An Accidental Sportswriter Read online

  (Actually, two years earlier, almost to the day, Gay had gotten that same assignment. He’d been sent to the Stadium for Mantle’s reaction to the fans who had been heckling him. They booed from the stands and squirted ink on his clothes if he didn’t stop to sign autographs. Talese described Mantle as “smoldering” when asked if he minded the abuse. Talese wrote that Mantle had answered, “ ‘If they bothered me I would not be where I am.’ Then he turned away.”)

  Mickey and Yogi Berra were playing catch in front of the dugout when I politely introduced myself before the game. I’m pretty sure I was wearing a suit and tie that night, possibly a matching vest. I’m sure I called him Mr. Mantle when I asked if I might inquire about what had happened.

  Mickey glanced over his shoulder and casually said . . . well, over the years, as this story became another one of my personal creation myths, I’d say, depending on the audience, “He made a rude and impossible suggestion,” or, during the Bush II years, “He quoted Vice President Cheney to Senator Leahy,” and sometimes I’d just flat-out quote him: “Why don’t you go fuck yourself.”

  Now, I had heard such words before, but never from an American hero. I read the papers, I knew his story. The golden boy from the golden West had arrived as a teenager in New York in 1951 with muscles in places most people didn’t have places and a country-fresh grin despite his damaged legs and a genetic black cloud: early fatal cancers ran through the males in his family. Another burden was Great Expectations: Mickey had been touted as the replacement for Joe DiMaggio if not Babe Ruth, and he had yet to come close except for his two Most Valuable Player award years, 1956 and 1957. Fans booed him now because he hadn’t sustained the pace. Despite it all, according to the scribes, The Mick was a lovable gamer.

  So I assumed I had asked the question incorrectly and rephrased it. Mickey signaled to Yogi, and they began throwing the ball an inch above my head. I was scared at first of being decapitated, then in awe of their control. They weren’t going to hit me unless I failed to understand that the interview was over. I scuttled off.

  I felt humiliated. What had I done wrong? How had I offended The Mick? Should I even be doing this work?

  I waited until other reporters arrived to chat with Mantle, then lurked outside their circle and eavesdropped. They didn’t bring up the punch directly, although someone asked how Mickey’s jaw felt and he cheerfully told them he was eating lasagna now and expected to be biting into a steak soon. They all guffawed. No follow-up questions. In my story, I only alluded to his remark by writing that he had “grunted away” a question about the attack. I decided that he had reacted the way he had because he didn’t know me and I had interviewed him too directly. My bad technique.

  It was almost two years—in a Florida bar during the relaxed atmosphere of spring training—before I told the entire story to a more experienced reporter. He laughed. That’s our Mickey, he said; we never write about him acting like a red ass because our editors know our readers don’t want to read about it. And we don’t want to lose access. Offend The Mick, and you’re dead in the Yankees’ locker room. You should see him spit at kids who want autographs. Welcome to the club. Don’t let it get you down. Happens to all of us.

  That should have made me feel better, but it only changed shame to anger. I didn’t want to admit to myself that I had been bullied, that I was once again a junior high school victim, an S.P. fag. It was painful to realize that it was all too close to the feelings that women have when they are sexually harassed and made to feel that it was their fault, that they brought it on themselves.

  I had arrived on the scene a naïf, unprotected by fandom or experience, and I think now that the Mantle episode loomed too large for too many years. Just get over it, Bobby. Had I adored him as a fan, I would have excused him—he was in pain, stressed out, just kidding. Had I been an insider, knowing that Mantle had his bullying moments, I would have stepped more carefully. I would also have known that there would be a lot more tense moments in my career.

  Sportswriting isn’t the oldest profession, although it is sometimes conducted that way. I like to imagine it began its modern era around the turn of the twentieth century, when Sheriff Bat Masterson, bored with shooting up Dodge, rode into New York City looking for action and became a sportswriter. He discovered that the pen is mightier than the pistol, especially when you promote such sporting events as boxing matches and horse races, then gamble on them, and then cover them for a newspaper.

  By the time Bat died in 1921, at his New York Morning Telegraph desk while writing his column, Grantland Rice and the mythmakers of the Roaring Twenties had begun their conscious “godding up” of an American pantheon, the likes of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bobby Jones, and Knute Rockne. Rice is best known for comparing the Notre Dame backfield of 1924 to the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, also the title of a popular 1921 silent movie about World War I starring Rudolph Valentino.

  In the vernacular of the time, Rice was a “Gee whiz” sportswriter, relentlessly positive, a booster, a jock sniffer. His contemporary W. O. McGeehan was the best known of the “Aw nuts” school, the rippers who snidely mocked the demigods, but in such a way as to make them seem important.

  Those were the two main approaches to sportswriting when I showed up, although two spirited tabloid writers, Jimmy Cannon (the most socially conscious of his generation and a man who called sportswriters “the vaudevillians of journalism”) and Dick Young were leading the way down from the Olympus of the press box to buttonhole athletes and coaches for quotes and explanations. Young was also running blind items in his gossipy New York Daily News columns that alluded to jock shenanigans, on and off the field.

  But we were still in the shadow of the corrupt old Damon Runyon era. Brown envelopes with cash inside were still being handed out to sportswriters, along with free tickets and expensive Christmas presents. I was lucky to work for a paper that paid all my expenses; most other sportswriters got their travel and meal money from the teams or the promoters. An honest reportorial job could be considered an ungrateful act, to be repaid with loss of access.

  There was emotional corruption as well. Players and reporters stayed at the same hotels on the road and traveled together, on trains and later on chartered planes. “Sports of the Times” columnist Arthur Daley referred to his newspaper colleagues as “lodge brothers,” which was accurate. They were all male and white, and, with the exception of the few athletic and journalistic superstars, pretty much all the players and reporters were in the same struggling economic class. There was a community of interest. The fans were the rubes at the carnival.

  For systemic criticism of sports, one would have to read a Communist, Lester “Red” Rodney, in the Daily Worker. Red Rodney, who died in 2009 at the age of ninety-eight, had been one of the most outspoken advocates of racial desegregation in major-league baseball. By the late fifties, he was gone in an internal Communist purge.

  The professionalization of sportswriting didn’t happen overnight (it’s still in process, I hope), but my generation likes to point to an incident that began the expulsion of player and scribe from their sweet, sweaty Eden.

  The crab apple of knowledge seems to have been Leonard Shecter’s report in the New York Post that Yankees coach Ralph Houk and pitcher Ryne Duren had scuffled on the train coming back from winning the 1958 American League pennant. Such family squabbles or drunkenness or screwing around were never reported. Shecter, like the other reporters, tacitly agreed to turn a blind eye at first. He was young and happy to be on the beat; he had yet to become a beacon of hard-nosed honesty, the curmudgeonly scourge of entitled jocks. But when a rival tabloid reporter ran an item about the Yankees siccing private detectives on carousing players, Shecter was under pressure to come up with something as good or better. He told his editors what he knew about the Houk-Duren fight. Duren, probably drunk, had gotten rowdy. Houk, while subduing him, had accidentally cut him over the eye with his World Series ring. The Post editors blew the story into
a torrid melee. There was a front-page headline as well as a back-page piece without a byline.

  “With one dispatch,” wrote Alan Schwarz in the Times, fifty years later, “Shecter had violated a sacred code that had existed in the 100 years of newspaper coverage of baseball.”

  Actually, sacred codes were being broken all over SportsWorld by then. The Giants and the Dodgers had jilted a city, and black players were emerging as stars in baseball, football, and basketball. Soviet bloc teams, often chemically enhanced, were dominating many Olympic sports. The concept of amateurism—playing for the love of the game—was under siege. And television was pushing its snouty eye everywhere, giving athletes the direct access to their fans that broke the pencil press.

  The shaky trust between player and scribe—and among scribes—was shattered just in time for me. I don’t think I would have functioned well in the old clubby atmosphere. Former fat boys never do. We’re too suspicious, too used to watching from the sidelines. By the time I got my first major assignment, a certain wariness had set in and the climate was more businesslike. It was nowhere near as adversarial as it is today, but athletes were careful until they knew you, and writers kept score of which athletes other writers were talking to. Writers tended to move in packs, as on class trips, and get nervous if someone was missing.

  Shecter was in St. Petersburg, Florida, for the first spring training of the New York Mets, and so was another of the new breed of sportswriter, Stan Isaacs, the sunny, funny, slyly subversive columnist from Long Island Newsday. They befriended me. Among the older writers were Milton Gross of the New York Post, the first of the press box–shrink columnists, and the fiery Dick Young of the Daily News, whose “Clubhouse Confidential” column, with its radioactive combination of sexual innuendo, right-wing demagoguery, and hard-core baseball knowledge became a must-read for players, as well as fans and other writers. Also there was the most important sports journalist of my era, Howard Cosell, a tall, dorky radio reporter who once made room for himself at a press conference by slamming his tape recorder into me. Who knew it would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship?

  Among the greatest innovations of this group was actually interviewing ballplayers and doing real reporting. They were all generously helpful to me as a twenty-four-year-old newcomer. Some were good guys, some understood that I was no threat. Yet.

  I was still too busy competing with Talese.

  Gay’s spring training pieces were my yardstick. Though I never came close to his easy breezy style, writing against my memory of his work was better for me than running with the pack. It was great fun, looking for stories the other reporters had missed (or, more accurately, dismissed). I even thought I had a major scoop once. The Mets had declared the hotel pool off limits to players. The official explanation was that swimming strained baseball muscles. But I heard that several guests had complained about Negro players being in the water with them. I cornered the Mets’ manager, Casey Stengel, a man whose face I had variously described as “creased as a pleated skirt” and “carved from imperfect Mount Rushmore stone.” (Worse yet, I described his walk as that of an “arthritic chimpanzee.”) Stengel was seventy-one, the same age I am as I write this (walking like an arthritic chimpanzee), but he seemed truly ancient. He was bitter at having been recently fired from the Yankees after twelve glorious seasons that had included appearances in ten World Series. I phrased my question about the pool fairly directly. I was two years past my Mantle moment, an army veteran now, thicker-skinned, narrower-eyed.

  “Thass right, pool’s off limits,” he snapped. “And I told ’em they couldn’t fuck either. All season. Now print that.”

  Hanging around Stengel, on the field, in the clubhouse, at the Colonial Inn bar until closing time, was entertaining and an endless source of copy (Casey told rookies, “Get yourself in shape now, you’ll be able to drink during the season”) and of stories illuminating baseball history—he had played in the time of Babe Ruth, and he had managed Joe DiMaggio (whom he called “The Dago”). I also got to understand the news pack through Stengel.

  Columnists and baseball writers from newspapers outside New York (and the likes of Daley of the Times) would sweep into the Mets’ camp and plug into Stengel’s never-ending monologue. If you stayed long enough, the references would be clear, the story he was telling would make sense, and sometimes the insights would be brilliant. But fifteen minutes of “so this here feller on second base, let me tell you he was not as horseapple as he was in Kankakee, which was amazing for a left-handed dentist which I did not get to be” was enough to anchor a column about “Stengelese,” the private language of an eccentric who might well be losing his marbles. It was a lot easier than logging time and listening. Stengel was probably a baseball genius in his game tactics and use of players. You could get a graduate seminar on the game at his elbow at the bar.

  You had to stay alert, though, because Stengel amused himself at the expense of second-rate ballplayers and the reporters. That spring training he trotted out his two worst rookies and announced that they were the hopes of the franchise, which we all wrote. There were no stories a few weeks later when they disappeared from the roster forever. They never appeared anywhere else.

  Without fanfare, Stengel was also capable of enormous patience and acts of kindness toward old people and the disabled. When I described several such incidents, an experienced reporter suggested that I had been duped, that Stengel had let the blind kid touch his face, that he had taken time with the nervous dad and his surly son just to impress me, a liberal milksop. When I said, “If that’s true, then you should write he’s a manipulative virtuoso, instead of your usual Stengelese bullshit.” He shrugged. “People like to read he’s a nutty old fart.”

  That spring training was a wonderful experience and the first time I could measure myself against other reporters on the same story. The most important lesson was that most of them were lazy. If I worked hard, I could compete with these guys. Stay a little longer, make a few more calls. I thought I did okay at spring training, the office seemed happy, and Lou Effrat, the Times’ old Brooklyn Dodgers reporter who believed I had usurped his rightful assignment, gave me a left-handed compliment: “Everybody’s talking about your writing, kid, too bad you don’t know what the fuck you’re writing about.” (That’s always been the rap on me, and sometimes it’s true. I prefer Jimmy Cannon’s testimonial the first time we met: “Kid, your stuff sticks out like a sailor’s joint on a Saturday night.”)

  After spring training, I covered baseball now and then, writing World Series sidebars and sometimes traveling with the Yankees or the Mets to spell the regular writers, but by 1964 Muhammad Ali was my beat. I didn’t go back to spring training until 1967, this time with the Yankees. The big story was Mantle in twilight. His legs were shot. The Yankees were trying to make him a first baseman.

  Seven years from my Mantle Moment, without pleasure or sympathy, I watched him struggle at first base. He wasn’t looking for compassion: he was just a guy trying to hang on way past his prime because there was nowhere else he wanted to be, certainly not home with his wife and kids. He was a shadow of The Mick, but no one was booing or squirting ink. Everything had changed in 1961, when Mantle, closing in on Babe Ruth’s record sixty-home-run season, was sidelined and weakened by an abscess caused by an injection administered by a “Dr. Feelgood” whose license was revoked a few years later. Roger Maris, no fan favorite, pulled past Mickey to break the record and win the hostility of the crowd.

  In 1967, Maris was on the championship-bound St. Louis Cardinals and the Yankees were headed for ninth place under manager Ralph Houk, the former Marine major who had decked Ryne Duren in 1958 and changed the course of sportswriting. Houk welcomed me by inviting me into his office and asking if I was “a ripper or a booster.” When I stammered something about just trying to be a fair-minded reporter, he cocked an eyebrow and said, “We’re all in this together.”

  I took that as a threat and a kind of welcome challenge. My s
tar was rising at the paper; my Ali coverage had been a triumph, I’d spent six weeks covering sports in Europe, a similar spin through the Soviet Union was scheduled for that summer, and I knew I was being groomed to be the third man after John Kieran and Daley ever to write “Sports of the Times” regularly. I was full of myself, and no pin-striped bully was going to push me around. Not Houk, not Mantle, no Yankee could intimidate this hotshot word slinger.

  Well, there was one Yankee.

  Joe DiMaggio was in camp. He had been brought down for public relations purposes, but he was elusive and we were told to leave him alone except for staged group meetings lest we alarm him into thinking we would ask about his former wife Marilyn Monroe; this was less than five years after her death, and she was still a tabloid topic as the rumored lover of both John and Robert Kennedy.

  The Clipper had been in center field the first time I ever went to the Stadium. I had pestered Dad into taking me. I’d listened to a few Yankees games at night in bed, and in the molasses tones of Mel Allen I’d seen Joe D’s whipping bat, his easy grace over the large, lush greensward.

  Dad took me to a game in a dutiful way. He never showed emotion, but I could tell he was not impressed. He had seen Babe Ruth. This was Mantle’s rookie year, 1951, and DiMaggio’s final season. I was not so impressed either. He was no longer “drifting,” as the broadcasters described it, under fly balls. He was chugging after them, stiff-legged. I was also underwhelmed by the Stadium itself, less grand than I had imagined. But such disappointments were minor. Dad and I at a ball game, like other fathers and sons! Maybe the library trips weren’t enough. In any case, DiMaggio was now linked in my mind with Dad, and so his star shone for me even after he retired, married Marilyn, lost her, then handled her funeral with such class. A fresh rose on her grave, every day, forever! He remained a distant luminary in SportsWorld.