An Accidental Sportswriter Read online

  “They saw you, the pastor is such a tyrant, I’ll be in such trouble,” he babbled, wringing his hands. “I plead with you in the name of God.”

  I felt embarrassed for the minister and began looking for a cab. I assumed that Greg, furious at being conned, would let the fat fool grovel, then stomp away.

  “Get up,” I heard Greg say in a flat, hard voice. “I’ll go in.”

  We sat in a back pew and watched an elaborate service conducted by ministers in flowing robes. Greg was very still, a smile tugging the corners of his mouth. I wondered what he was plotting. When his time came, he strolled down the aisle to the pulpit, stiff-legged, almost swaggering. A gunfighter’s walk.

  He looked down at the congregation and told them how the middle-class Negro churchgoer was a hypocrite for avoiding the civil rights struggle.

  “You sing the hymn ‘Were you there when they crucified the Lord?’ Well, a crucifixion is going on right now in America. Were you there? That’s what your grandchildren are going to ask. What are you going to tell them? That you were just standing around?”

  After twenty minutes, he stopped abruptly and walked out of the church. He was grinning when I caught up with him on the street. “Man, if I had been mentally prepared I would have knocked those people into the aisles, no preacher in America could have followed me.” He began to laugh and slap his leg. That was the monster in action.

  Once we decided on the title, Nigger, he held his ground against the publishing house. I loved his dedication: “Dear Momma—Wherever you are, if you ever hear the word ‘nigger’ again, remember they are advertising my book.”

  The book has been in print for more than forty-five years, and although the reviews were mostly good to great, the title didn’t help sales. Most blacks and fair-minded whites hated the title and found it hard to ask for the book by name. The whites who liked the title weren’t about to buy a black man’s book. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake, destructive defiance on both our parts. These days, it’s even harder to mention the title. I find myself talking about a book that I am very proud to have helped write as “Dick Gregory’s autobiography.”

  By the time Nigger came out in 1964, Greg’s entertainment career was in a downward spiral. The nightclub stage wasn’t big enough for him anymore. He was integrating jails, schools, restaurants. Club owners and TV producers were unwilling to book a performer who might show up late or not at all because he had decided at the last minute that flying south to a civil rights demonstration was more important than making white liberals laugh. Civil rights leaders have said that Greg’s appearances at demonstrations—which invariably brought a Huntley-Brinkley NBC news crew—not only advanced the cause but persuaded most hard-core segregationists to leave their guns at home.

  Playboy called him the Scarlet Pimpernel of the civil rights movement, and the writer Thomas Morgan called him the Lone Ranger, but too many commentators suggested that he was merely demonstrating for publicity, he wasn’t sincere. When he ran for mayor of Chicago, journalists wondered if he were a serious candidate. They weren’t interested if he was merely trying to get attention for issues such as welfare, housing, jobs, hunger, health care, and police brutality.

  I enjoyed campaigning with him, especially when a street hustler would sidle up and ask what he could do to help. Greg would laugh and say, “Really be something else if the rumor got out that Mayor Daley’s precinct captains were paying $20 a vote this year, then, when they come around with the usual $2, folks be so mad they run him out of town.”

  In 1968, Greg ran for president. I voted for him, of course, and when my friends upbraided me as if it were my fault that Richard Nixon had beat Hubert Humphrey, I’d quote Greg: “Look, brother, you got two girls and one is a full-time prostitute and the other is a weekend prostitute. If you choose the lesser of two evils and marry the weekend prostitute, you’re only fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re marrying a whore.”

  I don’t believe that now, and I wonder if I believed it then or was merely so delighted to be able to vote for a person who had eaten in my house. The lesser of two evils is still evil, that’s true, but isn’t less evil better than more evil?

  The year after Greg didn’t win the presidency, a book I hadn’t written about the narcotics detectives Egan and Grosso came out. It was called The French Connection. The Academy Award–winning movie followed three years later, in 1971, the year I left the Times and about the time Greg left the nightclub stand-up circuit. We didn’t see much of each other for the next few years. We kept up through late-night phone calls. He faded from media view except when he made an outrageous claim, suggesting in 1981 that the seventeen black children murdered in Atlanta had been part of “fiendish” government medical experiments. His antiabortion stand infuriated Margie and troubled me.

  He began fasting in civil rights demonstrations and lost more than 60 pounds. It became the flip side of his obsession with food. He started running again, in marathons. He hawked a diet powder on the New Age circuit. He helped the boxer Riddick Bowe trim his weight on a kelp diet and win the heavyweight championship.

  We had a wonderful reunion in 1990 when he came on my WNET public affairs TV show, The Eleventh Hour. It was vintage Greg. He talked about rich women who get prescription drugs when their husbands cheat on them and poor women who go out and get crack. “Both of them are drugged out so they don’t have to deal with their problems from an ethical standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint.”

  He talked about black folks needing to change their priorities. “Michael Jackson comes to town, I buy my child a forty-dollar ticket and give him twenty dollars to buy a silly glove. I never gave that child twenty dollars to join the NAACP.”

  It was a reaffirmation of my old admiration for him. Greg has said that there have been only three comic geniuses in America: Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor. Pryor credited Greg with opening the door for him. I wonder if Greg would have gotten into that league had he stayed primarily in stand-up comedy, especially after late-night TV shows opened up for black comics. But Greg followed his monster. Civil rights activism made him a hero but a dangerous commodity. His forays into the New Age nutritional circuit, which I never fully understood, seemed more calling than commercial opportunism, but they diminished his mainstream reputation as a social commentator.

  In the spring of 2009, when I saw an ad for a rare appearance at Manhattan’s comedy club Caroline’s, I was torn. I desperately wanted to see him, but I was afraid of being disappointed, of having my memory smudged. I decided to show up unannounced. I’d catch him afterward. Maybe.

  It was a ten o’clock weeknight show, and the crowd was predominantly middle-aged, mostly white, lots of jeans, sweatshirts, and running shoes. Tourists. They were old enough to agree with the MC who called him “the legendary comedian.” My nervousness that he wouldn’t be funny, that he would be out of touch, evaporated quickly.

  “I’m suing Bernie Madoff. That’s right. A civil rights suit. He didn’t rip off any black people.”

  He was onstage for an hour and a half, sitting down, punctuating his rap with broad winks, pauses, head and eye rolls. I recognized a lot of the 1964 riffs that people talked about.

  “If Jesus had been electrocuted, we’d be wearing little chairs around our necks—how do you make the sign of the chair?”

  And my favorite of the night: “Biggest loss of the Obama presidency is for black entertainers and athletes. Sports and entertainment used to be the only tickets out. We’re not better athletes and dancers, just twenty-two million parents making their kids practice.”

  Afterward, happy and proud, I decided not to try to fight through the crowd outside his dressing room. I wanted to keep the high, think about the past flowing into the present, how our subjects choose us, and how lucky we are when they choose wisely. Greg had taken me through a door into another world and changed me.

  I remembered how thrilling and exhausting it was hanging with Greg in the sixties, a
lways on the run to a cab to a train to a plane, ending up in an unscheduled city a stop ahead of our clothes, marching in a demonstration, sitting in on a Supreme Court hearing (where a black janitor let us in a side door and slipped Greg some papers), whispering in a restaurant bathroom with the water running to foil listening devices. Years later when I got my FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act, I wondered if some of the redacted pages were about Greg. Joe Louis, Jim Brown, civil rights leaders, writers, politicians, gangsters, blues singers paraded through his dressing room. He took me on visits to Malcolm X and Harry Belafonte.

  Once I took him along to visit Muhammad Ali, who covered the phone and asked Greg what advice he should give to some Muslim ministers calling from Africa.

  “Tell them to look to the east and pray,” said Greg.

  Ali uncovered the phone and said, “Look to the east and pray to . . .”

  “No,” snapped Greg. “They know who to pray to.”

  Chapter Five

  The Onliest (Part One)

  Muhammad Ali was my first Big Story. He put my name on page one. He made me a columnist. He was also the single most important sporting lens through which I learned about politics, religion, race, and hero worship. I’ve written far more about him than any other subject, and in watching him change and grow for almost fifty years I’ve watched myself.

  Loving Muhammad Ali has been easy. It’s grasping what he stands for at any given moment that’s been hard.

  Our journey began as sheer joy. The first time I ever saw him, I was standing with the Beatles.

  That was February 18, 1964, when his name was Cassius Clay. He was twenty-two years old. I was twenty-six. The Times was so sure that Gaseous Cassius, which was one of his early derogatory dubs, would be knocked out early in his heavyweight title fight against the champion, Sonny Liston, that instead of sending the regular boxing writer, Joe Nichols, down to Miami Beach, the paper sent a feature writer whose time was less valuable. I was thrilled with the assignment, another Talese-type adventure.

  My instructions were cold: as soon as I landed, I was to drive my rental car from the arena to the nearest hospital, mapping the quickest route. The paper didn’t want me to waste any deadline time following Clay to intensive care.

  After my mapping expedition, I drove to the seedy old Fifth Street Gym (in what is now trendy South Beach) to watch Clay’s daily training session for the first time. He hadn’t arrived yet, but the gym was packed with tourists and sportswriters—Clay had been on the cover of Time for his coffee house doggerel readings (“This is the story about a man / with iron fists and a beautiful tan”) and his ability to predict the round in which his carefully chosen opponents would fall. He had not yet earned the right to challenge the champion, but boxing needed a box-office draw against the unbeatable monster Liston. Clay was considered a necessary sacrifice. It was hoped that enough people would pay to see the Louisville Lip buttoned for good.

  As I climbed the splintery stairs, there was a hubbub behind me. Four little guys around my age in matching white terry-cloth cabana jackets were being herded up. Someone said it was that hot new British rock group on their first American tour.

  I was annoyed. Bad enough this disgrace to poetry was sullying boxing, now these noisy mop tops were trying to cash in on the sweet science. (In preparation for the assignment, I had read and reread A. J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science and carried my annotated copy with me. It would be some time before I began to figure out why so many of the boxing trainers and cornermen who seemed all but mute to me were masters of aphorism for him. Liebling was a superb writer.)

  A British photographer traveling with the Beatles had tried to pose them with Sonny Liston, but the champ had refused—“Not with them sissies,” he was supposed to have said—and now they were settling for a photo op with the challenger.

  At the top of the stairs, when the Beatles discovered that Clay had not yet arrived, John Lennon said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.” But two huge security guards blocked their way and crowded them into an empty dressing room. I allowed myself to be pushed in with them, figuring to get a few funny quotes. Had I understood who those four little guys were, I might have been too shy to become, briefly, the fifth Beatle. But then I was also clueless about Clay.

  The Beatles were cranky in that damp dressing room, stomping and cursing. I introduced myself, rather importantly, I’m afraid, and they mimicked me. John shook my hand gravely, saying he was Ringo, and introduced me to Paul, who he said was John. I asked for their predictions. They said that Liston would destroy Clay, that silly little overhyped wanker. Then they ignored me to snarl among themselves again. Silly little overhyped wankers, I thought.

  Suddenly the locker room door burst open, and Cassius Clay filled the doorway. The Beatles and I gasped. He was so much larger than he looked in pictures. He was beautiful. He seemed to glow. He was laughing.

  “Hello there, Beatles!” he roared. “We oughta do some road shows together, we’ll get rich.”

  The Beatles got it right away. They followed Clay out to the boxing ring like kindergarten kids. You would have thought they’d met before and choreographed their routine. They bounced into the ring, capered, dropped down to pray that Clay would stop hitting them. He picked up Ringo, the bittiest Beatle. Then they lined up so Clay could knock them all out with one punch. They fell like dominoes, then jumped up to form a pyramid to get at Clay’s jaw. The five of them began laughing so hard their impromptu frolics collapsed. That photo op is a classic. (Check YouTube; you might even see me.)

  After the Fab Four left, Clay jumped rope, shadowboxed, and sparred as his court jester, Drew Bundini Brown, hollered, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, rumble, young man, rumble!” Afterward, stretched out on a dressing room table for his rubdown, Clay pretended to fall asleep as reporters asked him what he was going to do after he lost. Finally, a crabby old reporter from Boston said, “This whole act is a con job, isn’t it?” and Clay pretended to wake up and he said, “I’m making all this money, the popcorn man making money and the beer man, and you got something to write about. Your papers let you come down to Miami Beach, where it’s warm.” The Boston reporter shut up.

  I think that was the moment when I began to wish this kid wasn’t going to get his head knocked off, that somehow he would beat Liston and become champion or at least survive and keep boxing. He would have been such a joy to cover, I thought. Too bad he’s got no chance. Too bad he’s only passing through, a firefly fad like those Beatles. We could all have had a blast.

  My reverie of regret was interrupted by Cassius, poking me. He put his head close to mine and whispered that he had noticed me coming out of the locker room with the four visitors. “Who were those little sissies?” he asked.

  The weeklong buildup to that fight was intense and clamorous, a feverish, hilarious, nutty series of encounters with down-and-out old boxers, sleazy hustlers, hookers, gamblers, and the likes of Benjamin “Evil Eye” Finkle (“I’m the number one hex man of the sporting world,” he told me). My notes read like ideas for a picaresque novel. While the week was a twilight reminder of the Damon Runyon days, it was also a foreshadowing of the more politicized days to come. Clay’s mentor Malcolm X, then a Black Muslim minister and white America’s designated bogeyman, was floating around the edges of the scene. His presence made plausible the rumor that Clay was waiting until after the fight to announce his membership in the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, a mysterious sect somehow conflated in the mainstream media mind with the Mau Mau, the Kenyan insurgents of the fifties who had terrified the British Empire.

  I kept an eye out for Malcolm that week in Miami but never saw him. He fascinated me. The summer before, I’d been assigned to yet another Talesian turn, a sidebar to the second Floyd Patterson–Sonny Liston fight. This usually meant a chat with Patterson’s wife or former manager or some old juvies from his neighborhood. I didn’t want to do that. I’m not sure if it was my political nature kicking in or
if I was trying to create my own style, but I headed out to Brooklyn, where a thousand blacks and whites were protesting racial bias in the construction industry. I asked the demonstrators what they thought about the upcoming fight. A black lawyer said, “They’ll always give us opportunities to act like animals.” That was not quite good enough to justify my angle on the feature.

  Then I spotted Malcolm, whom I recognized from newspaper photos. Dick Gregory thought highly of him. Tall, handsome, cold-eyed, the former Malcolm Little, a robber, drug dealer, and pimp who had found Islam and radical politics in prison, was standing across the street smirking at the demonstrators. I rushed over and asked him what he thought the fight signified. He said, “That’s a stupid question,” and his bodyguard, three black-suited members of the Fruit of Islam, the paramilitary wing of the Nation of Islam, shoved me into the gutter. As I went down, I yelled, “The only stupid question is an unanswered question!”

  Malcolm smiled and nodded. The Fruit picked me up. I introduced myself. He said, “I’m pleased to see that the two best men in the sport are black. But they’ll be exploited, of course, and the promoters will get all the bread. They’ll let a Negro excel if it’s going to make money for them.”

  That sidebar was a turning point for me. It gave me courage to find my own signature. The Times ran the story without discussion. Jim Roach liked it. Grumblies on the desk began treating me better. That story may have led to my being sent to Miami Beach six months later.

  That week of his first title fight, Clay dazzled with charm and braggadocio. The sportswriters of my generation were delighted with a subject who reflected our happening times of hippies, pop art, psychedelics, free love, rock and roll. We bemoaned his imminent demise at the hands of the baleful ex-con Liston, whose most searching remark about Clay, written in red in my notebook, was “He’s a fag, I’m a man.”