An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  He enforces The Rules. No hats, headbands, wristbands in the gym, nothing but uniforms. No girlfriends present at games. In fact, no one is allowed to watch except family members over twenty-three. And they can clap, but they can’t cheer. Every player needs to do service to the Flames, contribute at least one hour a week to cleaning up, keeping score, refereeing. Older kids coach younger teams. There is mandatory playing time, even if it means that talented kids sit on the bench and watch clumsy kids get their minutes.

  Papa grew along with the Flames. “That first real troublesome year, my problem was coming predominantly from white kids, so I started thinking every black kid was good and every white guy was a problem. Over the next couple of years my feelings matured a little bit, and I’ve reached the stage now where I just don’t notice somebody’s color. That’s a fact. Racism’s a two-way street. More importantly, racial fear is a two-way street.”

  Papa left Wall Street and set up a small local private practice. “I have everything I need, a great education, the ability to earn however much money I need to earn. When I die I’ll have money in the bank, so why do I have to worry about having a little more? A poor kid, his duty isn’t to go out and start something like the Flames. It’s his duty to get an education if he can; if not, then some kind of trade, a job, a wife and kids, and build himself up. We take things at their own level.”

  There were echoes of my dad in what Papa said, especially that sense of mission toward his boys and the certainty that the mission would succeed once the boys understood that he was serious, that he wasn’t going to give up on them. He was compassionate, but he was demanding. I remembered visiting my dad when he was a principal in tough Brooklyn schools. He had a ghetto stare of his own and a righteousness leavened with an easy rapport with the students. I admired what my dad was doing, the goodness of it. Following Papa, even in the early days of our relationship, I was aware that I might be transferring some of my feelings about Dad’s work to Papa, so I was especially wary. What exactly was Papa getting out of this? Money, prestige, power, some of those perverted priestly perks?

  In 1986, the year I moved from CBS to NBC, he ran into big trouble. While scrambling for private grants and city funding for the Flames, he antagonized several local politicians; ever righteous, he blew the whistle on their misuse of funds earmarked for youth programs. There were a Daily News exposé and an indictment. The Flames still didn’t get any money, and Papa almost got killed.

  A few minutes before midnight, Papa was driving his powder blue Lincoln Town Car in Coney Island with a friend, James Rampersant, Jr., the twenty-three-year-old son of a Baptist deacon. A car came toward them the wrong way. As Papa tried to drive around it, the car cut him off and its doors flew open. Long-haired, roughly dressed men with guns leaped out, yelling. Papa threw his car into reverse and crashed into a second car that had come up to block him from behind. More men with guns jumped out. Papa again tried to drive past the first car, but the Lincoln stalled. The men opened fire.

  Papa thought he was caught in the cross fire of rival drug gangs. He thought he was going to die. He and Rampersant began praying. They heard a police siren, but their problems were only beginning. The men in civilian clothes—plainclothes cops—dragged them out of the car and beat them. It was hours before Papa was treated for bleeding head wounds and broken ribs, Rampersant for deep bruises. They were arrested and charged with attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment, and criminal mischief. It was three months before all the charges were dropped.

  A year later, a grand jury report reached “the inescapable conclusion that this was a case of mistaken identity by all involved that led to a chaotic situation, frightening and endangering all the participants, police and civilians, for which no one can be held criminally responsible.” The report also suggested that police be better trained in the dangerous “suspicious vehicle stop.”

  When I trailed him in 1988 with NBC cameras, he seemed a little shaky, diminished. He had lost some of his zip, his smart-aleck repartee, and his quick legal logic. He had headaches and bad dreams. He forgot names. He tired easily. He was undergoing physical therapy, neurological rehabilitation, and treatment for post-traumatic stress. Yet he still seemed more focused and determined than most people. He still had hopes and a plan. “The kind of progress that still has to be made is the kind of progress you have to write onto people’s hearts, not the kind you have to write onto law books.”

  It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that he seemed to be finally recovering from his injuries. Flames enrollment was at an all-time high, as was his own credibility among street hoodlums and members of the media, two groups he courted relentlessly. To top it off, he was rich. After a two-week trial, Papa and Rampersant won $76 million from the city, the largest award in a civil case in Brooklyn. On appeal, it was reduced to $6 million, which they received in 1994.

  Then, once again, times got hard. The Church he had always leaned on began to fail him. Father Termine had retired and the new pastor of Most Precious Blood declared “a different vision” for his sports program, and the CYO leadership found a way to formally exclude the Flames. The next few years were a scramble to find gyms, leagues, opponents. I was back at the Times by then, and my notes, mostly from telephone interviews with Papa, are filled with Flames’ play dates in Queens, in leagues made up of synagogue teams. To practice, friends of the Flames slipped them into parish and public school courts. They dribbled on.

  Papa began to reevaluate his own religious convictions, especially after the Church ignored petitions and protests from white and black parents and from a group of predominantly black ministers from other denominations in the area. “It’s one thing,” he told me then, “to find out there are bad cops. My kids were always telling me that. But your church?” He barks his ironic signal. “Reading about some guy getting burned at the stake and getting burned yourself are two very different sensations.”

  Once Papa filed suit to force the Brooklyn Diocese to admit the Flames into the CYO play-offs despite the loss of their sponsoring parish, no one in the clergy would talk publicly about him to me. One bishop had set the official line when he told me for a Times story, “He’s done a lot of good for a lot of poor kids. No one’s denying that. But he’s been a thorn in everyone’s side. He’s not accountable.”

  Bang! If I’d had any doubts about what kept Papa on my mind, there it was. A lot of good . . . but . . . a thorn in everyone’s side. He’s not accountable. That Bishop Bully was a “whited sepulcher,” I thought. He could have been talking about Jesus!

  The judge eventually refused to make the CYO admit the Flames because “a court cannot tell a church what to do in matters that affect the practice of the faith.” Basketball as faith? I talked to the judge. Nice Jewish guy. The law, he said. He offered himself as a mediator, but the bishops weren’t interested.

  Papa’s Wall Street and Columbia connections came through, and the Flames began playing at a nearby high school. More and more middle-class kids began joining, often the sons of former players. Papa eliminated travel teams, enhancing the experience for kids of lesser talent. These days, when street agents and amateur coaches with sneaker money are running national teams, tournaments, and summer camps for elite players, it is rare for the Flames to attract star talent. They are not, after all, about those kind of hoop dreams.

  On a summer Sunday while I was writing this book, with Flames tryouts a month away, we were sitting on Papa’s porch, reminiscing. He has mellowed. He is not so restless. He shrugged at that. “Over the years, I think less and less about winning and more and more about instilling discipline and ideals, giving kids some structure, a place to go to feel good.”

  Regrets?

  “Not getting married and having kids,” he said. He was in his fifties.

  “You never could have run the Flames as a one-man band if you had,” I said.

  He nodded. “And the other is turning down the book and movie offers when they came around in the early nine
ties. Talking to the Hollywood guys, I was afraid they were going to change the story, trivialize it. I ended up not giving permission.”

  “You didn’t sell out,” I said. “See, I always said you were really a priest. Priests take vows of poverty and chastity.”

  He glared at me.

  I touch base with Gerard more often than I do with any other of my subjects/teachers. We call, attend Columbia functions, eat in Italian joints in Brooklyn. When his mom, Elena, was very sick, he asked me to pray for her recovery because God was more likely to listen to a selfless request from someone who never prayed. “That’s the point,” I told him. “I never pray. No one has ever asked me before.” “I’m asking you now,” he said. I could feel the ghetto stare over the phone. I prayed. She got better. “The new medicine,” I said. He said, “Who knows?” He threw a lovely eighty-ninth birthday lunch in 2010 for his mom and the half-dozen members of her prayer team at the posh St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan.

  Sometimes I think I need Gerard to recharge that spirituality he claims to see in me. This is a good man doing good work. I was right to invest so much air and space in him. His lesson is so profound: you can change the world one kid at a time.

  And sometimes I think I am still looking for the flaw, the dark end of the story. I’m a reporter, I don’t trust anyone. I’m too hip to be happy.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Faithkeeper

  Chief Oren Lyons’s main attraction at first was that he reminded me of my father: average height, muscular and chesty without seeming aggressive, and calm. Like Dad, he was so calm you couldn’t read his mood and thoughts. Unlike most people, neither of them mimicked the expression on your face. Both of them were unfailingly pleasant, confident, yet somehow wary, reserved. When I first met Oren in 1984, Dad was eighty and Oren was fifty-four. So he reminded me of my father when I was just starting out at the Times.

  I had gone up to the Onondaga Reservation near Syracuse, New York, after a story I thought would let me move away from the relentless geniality of my Sunday Morning sports essays. Something edgier. Dennis Banks, a founder of the American Indian Movement, had become an FBI fugitive after a gun battle on a South Dakota reservation. The Onondagas, as a sovereign nation, had given him asylum. In return, Banks was running health and sports programs on the reservation and had organized the Jim Thorpe Longest Run, a pan-Indian solidarity event that would send young runners from reservation to reservation, starting at Onondaga and finishing at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. It was a long shot, but I thought that might be enough of a sports angle to justify coming back with a producer and crew.

  After a long discussion, Banks agreed to an on-camera interview if the Onondaga chiefs approved. I was introduced to Oren, who heard me out, nodding and grunting like Dad. He was just as decisive. “Be good TV,” he said. I had no idea he was an international Native American diplomat, a university professor, an artist, and a former all-American college athlete. He was just a chief in running shoes, jeans, and a beaded shirt.

  We toured the reservation, a hardscrabble community of 2,000 or less (no census takers admitted) on 7,300 acres of junkyards and vegetable gardens, rusty trailers and suburban-style homes. I noticed elementary school boys and girls slamming hard rubber balls against the brick wall of their school with lacrosse sticks and teenagers choosing up sides for boisterous scrimmages in muddy backyards. Some older men were clearing debris from a sports field. Oren noticed my interest.

  “Guhchigwaha,” he said. “Means ‘Bump Hips.’ The Jesuit missionaries called it lacrosse because they thought the stick resembled a bishop’s crozier.”

  “You guys still play it?”

  “It’s the lifeblood of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. It’s the Creator’s game. There are two times of the year that stir the blood. In the fall for the hunt and now for lacrosse.”

  He had me at Guhchigwaha. Sorry, Dennis, I just found a Sunday Morning story.

  Banks and his run got into the piece, but it was mostly about Oren and lacrosse. There was a great news peg: the Iroquois were cranking up to compete in the international arena after a long absence (they had been banned on trumped-up amateurism violations when they got too good). Also, white college and club lacrosse was booming, and Native American teams were playing both an indoor and outdoor version. Oren himself was coaching several Onondaga teams, one starring his son, Rex, and his nephews, Scott and Kent, another his grandson Montgomery. Generations.

  Even after the piece ran, I kept going back to Onondaga or meeting Oren at lacrosse matches, conferences, the United Nations, where he was an international diplomat for indigenous peoples. He was running a close second to Gerard Papa as a subject who had entered my personal life. Oren slept in my apartment in Manhattan, I slept in his cabin on the res. I wrote magazine pieces and newspaper columns about him. Over the years, what he represented to me changed as I changed, but from the beginning he was symbolic of a masculinity I could admire: tough without bravado, shrewdly self-reliant, generous as a friend and mentor. Like Papa, Oren was a source of positive energy in a world of sucking black holes. Like Papa, he knew who he was, and he was comfortable, almost to the point of being smug. Was it a flaw or just confidence?

  Oren attributed his sense of self to his upbringing on the res. Hunting was Oren’s first rite of manhood. “My father would give me one shell. If I missed, he’d send me home. If I killed, he’d let me stay. The discipline of the hunt is very important. You’ve got to eat. You learn to respect skill. And you stay in touch with everything around you.”

  Sports and art, traditional tickets out of the slum, had given young Oren some early fame on the res. He was a good amateur featherweight boxer, and his drawings of eagles and wolves were of magazine illustration quality. (“Isn’t it interesting,” he once said to me, “that the only kind of taxes the United States lets you vote on is school taxes, and then you go out and cut them, which is like cutting off your own foot. And what do you cut, sports, which gives you strength and health, and art, which gives you that balance, sensitivity.”)

  But it was lacrosse at which he made his mark. He was a teenager then, playing in the shadow of his own father, a renowned goalie who would eventually be buried with his lacrosse stick.

  “My father told me, ‘You have to concentrate, have to keep your eye on the ball. No matter what happens, don’t let them catch your eye, ’cause then you’re done.’” Oren paused, cocked an eyebrow to punctuate the metaphor. “That’s all I ever took from him, but it’s all you need.”

  Roy Simmons, Sr., then the lacrosse coach of Syracuse University, told me some years later about watching Oren play on the reservation in the late forties. “Oren was sensational. He was quick as a cat, entirely courageous. I wanted him. But there was no way. I think he only had about a year of high school before he dropped out.”

  “I quit school in the eighth grade,” said Oren. “I had such a head on with the teacher, just hostile to me, didn’t like me. I recognized it was beyond me because I never offended that teacher. I tried my best. I was lucky to understand early it wasn’t about me, it was racism. And resisting it helped me sustain myself.”

  Oren boxed, drank, sketched, and raised hell until he was drafted in 1950, at twenty. He joined the 82nd Airborne. At twenty-three, he returned to the res and supported his wife and baby daughter by painting boxing portraits on the walls of local bars at $10 each.

  Coach Simmons rediscovered Lyons. “My kid, Roy, was entering Syracuse and I was anxious for him to play on a good team. I knew Roy would score plenty of goals, but I needed a goalie who would keep the other team from scoring. And there was Oren.

  “The semester had already started, so I grabbed the dean of admissions and dragged him down to this restaurant, Norm’s Arena. There was a painting of Jack Dempsey, looked like he was going to jump out and hit you. That got Oren into the School of Fine Arts, and I got the best goalie I ever had.”

  Eventually, with Oren in goal and two other all-
Americans on attack, Roy, Jr., and the future NFL star Jim Brown, the 1957 Syracuse team went undefeated.

  “Oren was different from other Indian athletes,” said Roy, Jr., who replaced his father as coach. “He was on time, he accepted discipline. But most Indian athletes are hard to read. Stoic. Never cry or admit pain. Winning and losing are not as important to them. They like to play the game, give and take licks, and when the dust settles, when it’s over, just shake hands. They’ll accept not being number one. And they’ll never admit they made a mistake. That’s hard for a white coach to deal with.”

  “It’s perplexing to white coaches,” said Oren. “Self-respect and individuality are very important to Indians. They’re very sensitive, they expect rejection. You can’t yell at them, or they’ll just drag up and go. They walked out on British officers who barked orders at them during the Revolution, and they walk off steel when the foreman yells at them, and they’ll walk off teams.”

  After graduation from Syracuse in 1958, Oren moved to Madison Avenue. In ten years he rose from paste-up artist to head planning director for seasonal lines at Norcross Greeting Card Company, an experience, he says, that “grounded me in the American psyche.”

  Club lacrosse took him into the dark upper reaches of that psyche. The last time Oren went hunting with white men was in the 1960s. A group of his lacrosse teammates, Wall Streeters, organized a Catskill Mountain hunt on the first day of deer season.

  “That’s a fierce sight, white men unleashed. Twelve-inch knives strapped to their thighs, bandoliers. They almost hit some guy in another party, missed him by six inches, and he fired back. They went to slug it out. I stopped it and volunteered to stay back and cook dinner. White men have all the rules, what kind of guns to use and which dates to use them, but not how you treat each other. I didn’t want my kids growing up in that environment.”