An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  To this day, that remains a mystery to me, as it does to Weiner, who became a successful journalist in Minneapolis, and to Shinnick, who emerged from his ruined academic career to become a practitioner of acupuncture and other complementary treatments in Manhattan. Both have remained friends of mine.

  When Scott died, I expressed my wonderment in a column: Had Scott cut a deal to escape prosecution?

  I had gotten hold of an FBI interview with Scott just before he died in which he claimed that while he was helping Hearst elude the police in 1974, she told him she had arranged her own kidnapping. She’d wanted to break off her engagement with the man she was living with in Berkeley, but she hadn’t wanted to give her parents the satisfaction of having been right about Mr. Wrong. So she asked her local dope dealer to make a connection with the Symbionese Liberation Army, which could snatch her and make the guy look like a wimp in the process. Was it true? Did Scott make up that story? Shinnick thinks so.

  Could Scott have been close enough to the Hearst barony to have it put a lid on his prosecution in return for not revealing that Patty had lied about her abduction? The twenty-two months she served for her adventures (a thirty-five-year sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and she was pardoned by President Bill Clinton) was a fraction of the time she would have served had the judge and jury believed she was not a victim at the start.

  Scott’s wife, Micki, was apparently angry enough at my speculations to disinvite me to Scott’s memorial. I regretted missing the chance to say good-bye with that old revolutionary crowd, see what they were all up to. But I understood that in the end, the journalist stands alone. Or should.

  Chapter Nine

  My Center Fielders (Part Two)

  Mickey Mantle was banned from baseball in 1983, which brought him back into my life. He had taken a public relations job with an Atlantic City casino hotel, which the Major League Baseball commissioner thought put him too close to the evils of gambling. It seemed like an overly pious ruling, but Mantle was philosophical—nobody in baseball was offering him $100,000 a year to hang out and grin. The producers of CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt thought that their new on-camera essayist, me, would find Mantle a perfect subject among my soft-core sports pieces—rodeo clowns, linebackers returning after cancer, Iowa girl basketball players, legless gymnasts. Mantle in his very off season.

  The most difficult part of the transition to TV for me was learning to trust producers, editors, and crews enough to be truly collaborative, to share the creation and direction of a story. I was used to hunting and gathering by myself, writing in a bubble, then fighting editors over words they wanted to change. In TV, the collaboration extends to the subjects; a cranky, uncooperative subject might still make a good newspaper story but rarely good television. And at Sunday Morning, especially in the more featurey sections such as music, art, Americana, and sports, we picked mostly people we liked, with whom we wanted to share time. People who delighted us, maybe even were worth our admiration.

  I was up for The Mick. It had been twenty-three years since he and Yogi had tried to part my hair, and I had come to realize that the shame I’d felt that night at Yankee Stadium and the anger later had been misdirected. Mickey was Mickey. The sports media that had godded him up were the guilty parties. I had covered plenty of heroes in those twenty-three years, even come to admire a few, such as Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, Malcolm X, and Dick Gregory. But I knew they were all humanly flawed and that totally embracing or rejecting a hero was silly.

  I still didn’t grasp the worship of Mantle beyond his amazing natural abilities, but I was long past making him the demon in my dreams. I felt a little sorry for him—he had squandered his talents. But I was open to Mantle. Or so I thought.

  So on a chilly day in early May 1983, I followed him around a New Jersey golf course on a joke-a-stroke corporate outing. He drank his way from hole to hole, offering ribald bonhomie to thrilled businessmen. Mantle was mellow by the time we sat down in a deserted clubhouse bar for a long on-camera interview.

  He continued to drink as we talked. He seemed determined to knock down some old myths: he said his legs had never been as bad as the sportswriters had made them out to be, nor had he lived in fear of an early death. In fact, he said, grinning slyly, he rarely ever gave it a thought unless some reporter brought it up. “Now I’ll probably have a hard time sleeping tonight.”

  I asked him if he had any regrets.

  “My only regret is that I didn’t take better care of myself like Willie Mays and Stan Musial and Hank Aaron. I think I could have played a lot longer.”

  I asked him if taking care of himself included drinking less.

  His cool blue eyes flicked over my face, narrowed. His voice changed to a growl. “Let’s close this off. Haven’t you got enough?”

  I felt myself stiffening, and my voice seemed to be coming from a great distance, perhaps all the way from 1960 while a ball whipped over my head.

  “Are you in a hurry,” I snapped, “or is all this bothering you?”

  That let some of the air out of Mantle. He seemed momentarily confused. “Well, I’m not in a hurry.” His voice softened again. “We’ve been doing this for thirty minutes . . .”

  My voice softened, too. I explained that people were more concerned about their health these days, and given that athletes are role models, what he had to say on the subject could be useful. It sounded lame to me as I said it, but it gave both of us room.

  He said, “From, say, 1960 to 1968, when I retired, my wife and kids didn’t come to New York with me. I stayed in a hotel, and from the time the game was over till the next day there wasn’t very much for me to do, you know, except I would go out to eat and I would start drinking.”

  It sounded packaged. I wanted more from Mantle, some inner glimpse. Sometimes you have to give to get. So while the cameraman changed tapes, I told Mantle about our first meeting in 1960. I told him that a lot of newspapermen thought his rudeness was a result of his stress and pain, but that I didn’t know that at the time and his casual curse words had rocked my boat and informed the rest of my career.

  He listened carefully, flashed that Oklahoma Kid grin, and lifted his drink. “I remember that well, Bob. It always bothered me. That’s why I started drinking.”

  That was the moment when I finally started liking that sarcastic country slickster. For the first time, I understood his appeal, why middle-aged men cried when he showed up at their surprise birthday parties (for a reported $10,000) and why Bob Costas and Billy Crystal revered him. Mickey was truly cool and funny in that smart-ass, deflecting style of the locker room, also the police station, the barracks, the trading floor. No wonder he attracted man crushes. He was the quintessential jock with both easy charm and the neuroses that hinted of vulnerability. The wounded warrior. Why had I never gotten that before? Had I seen only the bully? How much else had I missed along the way?

  The interview got a lot better after that. I ordered a drink. I asked him if he still thought about baseball.

  “I dream about it. Every night, almost.”

  “What kind of dream?”

  “Well, first of all I take a cab to the ballpark, and I’m in my uniform and I’ve got a bat. And I get there and the game’s going on and I hear them say, ‘Mickey Mantle batting, number seven, Mickey Mantle.’

  “But I’m not in the ballpark, and the gates are closed. There’s a hole that I can crawl under, and halfway through the hole I get stuck and I can still hear the guy saying, ‘Now batting, number seven, Mickey Mantle.’”

  He paused to sip his drink, and I didn’t dare breathe. This is great, I thought, I can see it on TV, a breakthrough in understanding The Mick, Freud at bat, and he’s giving it exclusively to me. The 1983 payoff for the 1960 brush-off.

  “And I can see Casey and Billy, Whitey, Hank Bauer, all the guys are looking around, like, where’s he at? And I’m stuck in the hole and they can’t hear me . . . and then I wake up. And I usually can’t g
et back to sleep.”

  I started winding it down then, even though Mickey seemed to have gotten a second wind. Now I wanted to end it, get back to New York, screen the tapes, show off this great stuff, new, fresh, a never-before-seen side of The Mick.

  Driving back, I wondered if Mickey would have his dream tonight. And I wondered what had been on his mind that night back in 1960. Had he been hung over, distracted, lonely, already burdened by regrets? Had he felt stuck in a hole? Had I been too young to have had compassion for him then, starstruck, just not empathetic enough?

  That Sunday, I found the same dream in a fine, long Washington Post feature story by Jane Leavy, who had even gotten a second dream, a classic falling dream involving a pole vault.

  Oh, Mickey, I thought, you got me again. But this time I laughed.

  (In 2010, Jane published The Last Boy, a masterful, sympathetic biography that portrayed Mantle as a hero, victim, and jerk.)

  Even as Mickey made his comeback into the public consciousness (he had actually never been that far out of it as adoring baby boomers made him one of their benchmarks and flocked to his Manhattan restaurant, opened in 1988), DiMaggio lost some of his luster. His fans never forgave him for his Mr. Coffee commercials; what right did he have to commodify our iconography? Rumors leaked out about his abusive treatment of Marilyn. His dignity and aloofness were reinterpreted as antisocial behavior. I thought the revisionism was unfair.

  In 1985, I wrote a piece for People about our spring training encounter in 1967. I sent it to him and asked if he would sit for a Sunday Morning interview. He never answered my letter, but when I chatted with him in spring training that year, he said he had read the piece and remembered our meeting but didn’t want to be interviewed just yet. But if I showed up at the Yankees’ locker room at 10 A.M. on Old-Timers’ Day that summer, he would make himself available. Over the next few months, I was unable to confirm the date; he and his representatives never called back.

  But I believed he would remember and be there. This was Joe D! He meant what he said! Reluctantly, Sunday Morning let me take a producer and a crew on what was considered an outside chance. We arrived at 10:05 A.M.

  The Clipper was waiting for us in the locker room, tapping his foot. “Where’ve you been, Lippy? I’ve been here an hour.”

  We set up in the Yankees’ dugout, but the public address system was blaring music and announcements, drowning our audio. This had happened before at the Stadium. There was no recourse. No interview. We explained this to DiMaggio, who lifted an eyebrow, then summoned a Yankees PR man to bring him a telephone. Was he calling George Steinbrenner? A moment later the PA was turned off. Who else but the great DiMaggio could silence the Stadium?

  It was a long interview, and I can read my sweat in the transcript. He was cooperative, even chatty, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t go too deep. His insights into baseball, his fellow players, New York in the thirties and forties, when he had owned the night, were sweet. He remembered Fifth Avenue at 3 A.M. in the winter filled with swells coming from El Morocco and other nightclubs. “New York was always New Year’s Eve,” he said. He remembered the great black dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson doing a soft shoe on the dugout roof during a game.

  He could be precise about individual games, even at-bats and catches, and about his various injuries and ailments, including ulcers. He’d “loved” playing and poured into it all his energy and emotion. But it hadn’t been easy; he’d always had “a knot” in his stomach because he was so shy and tense. He indicated that those were the feelings that dominated his life—it was only now that the knot was unraveling—but that was as far as we got emotionally.

  He had little to say about contemporary baseball. His wonderment at the Simon & Garfunkel song “Mrs. Robinson” seemed sad; at first he had thought it might be an insult, but later he had been flattered when Paul Simon explained that the line “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” was a tribute to his iconic stature. Simon had had the grace not to add (as he did in interviews) that Mick-ey Man-tle didn’t have the right number of syllables.

  DiMaggio kept coming back to his shyness, the dominant emotion of his life. I reminded him that Mantle had said that when they played together in 1951, “you needed an appointment to talk to DiMaggio.”

  He shook his head. “Now, there was a really shy person. I was looking at myself when I first saw him.”

  His loneliness and his decency were touching. He seemed never to have had a real relationship with a woman. His public dates were mostly party girls his gofers herded toward him. And oddly for a man from a big Italian family, he socialized mostly with hustlers.

  Was all this true, was it just in my mind? I thought a lot about my warm and irrational feelings toward DiMaggio. Am I one of those fans I disdain, who want our heroes in soft focus, a reflection of our hopes and dreams? You’re such a thinker, Lippy.

  I got high marks for the DiMaggio piece from my CBS colleagues. But I kept thinking that either I had missed the vein or still waters sometimes run shallow. I didn’t like either thought.

  Mickey Mantle died in 1995 at sixty-three, overwhelmed by cancer from a liver that had been removed and replaced only months before. The controversy—had he been bumped to the head of the line, and how could a patient with such advanced disease even be considered for a transplant?—was muted by admiration for Mantle’s gallantry, his call for organ donations, and his candor about his alcohol abuse and his destructive history as a husband and father. At the time I wrote, “Just before he died, Mickey Mantle gave us a reason to love him. He was willing to use himself as an almost anti–role model in a very heroic way.”

  But in the same column I also compared the male boomers’ adoration of Mantle to the way Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion, had become a symbol to alienated black youth. At about the same time Mantle died, Tyson had begun a series of comeback fights after three years in prison for rape.

  There was a flood of mail attacking me for linking Mantle and Tyson and for mentioning the controversy over Mantle’s quick liver transplant. “You are a wart” was one of the kinder messages. Others brought up a column I had written a month earlier urging the Baltimore shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., if he “has any class,” to take a day off before he broke Lou Gehrig’s record of 2,130 consecutive baseball games. That was not even an original idea; several years earlier, the Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt had suggested that if Ripken were truly “decent,” he would tie Gehrig’s record, then sit out one game. No shame in sharing the record with a man who’d had to quit because he was dying. Ripken, as good as he was, benefited from a 1995 conservative need to gild a so-called lunch pail hero who gratefully came to work every day. I thought he was lucky not to get sick, be replaced by someone younger and cheaper, or see his place of business moved out of town.

  I didn’t think I was being contrarian about all this, but I understood how out of tune I must have sounded after I read Bob Costas’s eulogy for Mantle in a Dallas church packed with old Yankees.

  Costas said he was representing “the millions of baseball-loving kids who grew up in the fifties and sixties and for whom Mickey Mantle was baseball. And more than that, he was a presence in our lives—a fragile hero to whom we had an emotional attachment so strong and lasting that it defied logic. Mickey often said he didn’t understand it, this enduring connection and affection—the men now in their forties and fifties, otherwise perfectly sensible, who went dry in the mouth and stammered like schoolboys in the presence of Mickey Mantle.”

  Costas lovingly mentioned Mantle’s flaws and regrets and ended with this: “I just hope God has a place for him where he can run again. Where he can play practical jokes on his teammates and smile that boyish smile, ’cause God knows, no one’s perfect. And God knows there’s something special about heroes.”

  In those days I talked incessantly about Mantle with my best friend, Roger Sims, who was on dialysis waiting for a kidney transplant. Roger was my age, formerly an air fo
rce pilot in Vietnam, a TV news producer, and a passionate Yankees fan. He was very conflicted. He loved Mickey, he wanted Mickey to live, he could say logically that Mickey’s transplant, even if immoral, could do great good for the cause of organ donations.

  But even Roger thought Mickey didn’t deserve to be jumped to the head of the line, not with the spreading cancer he had. And Roger felt the same way about himself; at fifty-seven, with serious diabetes and heart disease, Roger wasn’t sure he deserved a new kidney, certainly not when there were younger, healthier, “worthier” people who needed them. He was six years younger than Mantle.

  But even Roger got teary at the part in Bob Costas’s euology where Mickey was up in Heaven, running.

  Costas invited me to dinner soon after Mantle’s death. We had gotten to know each other during the shooting of Heroes of the Game, a six-hour documentary I wrote for Turner Broadcasting on the American Century through the lives of transcendent sports figures. On the show, Costas talked about Mantle, among other subjects, and I was struck by his intelligence, clarity, and basic decency. I had always admired his broadcasting skills and thought he was better than the games he called—he seemed ready to be a late-night host.

  But our dinner was not comfortable. Speaking carefully in full sentences and paragraphs, Costas suggested that I might be happier—certainly my readers would be happier—if I tried less to be provocative and more to be open-hearted. He said he sensed my humanity but thought I was suppressing it, moving past the boundaries of skepticism into cynicism, not finding pleasure in the games or the goodness in even flawed athletes. I was flattered that he had taken the time to mentor me—he was fourteen years younger—but irritated by his presumption. We did not speak again for fourteen years, but I recalled the meeting vividly whenever I saw him on TV. I wondered if he could have been right. Should there only have been paeans to Mantle right after his death? Why? Didn’t journalism dictate a full, fair portrait, wonders and warts both? And was Costas a journalist, moving so easily from solid interviewing to fandom to the broadcasting of events for which his network paid?