An Accidental Sportswriter

by Robert Lipsyte

  Oren’s disdain for the white world was almost casual, an engaging combination of disgust and amusement. None of that fierce red-man resentment I remembered from the more enlightened Westerns that Dad and I had gone to on Tuesday nights in the summertime. Oren wasn’t Geronimo or Tonto. He acted as though he came from a superior culture that hadn’t given up battling the bully. With Oren, I never felt sorry for Indians, that it was my duty to stand up for them. They could stand up for themselves, given an equal chance. It was my duty to go after the big assholes who think they can get away with anything.

  When Oren was called by the Nation in the late 1960s, it was easy for him to go home. The Clan Mothers had summoned him back to the reservation to take his place on the council. Women select the Onondaga chiefs, then sit behind them in the Longhouse, silent historians. It was a tumultuous time throughout Indian country, as white men and their native henchmen went after Indian lands for casinos, toxic waste dumps, staging areas for gun, drug, and human trafficking.

  In 1971, Onondaga refused to allow the state onto the reservation to widen a highway. The head chief, Leon Shenandoah, with Oren at his elbow, drew a line in the dirt and said, “This is where the United States ends.” Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential ambitions were at stake, and he didn’t want to look weak. State troopers were massed for the assault, facing Onondaga rifles, when they were abruptly pulled away to quell the Attica prison uprising.

  As a traditional chief, Oren spoke out publicly against Indians selling out their heritage. The Mafia had supposedly put a price on his head. Once, walking across a meadow on the res, we were fired upon from the tree line. Oren said not to worry; they were Indians and would have hit us if they wanted to. They were merely registering displeasure. (Like most Indians I met, he did not ask to be referred to as “Native American.” “Indian” was fine, although naming the specific nation was preferred.)

  Oren supported himself as an associate professor of American studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo but spent more time at the day-to-day work of the traditional chiefs, including the mediation of long-simmering feuds between neighboring families that often broke out in gunfire. The chiefs wanted to keep Indians out of American courts, as well as hospitals. I found such tales of tribal justice irresistible. My favorite was a dog story from Oren’s own past.

  Smudgie was a working partner, not a pet, a mean old spayed bitch who hunted with young Oren through the years right after his father left, when he kept his mother, his sister, and his six brothers fed with his gun. He shot pheasant, rabbit, and raccoon, and Smudgie pointed and found them. The woodland was their supermarket. Oren tried not to let Smudgie follow the deer or get a taste for flesh, but somewhere along the way she began to freelance around the reservation.

  One night, Smudgie lurched up to the door of the house, her chest blown open. She died in Oren’s arms.

  The blood trail made it a simple backtrack. The killer, a crabby old neighbor, had waited in ambush. He had let Smudgie get close enough to his henhouse for a clear shot from his doorway. It would have been easy to chase her, even to let her take a chicken and then demand reparation from the Lyons family. The chiefs would have enforced that. But the old man was bitter and had killing on his mind.

  So Oren buried Smudgie and hiked out to the meadow where the old man kept the two horses he used for plowing and transport. Oren shot one of them. Simple justice.

  Nothing was ever said.

  Thirty-five years later, I asked Oren, “You still think you did the right thing?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And it never crossed your mind to shoot the old man?”

  Oren looked amused. “That would have been something a white man might do.”

  Through Oren, I became a student of Indian history and lore, especially intrigued by the Iroquois concept of Seven Generations, every decision based on its ramifications for children and grandchildren and beyond. As I grew older, I found myself interested in mentoring, in sharing my experience with younger sportswriters and young adult novelists instead of competing with them. But I wondered if that was merely a way for me to opt out of the arena, to give up before I gave out. I watched Oren reaching his big hand out to his nation’s youth, and the lesson seemed clear. What could be manlier than to be an elder of the tribe and to help shape its future? Another lesson I could have learned from my father, had I been listening then. Their basic philosophies were similar, too.

  At eighty, Oren still reminded me of Dad. In the summer of 2010, with a new hip and a pacemaker, he looked solid and calm as ever. At his birthday party, he called on us all to “share.” A few weeks later, as a leader of the Iroquois Nationals, he negotiated unsuccessfully with the British government to allow the team to fly to Manchester for the world lacrosse championships on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) passports. Was it homeland security or once again were Indians barred for being too good?

  Once, while we were sitting on the raw plank deck of his hilltop cabin, Oren said, “There’s a moral nut in every human being. We have to keep reminding people, we have to keep exposing them to what’s good in themselves. We have to teach the question, the only question. ‘Is it right?’ So simple. But if people don’t want to follow that, the game is up. It’s all over.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Onliest (Part Two)

  Turns out Ali and I weren’t done with each other after all. Though I hadn’t forgiven his betrayal of Malcolm X, with time I came to understand how it could have happened. Ali was twenty-two years old, in the bubble of a magical universe beyond all his dreams—he was the heavyweight champion of the world, a sex god, the “onliest boxer that people talk to like he’s a senator,” and under the fatherly protection of a religious cult’s leader, Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. Ali felt safe and important. The apostasy of Malcolm, cold and real, threatened to prick that bubble. So Ali ran out on him.

  Through the early 1970s, while I wrote fiction and then SportsWorld, I found myself wondering what he was like now. After he beat George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle to regain his heavyweight title, I decided it was time to return to the story that had jump-started my career.

  After four years away from him, I was fresh and he was fun again. It was 1975. He was less dogmatic—he was more comfortable in his religion—and more relaxed. He could be kind; I remember almost missing a flight because he’d noticed that a little old lady had left the cap on her camera lens, and after plucking it off he posed for her again. He could be an outrageous hound; at a middle school award ceremony he MCed, he tried to pull a teen queen into our limo. She was willing, but the principal blocked her. “Does he always do this?” the principal asked me. “I’m not always with him,” I said.

  That was a stop on a weeklong Florida exhibition tour I tagged along on for a freelance Times magazine piece. The tour ended in a high school football field near Daytona Beach. He had just finished a jokey charity boxing match, and now he was back in the motor home he used as a dressing room, changing clothes while his bodyguard shooed everybody out, Jake LaMotta, Angelo Dundee, me, everybody except three foxes he had picked out of the crowd. Then two of the foxes were released, and Ali grinned at us as he closed the door behind himself and the chosen fox.

  I watched for a while, until the motor home began to jiggle on its springs. I imagined that the champ was floating and stinging.

  Members of his entourage looked at their watches—there were planes to catch—and then at me. “Don’t even think about it,” someone said, and Angelo said, “Don’t write about this, Bob,” and one of the press agents said, “Not if you ever want to interview him again.”

  I thought about the scene in Madame Bovary when Emma and Leon did it in a carriage that jiggled on its springs. Could I steal from Flaubert? It would be homage, right? Show off that “smooth literary touch” that Talese had mentioned. Eventually, in the Times magazine piece, I described the scene clearly enough to ensure that I would never be able to interv
iew him again. This was no discreet quickie, it was in public, part of his performance. I felt a twinge of regret. Too bad. It was over between Ali and me before it really got started again.

  The Times titled my article “King of All Kings.” I thought it was a good enough piece to go out on, my last word on my Big Story. Time to move on.

  Yet I wasn’t all that surprised that the first thing Ali said a year later when he saw me again was “‘King of All Kings,’ right!”

  Then he invited me to come listen to him some more.

  “Nat Turner and Wyatt Earp,” he said dreamily, “they was dead a hundred years before their pictures was made. And of course they didn’t get to play themselves.”

  This was in Miami, and he was lounging on a couch in the stern of another motor home, dressed for a morning run in a black sweat suit and black army boots. But he was also wearing makeup for his title role in his autoflick, The Greatest. That’s why I was there. The Times’ Arts and Leisure section had sent me down to write about Ali playing himself. I had figured that even if Ali wouldn’t talk to me, there would be plenty of people on the movie set who would.

  “After this picture I’m going to play Hannibal, hundreds of elephants. I got to have roles equivalent to my life. This face”—he sat up and touched it reverently—“is worth billions. My roles have always got to be number one. I can’t be the boy in the kitchen. Some big football star plays the waiter in the movie while some homosexual gets the lead role.”

  I probably should have known better than to quote him, but it was such a great line and not untrue. Hadn’t the closeted Rock Hudson taught my generation how to bag chicks? Ali had always made homosexual jokes, wouldn’t this be a way of showing character, much like the jiggling motor home? I didn’t care about protecting him. This quasi-accurate movie was based on his quasi-accurate autobiographical book. The Oscar-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., told me, “What made the script difficult to write was the facts. We decided not to be inhibited by the facts, to change them if necessary, to adhere to the truth.”

  Two weeks after Ali’s quote about homosexuals in leading roles appeared, the National Gay Task Force, in a letter to the editor, called “Ali’s bigotry . . . unconscionable” and wrote that “an interviewer should not let such prejudice ride without comment.”

  I think the Task Force was right; I should have put that quote into the context of Ali’s mindlessly casual and mostly unreported racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic remarks. But still it rankled that, under some pressure, I replied, “I made an error of judgment. My consciousness stands raised.” Who wants to admit a mistake? Or have to avoid writing truthfully because of what has come to be called political correctness?

  While I’m remembering getting ticked off about that, I remember something else I perceived—in a selfish, careerist way—as a professional humiliation.

  That was on a day in 1986, in Atlanta.

  “Hello, stranger,” murmured Ali. He was sitting on a hotel room couch in the official headquarters of King’s Dream, a heavyweight fight between Tony “TNT” Tubbs and “Terrible” Tim Witherspoon for which the new King, Don, had paid the old King of All Kings walking-around money to drum up some press.

  But Ali was not walking around. His bare feet were in a plastic pan of water that also contained electric massagers. He was trying to jolt his numbed appendages back to life. It might have been an early symptom of Parkinson’s disease. In those days, no one wanted to deal with the possibility that he could be seriously ill or, for that matter, even mildly punch-drunk. He slurred words when he was tired.

  I was feeling sad and nostalgic. I hadn’t seen much of him, and although friends had commented on his physical deterioration, it was new to me. I was still at Sunday Morning. I had come to this warm city for a proposed twelve-minute segment on Ali. With me was a talented young producer, Brett Alexander, a six-foot, four-inch African American I worked with often.

  After the usual chitchat to cover the interminable setting of lights and camera angles, I conducted what turned out to be the shortest and worst interview Ali and I have ever had. I started it by referring back ten years, when Ali had been talking about being on a divine mission and . . .

  “I have nothing to say,” said the man who never had nothing to say. His words were slurred. “Not talking about that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  It went on like that for a few minutes. I was hurt and embarrassed. I was supposed to be the Ali-ologist, and it’s expensive to send bodies and equipment out of town for a TV story. So I pressed on.

  “You are a tricky man, a wise man,” he ranted, “and you been sent by the power structure to make me look bad. And they sent along the biggest, darkest nigger they could find.”

  Now I was angry. We shouted at each other for a few minutes, but it was not even good television, at least not for an artistic, mild-mannered program. After a while, Brett signaled the crew to pack it in and we left. I was furious, but they were nonchalant, concerned about where we would go for lunch. Brett was sympathetic; he figured the poor guy was down on his luck, hurting, and probably a little paranoid. I asked about being called “nigger,” and he shrugged. Blacks are allowed.

  But I couldn’t let it go. I had to go back. The hell with the “I don’t have to be what you want me to be” stuff. One thing he has to be is a decent interview for me. It had been part of our social contract for twenty-two years.

  It was a bad moment that still makes me squirm. Why should this be all about me? Why wasn’t I sensitive to what he was going through? The King of All Kings, down on his luck, vulnerable, having to put up with my egoshit. But I was still fuming. If he didn’t come through, I was going to write about this, rip him up and down, expose him for what he was, a mindless pug available to be interpreted into a symbol of anything you need, a blank slate on which to write your own dogmas and dreams. Ultimately, Ali signified nothing.

  I stormed back into the hotel room by myself. Two young women were giggling as Ali pulled them into the curtained-off area that was his bedroom. Just before he pulled the curtain, he grinned at me and said, “Just like old times, huh, Bob?”

  With that the bad air whooshed out of me. I grinned back at him.

  Every time he’s seen me in recent years, Muhammad Ali asks the same question: “What’s the difference between a Jew and a canoe?”

  He starts laughing before answering: “A canoe tips.”

  Ali knows I’m Jewish—in the old days he often informed me I was so intelligent because I didn’t eat pork (wrong). Once he even asked the Jew-canoe question during a fund-raiser for his Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, then being referred to as the Museum of Tolerance. While his fourth wife, Lonnie, and his handlers winced, the other attendees, all white and mostly Christian, laughed uproariously. They told me later they knew he was kidding—in fact, they said, it was a brilliant send-up of intolerance. After all, Ali had quickly added, “If a black man, a Puerto Rican, and a Mexican are sitting in the backseat of a car, who’s driving? Give up? The po-lice.”

  He followed that with “What did Abraham Lincoln say when he woke up from a two-day drunk?” While his audience blinked, he answered, “I freed who?” and rewarded himself with laughter before they did.

  By then Ali was getting the benefit of the doubt as a cartoon saint, nonthreatening and mostly mute. Many of the people who had hated him in the sixties—and there had been plenty, black and white—had come around to admiring his courage and lack of self-consciousness as a Parkinson’s patient. Those who loved him most were those who had not wanted to serve in the army during the Vietnam War—his refusal had helped justify theirs and removed the stigma of cowardice—and African Americans, who saw him as a powerful race man who stood up to the white establishment.

  His critics say, with some validity, that he has benefited from projection. They point out how his admirers assign him progressive political and social views that he does not hold. H
is admirers point out his sacrifices for principle; had Ali remained a Christian, jockstrapped through the army giving exhibitions for the troops, and kept his sexual affairs private, he might have become a major corporate endorser.

  I can go both ways. I wept in 1996 when he lit the Olympic torch with a shaky hand (he burned himself but never let on), and six years later I cursed when he refused to condemn Al-Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks because “I got business interests in that part of the world.”

  A Muhammad Ali revisionism is under way. Right-wingers see bashing Ali, whom they consider a liberal icon, as a way of bashing liberals. Ali’s mocking of Joe Frazier through the seventies as an “Uncle Tom” and a “gorilla” was certainly an Ali low point, whether or not it was merely to hype the gate of their fights.

  Yet whatever Ali was or wasn’t personally, he made people brave.

  I found it hard to believe that he’d actually pull off that museum of his, although I was in awe of Lonnie’s drive and intelligence. She had an MBA and an icy discipline. I should never have doubted the power of Ali’s name combined with Lonnie’s ambition. In recent years, not only did the Ali Center open but 80 percent of his commercial rights were sold for a reported $50 million to the same company that markets the Elvis Presley image. A book was published called GOAT (Greatest of All Time, his corporate name), a gorgeous gallery of photos that weighed seventy-five pounds and sold for $3,000 (the autographed “champ” edition, with a Jeff Koons plastic sculpture attached, was $10,000). I had contributed an essay and was thus a guest of the publisher, Taschen, which launched the book during Art Basel, an international show of the hot, the hip, and the hustling, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, the site of that first fight with Liston.

  So there I was at ringside (I was one of many to make a brief speech), possibly sitting in the same seat I had sat in some forty years earlier for the fight. Only this time I was sitting near Ali and Will Smith, who had played him in the movie Ali. It was December, and just like the very first time we met it was cold where I came from but warm here and the popcorn man was making money and I had something to write about. It doesn’t get better than this.