An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  We finally ran into each other—literally—one gray, chilly day in Fort Lauderdale that spring training. I was studying a roster as I hurried along a plank walkway over wet ground that led from the Yankees’ locker room out to the field. DiMaggio’s head was down to avoid eye contact as he strode toward me. We collided. Face-to-face with me, DiMaggio froze. With his long, melancholy face, the deer-in-the-headlights cliché seemed appropriate.

  After an embarrassingly long time, I finally blurted, “Not baseball weather.”

  He blinked, took a breath, and looked up. “That’s an outfielder’s sky.”

  And then, as if he were Michelangelo describing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he talked about the roof of his world, about the danger of losing balls in the clouds as easily as in the sun, about smog and shadows and smoke, about the line of the ball, rising or looping, about the spin. I was mesmerized. I took no notes. I barely breathed, afraid to break the spell. I suddenly understood (but maybe I inserted the revelation later) that he hadn’t just “drifted” after all, that he was a scholar, that he had prepared for every kind of sky, patch of blue, burst of sun. He always knew where he was going to meet the ball.

  He paused only once, to notice I was shivering. “Rook!” he roared at a young pitcher sprinting by. It was Stan Bahnsen, a prize prospect who would be the American League’s Rookie of the Year the next season. “Get this man a jacket.” Bahnsen stripped off his warm-up jacket and gave it to me. DiMaggio helped me put it on.

  We might be talking still, but a Yankees PR official made a big show of rescuing DiMaggio from what he assumed was a media ambush. DiMaggio seemed reluctant to leave. The PR man said DiMaggio was late for an appointment. It sounded like a lie, but DiMaggio was too much the gentleman to show the man up. He asked my name. He said, “Good-bye, Lippy,” and gravely shook my hand.

  Lippy. All through childhood and adolescence I had battled that hated nickname. Now it was an honorific.

  The Mantle at First experiment failed, and he retired the next year. He referred to the next five years as a kind of death; he felt excluded and forgotten. And when he was remembered, it was not always with reverence. In 1970, Ball Four, the locker-room-wall-shattering valentine to baseball that former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton wrote with Len Shecter, portrayed Mantle as a lovable teammate, a hard drinker, and somewhat adolescent; he led Yankees on “beaver-shooting” expeditions to hotel roofs to spy on women undressing. Bouton didn’t spare himself as a cutup and carouser (although, as one of the most intelligent and politically sophisticated major leaguers, he demonstrated against South African apartheid and for American civil rights). Bouton was attacked by the baseball establishment (which included sportswriters such as Dick Young) for betraying the sanctity of the locker room. Sportswriters felt burned; here they had prostituted their calling by writing claptrap in exchange for access, and they had been scooped by a bona fide insider. Bouton, who loved Mantle, was hurt when told incorrectly that The Mick was angry. It was many years before that was reconciled.

  In 1974, Mantle was inducted into the Hall of Fame, with the attention and memorabilia bonanza that comes with official sainthood, and he was hot again. I was three years gone from the Times by then, in a New Jersey basement happily writing fiction, and I didn’t pay much attention. I was not keeping up with sports; I thought I was through with journalism. I certainly had no idea that I wasn’t through with Mickey or Joe, that we would meet again in a few years. I hadn’t yet learned the lesson that as you grow and change, you keep rewriting your best stories.

  Chapter Four

  Nigger, the Book

  Following my hero, Gay Talese, I began writing nonsports pieces for magazines, somehow specializing in cop stories. This was in 1963, a year after the Mets’ first spring training and a year before Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title. I wasn’t committed to sportswriting yet, and I didn’t want to be pigeonholed for life. I hadn’t yet figured out that sports led me to everything and everything led me back to sports.

  My favorite piece, for the Times Sunday magazine, was about two narcotics detectives who disguised themselves as bums, old ladies, hippies, to bust heroin dealers. Hanging with the cops was exhilarating. Now, these were authentic men! They had guns! We swaggered through the streets, daring the bad guys to make their moves!

  The magazine article attracted book offers. The cops told me to go ahead and make myself a deal but leave them the movie rights because there was a huge case they were wrapping up that would make us all rich and famous. I signed a contract for a nonfiction book about the central characters in one of their big drug cases. It was less about them than about NarcoWorld, including the dealers and the buyers, but they were key characters. I got my first advance, $1,500, one-third of it up front. I felt like a real writer.

  I kept hanging with them, but as time went on I began liking the older, alpha cop, Eddie Egan, less and less. He was a self-absorbed jock who had had pro baseball dreams. He was hard and violent. I thought his partner, Sonny Grosso, had a soul, but I wasn’t sure Eddie had one. One day Eddie and I went up to Harlem on a case (people thought I was a cop by this time, or maybe an assistant DA), and he kicked in an apartment door and started slapping a young white woman who cowered on her bed clutching a mixed-race baby. He stopped when he remembered I was there. Later, he said to me, “I hate it when white women fuck niggers.”

  I sensed that as I dug deeper into the story, there would be more incidents like that one. There was no way I could write about these guys as heroes and no way I could write the truth so long as they had some say over the final product. I hadn’t promised them veto power, but I had promised them a look at the manuscript. I wanted to write this book, a nonsports book, but I returned the advance. I was glad I had a day job.

  A few weeks later, the book editor called back. He was looking for a writer to collaborate with Dick Gregory on his autobiography. Gregory was already under contract but hadn’t clicked with any of the writers who had been sent to meet with him. I wasn’t that interested in ghosting a book, but I was interested in meeting Gregory, the first black comedian to make it in the major white clubs. He was earning $5,000 a week! While much of his act was standard stand-up about dumb cousins and vicious mothers-in-law, his racial rim shots (“’Leven months I sat in at a restaurant, then they integrated and didn’t even have what I wanted”) were repeated everywhere as social commentary if not uncomfortable truths (“We won’t go to war in the Congo ’cause we’re afraid our soldiers will bring back war brides”). At thirty, he was hailed as the Jackie Robinson of topical comedy, a Will Rogers for the Atomic Age.

  So on the evening of September 16, 1963, I walked into a New York City hotel suite, where I was politely told by Gregory’s wife, Lillian, that he was in the bedroom and could not be disturbed.

  I knocked and without waiting for an answer barged in. I introduced myself to a pudgy man in underwear curled into a fetal position on his bed. I sat down and asked him why he was crying.

  He slowly rolled over and looked up. “Don’t you read the papers?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I work for one.”

  “Didn’t you read about the four little girls who were murdered yesterday in a Birmingham church?”

  “It was terrible,” I said. “Now, about this book thing . . .”

  But he had rolled onto his back and was talking to the ceiling. “How can the white man be so evil to kill four little girls who weren’t even demonstrating for their civil rights?”

  He talked for hours, deep into the night, about the racial cancer destroying the nation and how most of the blame was on people who looked like me. You people stunt the lives of children and break up families, he said, you have the power to wound the innocent simply by calling them “nigger.” I took some notes because that’s what I did, but I mostly wondered what I was doing there. This man was not the cool, slangy hipster I had seen on nightclub stages, the Chris Rock–Dave Chappelle–Bill Cosby of his time whose h
umorous, rats-to-riches autobiography I was supposed to write.

  The man on the bed, alternately blubbering and ranting about the Birmingham bombing, was not funny or particularly insightful, I thought at first, just angry. I resented his making me the stand-in for all hateful white men. But something kept me there, and the more I listened the more I was engaged. As disturbing as it was, it began to make sense. I wondered if we could find a common ground. I began to wonder how I would feel right now if I were black. I’d never had a black friend. The only black person I knew was my parents’ cleaning lady. Gregory was taking me somewhere I had never been. I was open, and he must have sensed it. When I finally got up to leave, he asked me to come back the next day so we could start writing the book.

  It went badly. Greg was sometimes an hour or two late for an interview session, and when I complained, he’d say, “I can tell you been waitin’, baby, you sound colored.” He always called me “baby.” He didn’t remember my name.

  I began to envy the collaborators he had rejected. Once Greg and I started tape-recording, it got even worse, endless, unusable diatribes against white America. He had strong arguments and solid facts, but this was deadly speechifying, hardly the human stuff of autobiography.

  I took it for about two weeks of sporadic sessions before or after his nightclub appearances and my Times assignments. One day, I waited three hours for him with a prepared monologue. I told him that I didn’t need this jive job badly enough to put up with an irresponsible, selfish fool trying to hang me up in reverse prejudice. In fact, I declared pompously, the only thing I didn’t have against him was his color.

  I stood up, said good-bye, and marched out of his hotel room to the elevator. He followed me and got in. On the way down he said, “Bob Lipsyte, right?”

  “Too late,” I said.

  He said he was going to have a sandwich at the hotel coffee shop. Would I join him?

  While we ate, he kept repeating my name. When we finished, he said, “Let’s go back up. I think we’re ready to write a book. A real book, one they’re not expecting.”

  We went back up. The book that emerged was basically my editing of taped hours of emotional storytelling that my wife-to-be, Marjorie, transcribed when she got home from her Times job in the music department. She typed and cried, later laughed, along with Greg crying and laughing as he lay on his hotel bed like a patient in therapy. His stories were raw and unsentimental. The most poignant scenes for Margie and me were of little Richard sitting with his mom, who was dressed and rouged, waiting for Greg’s dad, Big Pres, to make a rare cameo in their lives. It always ended with Big Pres beating both of them for asking him to stay.

  It was a thrilling, intense education in race, politics, comedy. Being with Greg in those tumultuous years of 1963 and 1964 informed the rest of my career, most immediately my coverage of Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali. We never stopped talking, mostly about civil rights and Vietnam as Americans went south in voter registration drives and to Asia to fight an illegitimate war triggered by the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident. Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were murdered, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize. Black ghettos blew up into violence during “the long, hot summer” of 1964. By the end of that year, the conservative white Berkeley campus had erupted into riots during the Free Speech movement that eventually led to the university lifting a ban on student activism.

  We also talked sports. Greg had gone to Southern Illinois University on a track scholarship. One of the first stories he told me about himself once we were past the diatribes was how he had become an activist. I didn’t believe it.

  In 1951, his junior year in high school, Greg told me, he had set a St. Louis schoolboy track record for the mile. When it didn’t appear in the annual city yearbook the following September, he complained to his coach, who explained that only records set by white boys were listed. Greg was outraged, and he ditched school the next day to go to City Hall to protest to the mayor. It also happened to be the day that thousands of other African-American schoolkids were marching on City Hall to protest overcrowded conditions in their segregated schools. Greg was quickly recognized as a sports star. It was assumed he was there to protest with them, and he was appointed a marshal and asked to run up and down the line of march, maintaining order and morale. He was interviewed by newspapers and local TV. By the time they got to City Hall, Greg was talking about overcrowded conditions. When he got home, his mother was in tears. Someone on TV had called him a Communist. He told me it was the beginning of his political awakening.

  It sounded like one of those celebrity creation myths. But when I checked out the story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I was surprised. Dates, quotes, everything matched what Greg had told me. I began thinking about my own racism. Why had I thought his story was piped? And I began to trust him. Even in his hyperbole there would always be a core of truth.

  Once we got cooking, we taped mostly early in the morning in New York or Chicago or San Francisco after Greg had appeared at a club. It would be a long and wonderful night that began with Greg ambling onstage, climbing on his stool, lighting a cigarette, and asking the nearest white waiter for a Scotch and soda. When the drink arrived, Greg would shake his head and say, “Damn, Governor Barnett should see this.” The audience would laugh and then applaud the subtle compliment he had paid them and their city, so far advanced beyond segregationist Ross Barnett’s Mississippi. I thought many of them felt that the money they were spending in the club was somehow a contribution to “the cause.” And in some ways it was; the audience never knew that Greg stipulated in his contracts that the nightclub had to hire some black waiters, at least during his engagement.

  We’d go out to eat after the gig, at least half-a-dozen people, to whatever joint was still open, and Greg would order for everyone, much too much food. He would taste everything, almost delicately, savoring bites, obviously feeling comforted by the abundance. He had been hungry as a kid, and he remembered eating the silky sand that blew through St. Louis in the summertime.

  Just before Christmas 1963, after a late show at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago, I got the idea for the name for our book, although I didn’t know it right away. (The approved working title at the time was “Callous on My Soul,” which I hated.) We were eating at Mammy’s Pancake House, an all-night luncheonette on Rush Street, where Greg had ordered three kinds of pancakes—chocolate, Dutch apple, and sausage—roasted barbecue, scrambled eggs, and a breakfast steak when he suddenly said, “Someday I’m going to open up my own restaurant, call it ‘Nigger,’ just one table, five waiters, and an orchestra, the royal treatment to anybody who has the guts to come in. And every white man in the South will be giving me free publicity.”

  And then we went back to his hotel room to tape. In those eerie hours before dawn, he would lie on his bed and reach back to Richard Claxton Gregory, one of six kids, a welfare case born on Columbus Day 1932, who fantasized that school closed every year in honor of his birthday.

  He often talked about his “monster,” his term for the ego, ambition, drive, and survival skills that had outwitted bigger boys with humor, kept him running track until he was out of the ghetto, pushed him to polish his comedy act at parties and black honky-tonks until January 13, 1961, when the Chicago Playboy Club called him to replace the popular double-talk comic Professor Irwin Corey, who was sick. When Greg arrived, the manager was blocking the stage door. He was panicked at the number of southern conventioneers in the house. Maybe another night. But the monster refused to be canceled. The manager sighed and opened the door.

  Greg had a plan. He started by making fun of himself.

  “They asked me to buy a lifetime membership in the NAACP, but I told them I buy a week at a time. Hell of a thing to buy a lifetime membership, then wake up one morning and find out the country’s been integrated.”

  Now he had them, and he could say anything he wanted as long as he stayed away from sex.

  “Last time I was down Sout
h, I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said, ‘We don’t serve colored people here.’

  “I said, ‘That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.’

  “About then these three cousins come in, you know the ones I mean, Klu, Kluck, and Klan, and they say, ‘Boy, we’re giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we’re going to do to you.’ So I put down my knife and fork, and I picked up that chicken and I kissed it.”

  Sometime early in that first Playboy show a heckler in the back yelled, “Nigger!” Greg said, “Say that again, please. My contract calls for fifty dollars every time that word is used.”

  That fifty-minute show lasted almost two hours because the crowd wouldn’t let him leave the stage. When he finally did, he got a standing ovation. Hugh Hefner showed up for the second show that night, and when it was over he signed Greg to a three-year deal.

  The monster that had led him through the stage door would never concede defeat or admit it had been tricked. It also worked in smaller, more subtle ways.

  The assistant pastor of a black church in Harlem, a theatrical white man who called himself “a public relations man for God,” had invited Greg to speak one Sunday morning at a service for young prison inmates. Greg accepted immediately. But when he and I arrived at the large, ornate church, it was filled with hundreds of well-fed, well-dressed parishioners. He’d been tricked into showing up for the fat cats.

  Greg asked, “Where are the prisoners?”

  The assistant pastor smiled. “Their services are conducted much, much too early for an entertainer with your hours.”

  Greg stalked out of the church. “You can tell them the incense made me sick.”

  The assistant pastor, sweat bubbling on his pale, fat face, blocked Greg at the bottom of the steps. He sank to his knees.