama with a house, and ran a foundation for kids like they had been.

  Now that sports has lost almost all its moral cachet and is accepted as a branch of the entertainment industry, the customers seem to want the same rigorous scandalmongering that music and politics fans enjoy. It was no surprise that National Enquirer led the pack in breaking Tiger tidbits. That exposed yet again the lesson we had learned from the steroid coverage: most of the lodge brothers are unable or unwilling to cover news beats as real journalists. This is nothing new. The stories about the 1986 New York Mets as out-of-control bad boys came not from reporters assigned to the club but from female city-side reporters looking for features.

  Female sports reporters, a growing minority, tend to become lodge sisters when they can, which is understandable. They were treated poorly. When I started out, women were not allowed into press boxes, much less locker rooms, lest the lodge brothers’ faux jockhood be threatened. By the late seventies, most teams in most of the major sports had opened their locker rooms, and the only discernible change was that the quality of feature writing perked up. Baseball held out against women, thanks to the stiff-necked commissioner, Bowie Kuhn. In 1977, an accredited Sports Illustrated reporter, Melissa Ludtke, was not allowed into the Yankees’ locker room during the World Series because, she was told, “the players’ wives had not been consulted and, if she entered, their children would be embarrassed in school the next day.” This despite a vote by the Yankees ballplayers earlier in the season to open their locker room to women reporters.

  Ludtke’s successful suit to desegregate baseball reporting was the female sports journalists’ equivalent of Title IX. But as with that landmark legislation, enforcement and attitude adjustment lagged. Neanderthal jocks created nasty incidents, and Neanderthal scribes didn’t always stand up for their female colleagues. The mediocre ones had a right to feel threatened.

  Some of the best female sportswriters of my time, Jane Gross and Robin Finn among others, left for other departments of the paper, as did a number of outstanding women editors. They had to deal with an undercurrent of male resentment in the clubbiness of the sports departments and of the news pack on the road. Men’s fears of women seemed to parallel jocks’ fears of gays—would fans start thinking all of us were girls? Among the women who stayed are some of the best sports journalists of this time, including Terry Taylor, the sports editor of the Associated Press; Teri Thompson, the sports editor of the New York Daily News; and the columnists Sally Jenkins, Christine Brennan, and Gwen Knapp. One of the most talented stylists, Selena Roberts, a former Times columnist who went on to Sports Illustrated, has a tendency to shoot from the hip, which women still can’t do as heedlessly as men. Her coverage of the Duke University lacrosse team’s 2006 party with strippers, which culminated in bogus rape charges, was a rush to judgment (shared by many, including the local DA), although her descriptions of the climate of jock entitlement were thoughtful, accurate, important, and, alas, rare.

  As I had once hoped that the women’s movement would set me free, so I thought the wave of female sportswriters would have a positive impact on Jock Culture by providing a less adoring impression of men’s sports. At the least it would increase the coverage of women’s sports. Hasn’t happened. Naive on my part. Ambitious women journalists understandably want to cover the NFL and the NBA, to compete in the same edgy, often hostile, environment as male reporters while trying to prove they are not diversity hires. Their presence hasn’t yet changed the white male agenda that still, though in its final rounds, dominates the sports media as it does the life of the country. The games are still presented as fantasias in a bubble, dissociated from the culture. No wonder that blogs—as they have done in political analysis and restaurant, book, and movie criticism—have risen to offer a kind of rough democracy in commentary, although not, unfortunately, in basic reporting.

  The blog monster is ESPN’s “The Sports Guy,” Bill Simmons. He is post-Media. In 2009, the year he turned forty, the year his The Book of Basketball became a number one best seller, his ESPN.com column was attracting 460,000 unique visitors a month, and his weekly podcasts were being downloaded two million times a month. He also had a million followers on Twitter.

  Simmons grasps the cozy cultishness of fandom and knows how to relate it to other forms of pop culture: movies, porn, music, sitcoms, and the Internet, on which he staked an early claim. Raised in Boston, that cradle of fandom, unwilling to wait his turn at the traditional sportswriting trough, Simmons became a blogger before the term was in common usage.

  He doesn’t go into locker rooms or interview athletes. His fantasy-league teams seem as existent to him as the real ones (perhaps because the real ones exist only as external stimuli to him). His basic historical references are what he was eating or drinking or feeling when the Red Sox or the Celtics or the Bruins or the Patriots surprised or saddened or exalted him, which is like remembering how you felt during episodes of Friends, which he often does, or the song on the car radio when you were in the backseat trying to get laid. I’m sure he’s written that, too.

  I remember being at first appalled when Simmons described the only damage of the steroid era for the genuine fan as being “the shadow of a syringe” that would forever linger over memories. He recalled September 18, 1996, when he was smoking and drinking beer alone on a night off from his bartending job. He was watching the Red Sox game on TV while wondering what had happened to his life at twenty-seven. That was the night Roger Clemens, in whom Simmons had lost faith as an effective pitcher, struck out twenty Detroit Tigers. Simmons called his dad, then ran out to his local bar, hugged strangers, and bought rounds. “For one of the few times that year, I had a smile on my face.”

  I stewed about that for a while. It’s all about me, he was saying. He’s missing the essence of the games, I thought, he’s objectifying the players, he’s celebrating his lack of access. But after I read him regularly for a while (a funny, clever writer, he can become addictive) I got the Tao of Bill. The essence of the game is our response to it, not the game itself. Players are not necessarily human since, as the gap between us and them widens, they become archetypes in our minds. Besides, reporters with media passes are not getting access either; their “inside knowledge” is the gossip they churn among themselves. So why not gaze at your own navel—you can believe in it.

  The writer Dave Zirin considers Bill Simmons “1,000 miles wide and ½ inch deep” but credits his bold and creative use of the Internet with inspiring his own career.

  It was my old friend David Meggyesy, the former Marxist linebacker, who tipped me off to Zirin in the spring of 2005. In his introduction to Zirin’s first book, What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, Meggyesy had declared, “His writing reminds me of Bob Lipsyte, former sports columnist of the New York Times.”

  Zirin’s writing reminded me of only part of me, the soapbox columns I could get away with because I also wrote paeans to women tennis players and NFL linemen and aging outfielders. But I was fascinated by Zirin’s rare combination of political passion and love for games, both of which seemed more intense than my own. When I checked the kid out—he was thirty-two at the time—he turned out to be outgoing, funny, sometimes brilliant. He is a former high school basketball player and former Washington, D.C., elementary school teacher whose limitless outrage is matched only by his enthusiastic energy. He badgered his way onto radio and TV shows, Web sites, and conference schedules and never stopped making startling connections: “Hurricane Katrina got all those people into the Superdome who couldn’t otherwise afford it.”

  I wasn’t surprised when Zirin told me that his role model as a sportswriter was the late Lester “Red” Rodney, that Commie agitator from the old Daily Worker. He picks up where Rodney, a leading voice for integration in baseball, left off.

  From a 2
009 “Edge of Sports” column:

  Last Tuesday night, there were as many African-American presidents at the All-Star Game as players in the starting lineups. Only the fourteen-year veteran Derek Jeter represented people of African descent. (Jeter, like Obama, is of mixed heritage.)

  Baseball players now tend to come in two groups. There are Latino players, scouted before they are 10, signed into baseball academies before their sweet 16 and imported along a global pipeline until they are cast aside or make the majors. Then there are white players, who largely come from suburban backgrounds and college programs. Baseball—in the US context—has gone country club. Like golf and tennis, or their hemp-addled cousins in the X Games, they are sports that require serious bank for admission. In addition, you need parents with the leisure time to be involved. These sports just don’t fit the reality for today’s working families, black or white.

  Here’s Zirin on McGwire:

  It’s hard not to see parallels in the absence of public accountability among the banking titans of Wall Street. For the powerful, profits mean never having to say you’re sorry.

  It’s long past time we reframed the question and asked: what did the owners know and when did they know it? Why have no owners had to speak in front of Congress? Why have owners been allowed to keep every penny from the big money, big bopping 1990s, while players have been put through the thresher? How have no owners even been threatened with punishment for allowing steroids into their locker rooms? And how in the blue hell does Bud Selig still have a job?

  Zirin is no likely candidate for lodge brotherhood, although Simmons and his copycats may eventually own the lodge. The ultimate lodge brother of our time is Bob Costas. No one else has ever walked so gracefully the line between journalist and shill. He is one of Jock Culture’s most treasured cheerleaders, and that’s no pose; just look how happy he seems bantering with those ex-athletes on pregame shows, a terrier playing with mastiffs and Great Danes, or watch how he gazes down benignly at the Olympic Games, a duke on his castle tower. He takes himself seriously. His 2000 book, Fair Ball: A Fan’s Case for Baseball, pointed out the game’s flaws in such statesmanlike prose that people thought he might be a candidate for Major League Baseball commissioner. Why not? We’ve done much worse.