An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  I was delighted when he returned to boxing in 1970. My Big Story was moving into a great new chapter, I thought, as I settled into my ringside seat at Madison Square Garden on March 8, 1971, for the so-called Fight of the Century against Joe Frazier.

  I have a copy of the next day’s front-page Daily News photo, Ali on his back, eyes closed, mouth open; Frazier standing over him, fists cocked; and Lipsyte shouting into a telephone, face contorted. I keep trying to imagine my thoughts. Was I surprised? Was I sad? Was I already thinking that the Big Story was over, that Ali would now be just an “opponent,” a sacrificial lamb for champions and kids coming up?

  My job that night had been to keep the desk apprised of the progress of the fight so it could update the story when necessary. Within a few rounds, my clipped capsules of the action became a blow-by-blow account and I was patched through to every speakerphone in the Times Building. I was broadcasting. And even though the official decision was unanimously for Frazier and most boxing writers thought Frazier had won, everyone who listened to my account was led to believe that Ali was winning, even after he got up from his knockdown, unsteady, face swollen.

  I think it was that blindly biased private broadcast as much as feeling burned out by the column that dictated my own next great chapter. I was losing it as a fair-minded, clear-eyed observer. I’d crossed over, become a fan. And this time Ali was certainly all finished. My Big Story was over. I quit the paper six months later. I was thirty-three.

  I stayed in touch with Cus D’Amato, who moved to a friend’s house in upstate New York. He would eventually open a gym there.

  One day in 1979, a former boxer who had once trained with Cus and now was a counselor at a nearby juvenile correctional facility, showed up with a problem, thirteen years old and 200 pounds, who had beaten up every kid in the reform school and started pounding on the guards. Could the old boxing manager meet him, talk to him, maybe even train him—try to channel all that fury into boxing instead of beating up people?

  Cus said no, but the counselor was insistent, and finally Cus said, Okay, bring him around, but no promises. Something magical happened between the old white Italian and the black teenager. Eventually, Cus taught him to fight, inflamed him with his philosophies of fear and violence, and legally adopted him.

  When I knew Mike Tyson in those days, he seemed like a sensitive kid. He was also an unstoppable young slugger. It was a great story. A classic. Unfortunately, a classic like Frankenstein. Cus apparently never finished his creation, and when he died, a year before Tyson became, at twenty, the youngest ever to win the heavyweight championship, the monster began to spin out of control. Over the years, interviewing Tyson the champion, the ex-champion, the convicted rapist, grieving father, junkie, lost soul, now struggling entertainer and family man, I would always see the teenager who had climbed up his own shadowy, twisting flights of stairs.

  Chapter Six

  Uncle Howard

  Howard Cosell once said to me, “Bobbin, you have a face for radio and a voice for print.” This, coming from a horse-faced man with a bad toupee whose nasal voice was the most irritating on the airwaves, was nothing less than inspirational. The opinionated loudmouth was one of the main reasons that ABC was no longer the Almost Broadcasting Company, why Monday Night Football was the blockbuster hit of prime time, why a white sports audience came to understand Muhammad Ali’s persecution. One year, in the same poll, he was voted both the best-liked and most-hated sportscaster.

  I had no such ambivalence. I loved Howard Cosell. He was encouraging to me, personally and by example; he used his radio and television pulpit to become the most important commentator on sports-related news in the country. Sure, he hustled sports—football, boxing, baseball briefly, the Olympics, and some made-for-TV early reality games—but he also delivered thundering jeremiads against greed, exploitation, racism, and the spurious use of tax dollars and eminent domain to build stadiums that would enrich the owners with whom he loved to mingle.

  I took his credo—“You can’t always be popular and right at the same time”—as a moral lesson and sometimes as a shelter when I was attacked for being a contrarian. In those days, it was rare for someone on TV or radio to stand up to public opinion. Cosell stood up. He was often called controversial because he wasn’t bland. His attacks—on his radio shows, on his excellent, short-lived TV magazine, SportsBeat, and in interviews with anyone who would listen—against the news media’s pandering to illegal sports gambling, the inconsistencies of drug testing, and the brutality of boxing were unusual for his times.

  Cosell’s sudden refusal in 1982, after the brave but untalented Tex Cobb lost a one-sided bout to heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, to broadcast any more professional fights was considered a grandstand play. What took him so long? asked his critics; the hypocrite made a fortune at ringside with Ali and so many other boxers. It was late. But among those who demanded reform when the overmatched Duk Koo Kim died after a fight with the lightweight champion, Ray Mancini—which was only days before the Holmes-Cobb mismatch—Cosell was the only one willing to sacrifice a job, which he did, helping push through reforms. Cosell’s play-by-plays and color commentary were entertaining and informative but not irreplaceable. What was irreplaceable, as he knew, was his presence, which gave a kind of moral seal of approval to the increasingly corrupt sport.

  I once wrote that he was “a living mixed metaphor . . . symbol, know-it-all uncle, stern coach, comic relief. He was even a dichotomy: Who else could lure us into the SportsWorld tent with promises of jockomamie delights, then, once inside, berate us for wasting our time at such foolish entertainments?”

  He often told me how annoyed he was at the dichotomy line, but I think he liked the idea of someone taking him so seriously. Cosell criticism usually came down to variations of Jimmy Cannon’s lame put-down: “Cosell put on a toupee and changed his name [from Cohen] to tell it like it is.”

  He could blunt criticism with his own self-assessment: “Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.” The twist, of course, was that he reveled in being able to get away with bad behavior. He modulated it with an exaggerated charm around tycoons, sports stars, and famous entertainers, as well as hot dog vendors and kids on the street, especially if there was an audience.

  Cosell recognized the transcendent importance of baseball’s first modern-era black ballplayer, Jackie Robinson—the word he used was “unconquerable”—and long before anyone knew what Howard was talking about, he dubbed O. J. Simpson “that little lost boy.” If Cosell seemed a bit fulsome in his praise of Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi and harsh in his condemnation of baseball gambler Pete Rose, it was because he was, at heart, a True Believer. “I believe in all the clichés,” he said. “I am a sports fan.”

  He was a True Believer in America. A Brooklyn Jew, a lawyer, an army officer in World War II, of course he would believe in the country’s promise to all of fairness, constitutionality, meritocracy, order. In that sense, I was a True Believer, too. We saw that in each other. And he was an accidental sportscaster.

  As a Manhattan lawyer, he was representing the Little League of New York when ABC radio asked him to host, for free, a Little League show. After three years, in 1956, he decided to become a full-time broadcaster and proposed a weekly show. He was giving up the law, so he wanted to be paid. He was told to get a sponsor. He did. That interview and opinion show, Speaking of Sports, and later Speaking of Everything, were ABC mainstays, intelligent, contentious, unafraid. He did pre- and postgame TV shows. He produced and voiced such groundbreaking documentaries as Grambling College: 100 Yards to Glory, which brought national attention to the historically black Grambling College and its legendary football coach, Eddie Robinson.

  I met Cosell in 1962, at the Mets first spring training camp, when he whacked me with the thirty-pound Nagra tape recorder slung over his shoulder. This pushy stork—a radio reporter, yet, then the lowest on the lo
dge brother pecking order—was merely trying to get closer to the subject of a news conference.

  It was a few spring trainings later that I saw him at a hotel poolside, ostentatiously annoying an attractive middle-aged woman and her two cute teenage daughters. As I came closer, he brayed, “There he is, Bob-bee Lip-syte of The New York Times, destined for stardom.” I froze, embarrassed. The woman he was hitting on said, in a husky contralto, “Now just shut up, Howard, can’t you see you are embarrassing the boy.” And he shut up. He sat back with a sheepish grin, and he looked very happy. The woman was Emmy, his wife and keeper.

  Through the next thirty years, Howard became my colleague, my friend, briefly my employer, and a loud booster of my career—which did not endear me to other sportswriters and sportscasters, most of whom he treated with vicious, almost pathological contempt.

  I liked the idea that Howard made so many in the sports media so crazy. His celebrity—he was often better known than his sports star subjects, who seemed delighted by his attention—gave him great access. His insistence that he was “telling it like it is” made it seem as though everyone else was fudging and piping, which was often true. But his sarcastic contempt for most other sports journalists often came from jealousy or paranoia. He didn’t understand that most of the younger ones just wanted to sit at his feet. So he kicked them.

  The first time Bob Costas met Cosell was at the 1983 World Series as both were entering the Baltimore ballpark. “I know who you are,” brayed Cosell, “the child who rhapsodizes over the infield fly rule. You’ll have a great career.”

  I later asked Costas if he had been offended or flattered. He thought about that. Sort of both, he said. Who else but Cosell could so neatly recognize your existence and then sarcastically dismiss it?

  “I wanted to be his friend,” Costas told me.

  That never happened. Ten years later, when Cosell was out of television and ill, Costas called him. “I told him that I had admired him and that I and my generation just wanted to be friends with him but that he had pushed us away.

  “There was a pause, and then he said, ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right. We’ll talk again.’ We never did.”

  It was Howard’s relationship with Muhammad Ali that was both the high-water mark of his career and the target of journalistic resentment. It was even the subject of one of the best books of the Ali oeuvre, Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship, by Dave Kindred, a rigorous reporter and a phrasemaker with insight. “Before Ali,” he wrote, “sports was a slow dance. After, it was rock and roll. Before Cosell, sports on television was a reverential production. After, it was circus.”

  I particularly liked Kindred’s recounting of the late-night flight in which Ali read to me at high volume his lecture on friendship. “ ‘Whenever the thought of self-interest creeps in that means destruction of friendship. It can never develop into a real friendship, it can only develop into a business relationship. It will last as long as the business relationship lasts. Like me and Cosell. I lose, he goes to somebody else.’”

  Cosell never went to somebody else with such intensity, because, as for me, there was never another subject that deserved it. And for Cosell, no other subject for which he would be the willing straight man. Ali was the star, and Cosell, to remain a journalist, had to keep some distance. Cosell gave airtime to Ali’s religious, political, and social opinions when they were under attack by the government and the mainstream media, but he never endorsed them. He defended Ali’s right to have his opinions. It was a standard that I tried to emulate, although in my arrogance back then I wouldn’t have allowed that anyone else was my model.

  At the end of his career in 1992, during a celebration of him at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York, Cosell was asked if there was anyone to whom he could “pass the torch.” He cleared his throat and glared, and coldly said he didn’t think there was anyone in broadcasting who could cover the range of topics he had covered with similar intelligence or morality.

  Sitting there that night, I totally agreed. There was no one with his range of knowledge, his biblical old prophet’s rage, his insider information. But I also had to laugh. This was from someone who loved playing himself on sitcoms, who had hosted “Battle of the Network Stars” where the likes of Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Wonder Woman (Lynda Carter) competed in goofy athletic events. Of course, he did storm off the set of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*but Were Afraid to Ask)—when he found out he was cast as a sperm. But it was probably because he was only one of many.

  I could find the dichotomy endearing, but many fans and media could not. And they never forgave him for patronizing and later ridiculing his teammate in the Monday Night Football booth, Frank Gifford, who as a New York Giant in the fifties and sixties was the beau ideal of jock manhood, handsome, brave, pleasant, bright enough. Gifford was beatified by a former University of Southern California classmate, Frederick Exley, in the critically acclaimed A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir, which fixed Frank in the literary imagination. As advertising found sports, Frank became a Madison Avenue favorite. Frank was not a talented broadcaster and certainly no journalist. Howard must have resented Frank’s looks and athletic credentials, the unfairness of his coasting through the world while Howard was always, as he said, “on the precipice of professional peril every day of my career.”

  Which was true. Howard could be in trouble for slurring his words on a broadcast (he said flu, they said drunk) or calling a black football player “a little monkey” (Cosell, a stalwart antiracist, often called quick little players of any race “monkeys”), while Frank, sweet-natured and cooperative, managed to be forgiven by the media for an incident in which a woman successfully lured him to an assignation to get photos and a story for a tabloid newspaper.

  By the end of 1975, the high drama of the Muhammad Ali saga was winding down. Ali had regained the heavyweight championship in “The Rumble in the Jungle,” in which he outlasted George Foreman in Zaire, and he had completed the Joe Frazier Trilogy with “The Thrilla in Manila,” which he won as both men took terrible punishment. But Howard was still at the top of his game, and his turns on Monday Night Football were clearly not enough for him. If he couldn’t be a senator, he thought, why couldn’t he take that personality, that celebrity, that incisive intellect, that penetrating wit into the wider world of entertainment?

  Well, he couldn’t, and the proof was a variety show called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. In his best joke, the head writer, Walter Kempley, wrote, “This show is so bad not only is no one watching, they are going next door to turn off their neighbor’s set.”

  Before the show made its debut, while I was waiting for my supposed valedictory to the lodge brother biz, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, to be published, Howard asked if I would be interested in working on it. I had no TV experience as yet, didn’t consider myself a particularly funny writer, and wasn’t plugged into the entertainment scene. But Howard didn’t think those were problems, and we batted around the idea that I would be the show’s “journalist in residence.” I would make sure the scripts didn’t fawn over guests too obviously, and I would scout for stories that Howard could break on air. I jokingly suggested that one such story would be getting the fugitive heiress Patty Hearst, who had been kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of criminals and radicals she had then apparently joined, to surrender to Howard live on stage. His eyes lit up. More than a year after the kidnapping, Patty was still a Big Story. Then he asked me how I would introduce the show’s first booked act, a Beatles wannabe Brit band called the Bay City Rollers. I said, “Are they the hope or the hype?” Next thing I knew, I was offered twice as much weekly salary as I had ever earned.

  I hated the job, hated it more than being a copyboy in the sports department. I had very little to do and few friends because most of the staff assumed that I had been hired by Howard to spy on them, which was probably true.
Howard took me to lunch a few times a week and tried to pump me, but I knew nothing. He mostly wanted to know what the staff thought of him.

  There were some very talented people on that show, including Kempley, who had written for David Frost, Johnny Carson, and Jack Paar. He dreamed of writing novels and considered his TV and Hollywood work “pillaging.” I was the number three writer on a two-man team and would sit in the writers’ room with Kempley and David Axlerod, laughing myself breathless at their old jokes, repartee, and skit ideas, few of which got on air.

  They were further frustrated because the show’s recurring comedic actors, the Prime Time Players, insisted on writing most of their own material. They were unknown youngsters named Christopher Guest, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Bill Murray. Their best stuff didn’t get on, either. To make matters even worse, the show’s executive producer, the imperial Roone Arledge, routinely called on Saturday mornings to impose a new idea for that night’s show, sometimes based on something one of his kids had told him. The Eagles are hot, Dad. Book ’em!

  And Howard was no Mr. Tell-It-Like-It-Is here. He kissed up to John Wayne, sang “Anything You Can Do” with Barbara Walters, and showed little of his arrogance, feistiness, or wit among the nonjock celebrities he fawned over.

  I wanted to quit, but the amazing $1,150 per week was my pillaging.

  I did try to generate some work for myself on the show. I put out feelers about Patty Hearst and got the sense that having her surrender live to Howard was unlikely but also not impossible. There were people out there, some of whom I knew . . . (about which more later).

  I wrote a recurring skit for the Prime Time Players in which Howard and “the boys,” as we called them, sat in a Monday Night Football–like booth reviewing the nonsports events of the week as sportscasters might. But the edginess of the parody was blunted by Howard’s new timidity, and the boys got bored. Soon after our show was blissfully put out of its misery, they joined the Not Ready for Prime Time Players on the rightful Saturday Night Live.