An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  Late in 2009, fourteen years after the last time we spoke, Costas and I met for lunch at a midtown New York Italian restaurant. The meal lasted three hours and was far more relaxed than our last one. I think I had changed more than he had (emotionally, to be sure, but he also continues to look preternaturally young). We talked about that previous meal. I liked him for being even tougher on me this time.

  He again brought up my 1995 column calling for Cal Ripken to sit out a game and avoid breaking Lou Gehrig’s record. “Sometimes I thought you were a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian,” he said. And then he got to the core of the matter. It was “almost churlish,” Costas said, when so soon after Mickey Mantle’s death I suggested that he had jumped the line for a liver transplant.

  I asked him what he wanted of me.

  “I wanted a dash of celebration and appreciation along with the excoriation.” He paused, almost smiled. “Am I sounding like Jesse Jackson?”

  I nodded him on.

  “It gives you more credibility for when you criticize. You know, I grew up reading you, hoping to someday win your regard. When I took you to dinner, I still hoped to win your regard. But I wanted you to be less corrosive; skeptical, not cynical.

  “In the sixties and seventies the issues were more clear cut—gays, women, Ali—and you were on the right side. When you made your bones on those big issues, the prevailing tone needed a counterpuncher. How Willie Mays caught a fly ball was covered, so Lipsyte was right to pound away at the issues.

  “But now the prevailing tone is so mean you have to play it straight. It’s not clear cut, black and white. There needs to be more nuance. There’s more of a need to celebrate. I thought of you as a smart and independent guy holding his patch of ground, but something blinded you to the appealing stuff. It’s not a breach of integrity to find within what you disapprove things that are worthy of approval and celebration.”

  I listened carefully and took notes. I didn’t argue because I was fascinated. He was talking about me. Later I wondered if he had been talking about himself as well, justifying his own celebration of a sports industry that I think needs counterpunching more than ever.

  We talked some more about Mantle and that “almost churlish” liver-transplant column. Why couldn’t I see the humanity of Mantle?

  He asked if I considered him presumptuous, then or now. Both times, I said, although I had resented it then and was grateful now. There were areas where we needed to agree to disagree. It was apparent that I did not consider him the journalist he thought he was. There was no chapter on steroids in his baseball book (“I was talked out of it,” he said, “and I regret that now”), and in the absence of “hard evidence” it was not something he thought he could bring up in his broadcasts of games. Once in the late nineties, he said, he had remarked on air to Joe Morgan that something was out of whack in the game. When Morgan said, “Ball may be juiced,” Costas replied, “Not as much as the players.”

  I didn’t think that qualified as serious journalism, but I didn’t pursue it. By that time, I was liking Costas, and we parted with a promise to meet again. I hope we do. There would be a lot to think and talk about—beyond Mantle. And I wondered if Costas and I were secret sharers in some way, each disappointed in the other and perhaps even disappointed in himself. He doesn’t think he has quite “filled out his role.” Maybe after 2012, his last Olympics for NBC, he says, he will “break out.”

  Maybe I do need to be more of a fan, or at least find more to celebrate. The questions for each of us, I think, are the basic ones: Could I have been more?

  And, Is there still time?

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Man

  My father was in his eighties when I found his track medals in the back of a drawer. He had been a schoolboy middle-distance champion. A jock! Pressed for more details, he reluctantly told me that he had quit his college track team when the coach wouldn’t send him to an out-of-town meet because the Olympic hopeful, whom Dad had beaten all season, was the one the coach had decided to promote. And that had been the end of his sports career. He hadn’t spoken about it in nearly seventy years, he said. Not even to his sportswriter son.

  The symbolism of those medals has turned out to be a big piece in the jigsaw puzzle of Dad’s life, and thus in my own. In some ways, maybe, my biggest sports story. Over the years, Dad had freely expressed his skepticism—even cynicism—about politics, religion, and academia. Dad had opinions about everything. But he had always seemed indifferent to sports on any level, which, given his great interest in individual and mass psychology, seemed odd. I wondered if he felt too intellectual for sports or, later on, if he was subtly putting down what I did for a living. Or was that me putting myself down? He was always telling me, jesting on the square, to take a week off and write a best seller. I’d breezily reply something like “I’m too busy to get rich,” but it felt like a needle and sometimes it hurt.

  I had no idea that he was still indignant over what he considered an unfair exclusion. He thought he had won the right to go to that track meet. Sports had disillusioned him. He had believed sports was a true meritocracy. Like Cosell, he believed in America’s promise to all of fairness, constitutionality, order. Dad just didn’t believe that the country always kept its promises.

  After I found out about his aborted track career, I asked for his take on the City College scandals of 1951 in which basketball players had conspired with gamblers to fix the outcome of games. (Dad graduated from City in 1927.) He told me that he thought much of life as well as sports was fixed, though not as blatantly as those basketball games had been. In most cases, he said, it’s about the wrong people getting the chance to play “for political reasons.” He said that we need to make sure everybody gets an equal chance to play on a level field. Then it’s up to them.

  Now I get it. He was my jock ideal. Fairness was the dominant theme of his life. Most of his career was in underserved districts of New York City, teaching and administering in schools for what were then officially designated as “socially maladjusted” boys. He lived to salvage those boys. The world might see them as juvenile delinquents, but in his writings Dad called them “inadequately protected children” whose “disturbances” had been caused and exacerbated at home and in previous schools where they had been embarrassed and punished. He offered them “an atmosphere of masculine authority” in which their self-esteem would be boosted.

  He was hardly a “leftist” or even a “bleeding heart” by any labeling standards. He was an all-American centrist: Give people a fair shake by making sure they have a pair of boots so they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which meant health care, education, shelter, food, and psychological support. After that, they were responsible for themselves. Dad had always felt responsible for himself.

  I think his worldview began to take shape in 1912, when he was eight years old and heard the SOS calls from the Titanic on his brother’s crystal radio set. A seed was planted in his mind. If the supposedly unsinkable Titanic could go down, could you ever again put faith in technology or in the officials who misspoke with such authority? When his father died in the flu epidemic a few years later, another seed was planted: even God could not be relied on to do the right thing. Yet Dad was an optimist. He believed that things could be made better and he could be part of the solution. But he took nothing for granted.

  Whenever disaster struck, from illness in the family to carnage on the evening news, I’d call him. In 1963, when President Kennedy was murdered, I called Dad to make sure he was okay. After all, the old man was pushing sixty. I called him after 9/11 to make sure I was okay. After all, I was in my sixties. Being a frequent subway rider in New York, I even called him after the 2004 train bombings in Madrid. I said I was calling to tell him we were all okay. I knew he would calm me down. After all, he was 100.

  Dad would tell me to relax. Don’t let your imagination loose unless you’re writing fiction, he’d say: “Nothing is ever quite as good as
you imagine it will be nor as bad.” When I was younger, there seemed something bittersweet, disappointed, even defeatist about that, but now it feels more like Never Give Up. We Can Get Through This. After all, Dad was saying without saying “Look, I’m still here.”

  Now he’s not, but I’m still talking to him, taking both sides of the conversation. He’d have been very interested—I told you so, he would remind silently with his bushy eyebrows—about the housing bust, the oil spills, the latest Wall Street greed implosion. His frugality, born in the Great Depression, had paid off with a fine nest egg for a schoolteacher. His distrust of Wall Street, where he had worked as a teenage messenger, had impelled him to keep every saved penny in Treasury bills. Thanks for that, Dad. Among other things.

  When the name Lipsyte first appeared in the New York Times, it was his, on June 28, 1936, two years before I was born. The headline read:

  BRONX MAN ALSO VICTOR

  Sidney Lipsyte Gets $400 for Article

  Dad had won first place in a Times essay contest on “the Constitution as a living document.” He told me he had written it overnight at the urging of his principal. Dad was a junior high school English teacher then. In the Times story announcing his prize, he said he was going to use the money, no small change in those days, to “travel.” Actually, he bought one-third of an acre some fifty miles from Queens in upstate New York and began to build a house, much of it himself. So he knew that writing pays!

  He always encouraged my writing. Sometimes a little too vigorously. He had lots of ideas to make my junior high school science fiction stories more exciting. We struggled for creative control. At the time I thought it was parental bigfooting, and I was resentful. Years later, when he showed me short stories he had written for school magazines about the Imp of the Universe and his henchmen, Time-on-his-Hands and Mischief-on-his-Mind, I realized that he was living a dream through me, and I was proud. Knowing that, I felt more comfortable allowing myself to live my dreams through Susannah’s social consciousness (she’s a lawyer) and Sam’s fiction; when his 2010 literary comic novel, The Ask, hit the Times’ best-seller list, I fully understood the pleasure of vicarious pleasure.

  When I dropped out of the premed program at Columbia and declared English as my major, Dad was supportive, although he urged me to take the junior high school English teachers exam as a fallback position. I refused until his urgings became challenges. All those Columbia courses, he’d say, bet you couldn’t pass a license exam I passed a quarter-century ago with mere City College courses. He knew me. Of course, I had to take the test. He didn’t seem surprised when I passed, and five years later, during a newspaper strike, he never said “I told you so” when I was able to support myself by substitute teaching at the Rikers Island jail school he supervised.

  He was always suggesting stories for me to write for the Times. One of my first Publisher’s Prizes, an internal newsroom award, came through a tip from him in 1960. Floyd Patterson, the heavyweight champion, had been a socially maladjusted boy. When he made a last-minute decision to visit his old school (another one that Dad supervised) with his championship belt, Dad called me. It was a scoop.

  I remember Dad as emotionally remote when I was a kid, but that was the style of the day. He and I shook hands. Sam and I hug. Sam and his son, Alfred, kiss. Dad was uncomfortable with expressed emotions. He and Mom often called me or my sister, Gale, together. When emotions flared, Dad would hang up the telephone extension. I thought of him as insensitive. Many years later, he told me that he had strong feelings but didn’t like to let them show. He said he felt bad that people might have thought he didn’t feel at all. As a kid and young man, I was never sure of his approval. Mom, on the other hand, was wildly emotional, freely expressive of loves and hates, of approval and disapproval, a spinning weather vane of passionate feelings.

  Mom and Dad complemented each other. They hardly spent a night apart through sixty-six years of marriage. She was the fierce guardian of Dad’s career, and he was the soft wall she could bounce off. They potentiated each other’s distrust and paranoia, resentment of rich people, and posture of intellectual superiority. As children of nineteenth-century immigrants from Russia and Germany who had settled in the Bronx, they came by their suspicions naturally.

  Dad was born on April 4, 1904, the fourth of four boys. He was interested in science and wanted to be an engineer like his oldest brother, but he refused to change his name (all his brothers became Lipton) and pretend to be Christian to beat the engineering school quotas against Jews. I’m not sure why. He never gave me a clear explanation. He was not at all religious. I like to think it was some kind of stubborn refusal to cave to bullies. So he became an ambitious, driven public school teacher, working extra jobs weekends and summers to create financial security, build a country house, and assure college for my sister and me. My mother was a teacher and guidance counselor, but it was a mommy-track career—she stayed at home for long stretches.

  I loved visiting Dad at work, particularly during the years he was principal of one of those hard schools. He strode those halls like Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise (he would have thought C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey), a beloved, as well as respected, figure. The rough boys vied for his attention. Several times I saw him wallop kids hard on the butt for some infraction; the boys would grin at him as if thrilled by the caring attention they got nowhere else, promise to behave, and swagger off. I thought about my own Halsey gym teachers booting the bullies. Maybe there was more to it than I realized.

  When he loosened up enough—we were both old men by then—to tell me his stories, one of his favorites was of his first command, at forty-four. He was appointed principal of an elementary school near the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1948. That school was already old when he took it over. He spent much of the summer before classes roaming the ancient vessel. One day he discovered a sagging wall in the basement. Physically strong and fearless, he pushed the wall over to reveal a huge tiled room, the walls and ceilings festooned with rusted pipes. In old school records he discovered that a shower room had been built for a local immigrant community that had no hot running water.

  Taking advantage of the brief window of accommodation that incoming principals get, he persuaded the district to hire plumbers and restore the shower room for a student body that still could not wash itself on a regular basis. To remove any stigma, he created the Swim Club and promoted its logo, a fish, as if it were a varsity letter or gang colors. Kids wanted to wear that white cotton fish patch pinned to their shirts, members of a club whose sole admission requirement was needing a hot shower.

  Dad was a combination bureaucrat and buccaneer. He always wore a suit and tie (bought by my mother in discount stores), usually with a white shirt. That’s where I learned about conservative camouflage; even in a cheap suit you can slip into most places, or could before 9/11, and make most establishment subjects think you are one of them or want to be. Tie snugged to his starched collar, Dad ran schemes to help his boys, one of which nearly got him into major trouble. His schools received subway tokens to distribute to pupils, but only for use going back and forth from school. What about the weekends, he thought, visiting relatives, church, sightseeing, shopping, maybe even a museum or a ball game? He started an illegal program to reward kids for regular attendance, improvement in grades, and good conduct with subway tokens. Attendance, grades, and conduct improved. When an assistant principal who wanted Dad’s job turned him in, Dad was called to headquarters. I can imagine him making his case in a pedagogical bluster, his neck and face turning red above the starched collar. We’re here to improve and enrich their lives, he’d be shouting, give them a chance to rise above the poor example of family and community. I can imagine “the brass,” as he called them, stepping back, waving him away, okay, okay, Sidney, just don’t do it again. Or get caught.

  Dad ended his career as a director of a bureau in the Board of Education hierarchy, a colonel, I guess. H
e never made general, one of the various superintendent slots, which I know he would have liked. As so many do, his career ended badly.

  In 1968, fifty-six years after the Titanic went down, Dad felt betrayed once again. The revolutionary passions that swept through America, even through sports, smashed into the city school system and broke it apart. Teachers went on strike over the issue of community versus central control. It started in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville district of Brooklyn when the local superintendent, Rhody McCoy, who was black, fired a number of white teachers and principals. McCoy believed, as many whites including my father did, that black kids needed black role models. Dad had been in the forefront of hiring, mentoring, and promoting black men and women to be teachers and principals. He had put Rhody McCoy on the fast track in the first place. Rhody was his guy! Rhody danced with Mom at teacher functions! At every one of his promotion ceremonies, Rhody publicly thanked Dad! I had met and liked Rhody.

  But now Dad, as an official observer during the strike, was being spat on by black parents, kids, and even teachers. Rhody McCoy saw it and physically turned his back on Dad. The reality and the symbolism of that betrayal devastated Dad, although he tried not to show it. He talked stiffly about politics, not about personal hurt.

  Rhody became a controversial and polarizing figure in the city, symbolic of an upheaval that came to be seen variously as a black power grab, a righteous revolution, and an honest attempt to transfer educational control from a hidebound bureaucracy to the people it was serving.