An Accidental Sportswriter Read online

  Fifty-seven years later, in 2009, I recounted that story to Paul. He liked it but wondered if it was a self-defining myth. Scientist. Did he remember how fat I’d been? He shook his head. What about Willy? He shrugged. Didn’t remember him.

  The two girls who inspired my triumphant battle, both of whom I later briefly dated, Rose Ballenzweig and Barbara Rosenberg, are dead. In fact, it was at lunch after Rose’s funeral in the spring of 2009, with the former Marcia Dollin, Anne Kanfer, and Doris Kameny, that I maneuvered a conversation about the addictive cupcakes from Shelley’s, the bakery owned and run by Rose’s family, to my belly and my bully.

  The three women looked at me.

  You weren’t that fat, they said. You were bullied?

  Willie, I said. But I can’t remember his last name.

  They looked blank. They didn’t know his first name.

  On the long drive home, I thought about that fight with Willie. Didn’t everyone know about it? It was Hector and Achilles, Beowulf and Grendel’s mother, Ali and Frazier.

  I’m a reporter, I could find Willie. So I made some phone calls, sent some e-mails, Googled and Facebooked. No Willie.

  So for now I’ll just keep Willie in his little room in my mind until I need him again. I’m sure I will.

  Chapter Two

  The Piper

  When I was twenty-five,” wrote my idol Gay Talese of his early New York Times career, “I was chasing stray cats around Manhattan. . . . The year was 1957.”

  When I was nineteen, in 1957, I was chasing Gay Talese. I was a copyboy in the Times sports department, and Gay was a sports reporter whose feature stories were turning the so-called Old Gray Lady into Technicolor. He was showing the style that would make him the most influential of the so-called New Journalists of the sixties. He would soon write for Esquire what is considered the quintessential celebrity magazine article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and publish such best sellers as The Kingdom and the Power, about the Times, and Honor Thy Father, about a Mafia family.

  You could learn from him, I thought; actually, I started out by slavishly imitating him, not only trying to write in his cadences but to observe as he did, being totally open to the half hidden and the unexpected, then stringing the precise details into elegant loops. I thought that his choice of subject—the forgotten, the ignored, the loser—was the closest a newspaperman could come to being John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway or Anton Chekhov, my youthful literary heroes. Gay used the grand sweep of fiction to string little facts to tell true short stories.

  Not everyone felt that way. Some Times deskmen sneered that Gay had “piped” his stories—exaggerated if not fictionalized them. The quotes were too good to be true, they whispered, the settings too descriptive to be accurate. In the fading slang of the day, his stories had been puffed out of a dreamer’s opium pipe. But they let him get away with it at the Times Sunday magazine and especially in sports, the only section where Mr., Mrs., and Miss were not required to be used on second reference (sports figures along with convicted felons were denied the respect of everyday honorifics). It was the right time to be in the Times’ toy department.

  And there I was in a job I mostly despised except for the stolen moments at Gay’s desk. He listened to my complaints, read my stories, and encouraged me to use the slack periods in my late shifts to rummage in the newspaper’s archival “morgue” for ideas, make long-distance calls on Times phones, and scope out “the sergeants and colonels who run this place.”

  He liked me, he told me in 2009, because I was “polite, smart, obviously brought up by educated parents.” A former copyboy himself, Gay was always on the lookout, he said, for kids coming up. He identified me and Joe Lelyveld, the future editor of the paper, as “hot prospects.”

  Gay was remarkably generous with his time—he was never brusque, even on deadline—and with his advice, which I still use: keep all phone numbers (write them in pencil so you can change them easily); research your subject thoroughly; ask unusual questions, always including “Why is that?”; and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Then polish. And fight those bastard copyreaders (they weren’t yet called “staff editors”) for every word. Lelyveld recalls Gay’s admonition to stay off page one, where the full weight of the Times stylebook could crush a lively story. A good writer, said Gay, will be discovered wherever he shows up in the paper.

  Slim, handsome, friendly, impeccably be-suited by his New Jersey tailor father, Gay had been a Times copyboy after the University of Alabama (the only college he could get into and then with strings pulled by one of his father’s customers). He had returned from the army to be a reporter in sports. He was simply too handsome, glamorous, and well dressed for the old grumblies and easy to dismiss as a “piper.” New Jersey? Alabama? Despite a hierarchy of southern-born editors and City College (or no-college) reporters, the Times considered itself an Ivy League paper.

  Gay often pulled night rewrite, and in those quiet hours he would expound: find a character through which to tell your tale with anecdotes, revealing quotes, and detail. I would stand at his desk as he leaned back in his chair, sipping at the paper container of cocoa I had brought him from a deli. He was very particular about that. “I don’t want hot chocolate, Bob, that’s powder and water, I want milk, and this is how you tell them it should be cooked.” He wrote the same way, slowly, precisely, painfully. (He would say later that writing was like passing kidney stones.)

  Fetching Gay’s cocoa and the tutorials that followed were the highlights in a time of increasing frustration. I was a copyboy for almost two years, not an unusually long squirehood in those days, but I despised most of the cranky deskmen and their bullying. And I was tired. The first year I took graduate courses at Columbia in English lit. They were boring. The second year I went to Columbia’s graduate school of journalism, which was lively enough, but writing standard who-what-where-when-why pieces on assignment for a bogus school newspaper seemed absurd; I already had an entry-level job at the world’s greatest paper. As a student of the Talese School, I wrote leads that were often rejected by the J School teachers. I barely graduated. My final paper, about discrimination in broadcast journalism, was not considered newsy enough. It was also not very good. School was roughly nine to five, my job was seven to three. I also got married in there somewhere when two sets of parents applied the screws because Maria Glaser and I, both twenty-one, were living together, which was rare in those days. Maria was a part-time student at Columbia and worked in a doctor’s office. The marriage lasted five years.

  On Saturdays and Sundays before my copyboy shift, I covered sermons at $5 each for the Religion Desk, one way of getting into the paper. I became adept at making notes under my prayer shawl in Orthodox synagogues. Church sermons were easier to cover because priests and ministers would not only give me their texts in advance but discuss them afterward in the rectory over Scotch.

  That first year, 1957, was a traumatic one in New York sports, and in sports departments. At season’s end, the Dodgers and Giants moved to California, and though that made the pastime truly national, it upended the original order. New York suddenly had one major-league baseball team instead of three (fewer than Chicago!), and the sports section had a lot of vacant space for high school sports, fencing, harness racing. And feature stories. The rigid old sports editor, a former Latin teacher, was replaced by Jim Roach, the Thoroughbred racing writer, a warm, lively, innovative editor who could calm cantankerous deskmen and ambitious reporters alike with his standard “Hey, we’re trying to run the Fair Shake Athletic Club around here.”

  Even before his official appointment, Jim Roach was instrumental in sending Gay to Arizona to cover the Giants’ first spring training as San Francisco’s new team. Gay raised the mark for spring training coverage, wrapping the statistics and meaningless game detail inside feature stories. He found desperate rookies and sage old-timers ready to talk about their need for “security” in their lives and chronicled a new “gray-flannel-suit” generation that subscr
ibed to The Wall Street Journal and wouldn’t spike their mother even if she was rounding third with the winning run. Willie Mays, at twenty-six the “180-pound package of rare tenderloin,” told Gay, “I’m changing from a kid to a man.” This was all new. Gay was modern and funny without being snide. I’d rush into the wire room to get his incoming copy, then walk slowly back, reading it. He was the only Times sportswriter we ran to read with the same anticipation we had for Red Smith of the New York Herald Tribune.

  One story Gay didn’t write, but told me about on his return, was his amazement with his fellow scribes. A tall, messy sportswriter from the tabloid Daily Mirror would often show up drunk for games; a short, dapper sportswriter from the Daily News, his archrival, would write his story for him. What happened to competition? asked Gay. He would laugh and shake his head. Which story was better? How could you not write your best?

  Even with Gay around, the nights at the Times were getting longer and I was more tired and frustrated. And then one night of snarling deskmen and lonely calls from Maria and no time to finish a feature story for a J School newspaper that no one would read, I brought Gay his cocoa and told him I was quitting.

  “Why is that?” he asked. Just like an interview.

  I spilled it out, and he sipped and nodded, no judgment. He said he understood but he thought it would be a mistake. I should stay. He told me that I had talent and would make it at the Times. I was exactly what the paper was looking for. But if I was determined to leave, he had a proposition.

  He spoke very precisely. “Bob, I will give you five thousand dollars in exchange for ten percent of your earnings as a freelance writer for the next ten years.”

  I lost my breath. I was making $35 a week. He was offering me nearly three times my annual salary. He believed in me.

  “You serious?”

  “It’s a good investment for me. You think about it.”

  Of course, it was all I thought about for days. I wasn’t totally sure that he was serious (Maria didn’t think he was), but he lifted my spirit as surely as Richard Halliburton had once done.

  He gave me the confidence to soldier on. By the time I graduated from J School in 1959, I was a clerk, a step up from copyboy, handling standings and statistics. In the fall of that year, soon after Gay was transferred out of sports for a short-lived political beat that seemed almost disciplinary, I was promoted, at twenty-one, to reporter—knighthood.

  I eventually became Gay’s heir to jazzy features, sidebars to big stories, top assignments that required, as he characterized my work in The Power and the Glory, “a smooth literary touch.” (That was all he wrote about me in all those hundreds of pages. I was hurt at the time.)

  I’m always nervous before making the initial contact on a story. I keep telling myself that butterflies let me know I’m ready for something worth doing. But I couldn’t understand why the thought of calling up Gay Talese made me so edgy. This was a courteous and generous man.

  But you’ve hardly had anything to do with him in forty-odd years, Bobby, and he’s important to you. You don’t want to be rejected, fat boy.

  Gay’s very busy. I might catch him at a bad time.

  So I sent him a letter and he called me as soon as he received it, inviting me right over, and there I was in his house on East Sixty-first Street. The last time I had been there was in 1964, after David Halberstam’s Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam coverage was announced. David, Gay, and I had take-out hamburgers before the party. I tried to get David, recently returned from Vietnam, to tell me what that country’s infamous Dragon Lady, Madame Nhu, was really like, but he was interested in what I knew about the Yankees. Gay seemed delighted by the exchange.

  Gay was basically unchanged: slim, handsome, glamorous in brown-and-tan shoes, brown slacks, a herringbone jacket over a brown suede vest, striped shirt, and orange tie. He wasn’t even going anywhere. He was not dressed up, merely dressed.

  He made me at ease immediately, had me sit on a worn brown leather couch. He sat in its twin, set perpendicular to mine. We faced each other sideways. He served sparkling water in wine glasses. In my haste to be on time (or was it an unconscious decision?) I had not worn my hearing aids. I strained, but it was fine. He spoke very clearly, exactingly, a man who wanted to be quoted accurately. Although he never used a tape recorder himself, I think he was disappointed that I wasn’t recording.

  I told him about this book, about the impact he had made on me. He nodded but looked slightly embarrassed at the praise. I filled the silence with something about how odd it seemed that as important as he had been to me, we’d barely seen each other over the years.

  “You could have picked up the phone,” he said. “Say, ‘Hey, Gay, I’m in town, let’s go to dinner.’ I go out to dinner every fucking night.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “You know the word ‘intimidation’? Would you call up Jesus, ‘Hey, Son of God, whacha doin’ tonight?’”

  He looked at me oddly. As soon as it had come out of my mouth, it sounded dumb. It did seem like a strange conversation for men in their seventies. Or was he thinking, Of course I’d call Jesus if I had the number?

  I told him about going out for his cocoa. He didn’t remember that. “Cocoa’s a comfort drink,” he said. “Something to put you to sleep. You know, this is like the difference between being a freshman and a senior. Freshmen always remember more than the seniors about what happened.”

  I sat there for several hours, becoming more and more comfortable as he chatted about himself. I had come with questions about me, but they faded in my fascination with him. Growing up the son of Italian immigrants in a WASPy town, sewing and delivering dry cleaning for his parents’ shop, he said he had felt like an outsider. He might as well have been fat, I thought.

  Before I left, he showed me his downstairs office, the bulging files, the endless lists, sticky notes everywhere, photos pinned to the walls. I worked that way, too. Had I caught it from him?

  He told me to call when I was ready to come back and talk some more.

  I would have to because I hadn’t asked the Big Question. Had he been serious about giving me $5,000? Didn’t I want to know? Burying the lead (or lede in journo jargon) is a journalistic misdemeanor, but not asking the question the lede will be based on is a felony.

  Gay went off to Europe on a speaking engagement, so it was four weeks before we met again. I was wearing my hearing aids this time. We sat on the same perpendicular couches. He presented me with a copy of a letter I had sent him in 1973. So we had been in contact. I had needed to talk to him as my novel Liberty Two was inexorably disappearing into the literary sinkhole. He had been helpful and comforting. In the letter I thanked him and reminded him how that $5,000 proposal, now some fifteen years in the past, had swelled my “emotional bank account.”

  I read the letter while he answered a phone call. When he came back, we started talking about something that led to my laughingly saying “But you never went into therapy” and his surprised “For years, years, I was in therapy, I told them everything. But I would tell anyone anything. Any derelict on the street. Therapy wasn’t worth it.” Once, he said, he saw Jann Wenner, the founder of Rolling Stone, come out of a therapist’s office, and the next week he read that Wenner had left his wife for a boyfriend. Gay said he thought he was spotting a new gay trend at the time, “Hey, I’m really on the ground floor of something here.”

  There was something surreal about the eight hours I spent with Gay that day and night. How could I have been so anxious about calling him up, this chatty, friendly narcissist? He needed people to talk to. He talked about his new book, a portrait of his fifty-year marriage to Nan, the beautiful and successful book publisher; it included at least one secondary “marriage,” long absences, continuing friendships with women he often slept with. What about rumors of Nan having such relationships? He shrugged that away; she was much more private than he was.

  Why was he writing this?

  “I’m seventy-seven years old,�
�� he said, “and this is the only story I have left.”

  It took me a while to get to the Big Question. He did not remember the $5,000 proposal. He was making about $200 a week then. His highest salary at the Times was $315, although he always made extra money writing for magazines. He was a saver. He’d come out of the army with $10,000. He’d been an officer.

  I pulled the conversation back to me. “Could it have happened?” I asked.

  “It would not have been uncharacteristic.” He leaned forward and peered at me. “Does that sound greedy to you, ten percent?”

  “No, no. You know, I don’t think you quite understand the impact it had on me, it was so inspiring. You need someone to believe in you so you can believe in yourself. It’s a major lesson of my career.” After a moment, I asked, “Is there any possibility you could have been kidding around?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  My career had been piped.

  Chapter Three

  My Center Fielders (Part One)

  On May 30, 1960, after a Memorial Day double-header at Yankee Stadium, some fans jumped out of the stands and raced across the outfield to surround Mickey Mantle. One of them punched Mantle in the jaw. It was shocking for the time. Recreational violence had not yet become commonplace in American sports.

  The Yankees went off on a road trip on which Mantle was observed drinking his meals, which was not uncommon. But his jaw was swollen. The Times’ regular Yankees beat writer would never have troubled the twenty-eight-year-old center fielder by actually asking him what had happened, so the following Friday night, after the Yankees returned to the Stadium, an expendable twenty-two-year-old was dispatched from night rewrite. I was thrilled with the assignment, the kind that Talese would have gotten had he still been in the sports department.