An Accidental Sportswriter Read online

  But before we got canceled, I got mad at Howard for the first and only time.

  Time Warner had announced plans to produce a blockbuster Superman movie. It was holding auditions for the Man of Steel. I wrote a skit in which Howard wins the title role, dons the Superman suit, and brings on stage Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who as teenagers in Cleveland created the comic hero but never shared in the bonanza. They were old men now and down on their luck. In my skit, while Howard, Siegel, and Shuster were onstage, the real head of Time Warner walks on to give each of the Superman creators $10,000 a year for life.

  A Time Warner executive brusquely dismissed my idea over the phone (“You have to be fucking joking, Howard Cosell?”), but I decided to press on, if only to embarrass Time Warner. With the help of Mickey Kelley, a young researcher who would become Bill Murray’s first wife, I had Siegel and Shuster flown to New York with their families and put up in a good hotel. Since I was considered Howard’s spy, no one on the staff challenged my orders.

  At the Saturday-morning rehearsal, Cosell and Emmy, who was never far from his side, decided that the two men were “too unattractive” to be onstage with Howard. Besides, if Time Warner wouldn’t cooperate, why make it look bad? My entire segment was canceled. I was furious. I threw a tantrum. How could anyone be too unattractive to be onstage with this horse-faced creep with a bad toupee? And what did Howard Cosell stand for if not righting old wrongs? I told Howard that if Siegel and Shuster did not appear, not only was I quitting, but I would be writing about it. In some weird way I think Howard enjoyed my outburst, like the Halsey Junior High principal Dr. Nussey trying not to smile after I beat up my bully Willie. Except that Howard was both the bully and the principal here.

  We compromised: Siegel and Shuster would sit in the first row during the live telecast, and Howard would walk down from the stage to chat with them on camera.

  That worked out fine, live on Saturday night, and on Monday morning we got a request from the National Cartoonists Society for the phone numbers of Siegel and Shuster. The Society was going to threaten to strike if Superman’s original creators did not get a piece of the action. Eventually—and I want to believe Mickey and I had a part in this—Siegel and Shuster each got $20,000 a year for life.

  The show went off the air after eighteen weeks. I went off on a book tour for SportsWorld. People along the way asked me about Cosell almost as much as they asked me about Ali. Soon after I returned, Howard and I were coming back from a lunch when we passed a bookstore selling SportsWorld. He suggested I go inside, announce myself, and offer to autograph copies. I shrank at the thought. I was too shy.

  He grabbed my arm, pulled me into the store, and bellowed, “I am standing here with Bob-bee Lip-syte, the greatest sportswriter of . . . our . . . time. If you buy his new book, SportsWorld, I will autograph it.”

  We sold a pile.

  In 1985, Howard published his third and best memoir, I Never Played the Game, written with my old friend Peter Bonventre. His critiques, particularly of Monday Night Football, were more than the network suits could bear. And, in truth, ABC didn’t need him anymore. Roone Arledge had won. ABC was one of the big three networks. Cosell was fired. He began to fade away.

  In 1990, Emmy, who had been under treatment for lung cancer, died of a heart attack. The fight went out of Howard. The next summer, already in failing health, he had a cancerous lump removed from his chest. When I called after the surgery, he said, “Leave me alone, Bobbin, I just want to die.” I called the next day, and he said, “I told you, leave me alone.”

  I decided to skip a day. I was busy, working on a documentary about him for ESPN, and I found out that the new management at ABC had refused to release his videotapes for our production. When I called Howard, after he told me yet again to leave him alone, that he wanted to die, I thought I might get his blood moving by telling him about the refusal. There was a brief pause, and then he roared, “That man is dead!”

  Cosell was back.

  It is probably unnecessary to add that he made some calls and we got the videotapes.

  Dave Kindred thinks I talk about Cosell as if he were a crazy favorite uncle, and that is certainly part of the story, maybe more than I think. There were those lunches when I couldn’t match iced teas to his martinis (his so-called silver bullets), when he would lean back and say, “Bobbin . . . ,” the start of a monologue in which he would rail against his enemies, bemoan the world’s misunderstanding of his genius, and excuse my naiveté. He talked lovingly, sometimes mawkishly, about his wife, his daughters, his grandchildren, but sooner or later he would come back to rail against the fools he refused to suffer, the worst of the “jockocracy,” the ex-athletes on the air. (I gave him that term after hearing it from the feminist activist Flo Kennedy. Howard gave me credit the first few times, and then it was his.)

  But his own naiveté might have been his flaw, his grandson Jared Cohane told me. Now a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut, Jared spent summers with his beloved “Poppa” in his Hamptons summerhouse, absorbing his work ethic. Only the broadcaster Keith Olbermann, whom he worked with at ESPN, came at all close to Cosell in intelligence and insecurity, according to Jared.

  “From a distance now, I think there was a certain naiveté,” said Jared in 2009, “in that Poppa never saw the possibility of repercussions in the things that he said. And when there was a negative response, he immediately said that people were out to get him. You just can’t be controversial and thin-skinned.

  “And he never got the team concept. He didn’t grasp that he was part of a team with people he worked with, that it wasn’t right to criticize them the way he did in his books.”

  I found myself defending Cosell to his grandson. “I think he always saw himself as an outsider, a Jew, an English major in the jockocracy, a kind of Lone Ranger. He didn’t feel like part of the team. He was on his own. It was probably his strength and his weakness.” After I said it, I wondered how much of it applied to me, too. Maybe that was what we saw in each other.

  The last time I saw Howard was on March 25, 1993, his seventy-fifth birthday. He was already drifting away. I gave him a teddy bear in a baseball uniform and what turned out to be a good-bye kiss. I also wrote about it in my Times column, which infuriated his daughters, perhaps rightly, because they were such fierce curators of his legend. They couldn’t bear their father being portrayed as weak and vulnerable, as less than Howard Cosell. (Over the years, Jill and Hilary both told me I had “no idea how hard it is to be Howard Cosell’s daughter.”)

  I’m still not sure if I crossed some boundary between the personal and the professional. They didn’t invite me to his memorial service, although I went anyway. After all, I had spoken at Emmy’s memorial service, at Howard’s invitation. Jared remembered that.

  When I told Jared that Howard would be rediscovered, especially since no one has replaced him, he said, “Maybe you’re right. Listen to this.”

  He pulled up a bookmarked interview on his computer. A few days earlier, on November 3, 2009, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ head coach had talked about his upcoming game against Denver. “If you like challenges,” said Mike Tomlin, who at thirty-seven was exactly Jared’s age, “this one has just about everything you’re looking for. You’ve got a great team in their venue, it’s Monday Night Football, it’s going to be awesome, and all we need is Howard Cosell.”

  I’d second that but extend the need beyond Monday nights. What would Howard be saying now about pro football, a violent sport that has lost its moral compass? Players’ salaries are limited by an owner-imposed cap, there are no guaranteed contracts and no long-term responsibilities for players’ health, even as we’re finding out how dangerous the game is to the brain, the heart, and the joints. I like to imagine Howard rising in his version of a biblical old prophet’s rage, telling it like it is, right if not popular.

  Chapter Seven

  My Muscle Molls

  The only woman in the Times sports department when I arrived i
n 1957 was Maureen Orcutt, a big, jolly, fifty-year-old backslapper who seemed to have a vaguely secretarial function. Now and then, she went off to cover women’s sports, mostly golf. Her stories tended to be short and dull. I liked her but agreed with the copydesk consensus that didn’t take her seriously as a journalist, which after all was a man’s job, especially at the Times. Fresh from Columbia, another boys’ town, I carried an attitude toward women that has evolved slowly over the past half century, through four marriages, a social earthquake, and lessons learned from the struggle of female athletes for a place in the arena.

  It was years before I learned Maureen’s backstory, mostly because I wasn’t interested. She was part of the sports department furniture as far as I was concerned, fun to banter with but no threat, and no one, I thought, who could teach me anything. Maybe that was the first story I missed at the Times. Maureen was a Mayflower descendant, the daughter of a former Times editor. She’d been married for two years in her late twenties. She’d won sixty-five major golf tournaments. She had been the runner-up for the U.S. amateur title in 1927 and 1936. And she had beaten Babe Didrikson!

  Now, I knew who Babe Didrikson was because Paul Gallico’s Farewell to Sport was a favorite book. Gallico, a New York Daily News columnist, was an influential sportswriter of the twenties and thirties who pioneered participatory journalism long before the best-selling stunts of George Plimpton. Gallico even lasted two minutes with a heavyweight boxing champ, the Manassa Mauler himself, Jack Dempsey. Gallico then went on to become a prolific fiction writer (The Snow Goose, The Poseidon Adventure). No wonder he was an early role model of mine. I tended to believe his bullshit.

  In his chapter on women athletes, titled “Farewell to Muscle Molls, Too,” Gallico wrote that Babe had become the greatest female athlete of her time (from the early thirties to the early fifties), perhaps of all time, in basketball, baseball, track and field, and golf “simply because she would not or could not compete with women at their own best game—man-snatching. It was an escape, a compensation. She would beat them at everything else they tried to do.”

  Can’t get a date, so you become an all-time sports legend. Sounds right. This, I learned much later, was a classic Jock Culture reaction to getting your ass whipped. Gallico was a former college athlete (Columbia, no less) and vain about his jockness. During a golf match, his colleague Grantland Rice had mischievously talked Gallico into a foot race with Didrikson. Naturally, the Olympic gold medalist had left the scribe for dead. After that race, Gallico began writing about Babe’s Adam’s apple. If a woman beats you, she can’t really be a woman. Probably a dyke.

  I wish I had figured out that lesbian-branding scam a lot earlier, because in some ways it was the flip side of calling boys who didn’t fit easily into Jock Culture “fags.” Women athletes as good as or better than average male athletes were obviously as queer as were males who weren’t good at all or who refused to give it up for Coach. I was a sportswriter covering those Tea and Sympathy coaches who left Kotex pads in boys’ lockers before I realized it was more about control than homophobia, and it did keep straight boys in line. For gay male athletes, it frequently meant giving up football and baseball for cross-country or dropping out altogether. For women athletes, many of whom were lesbians (throughout the twentieth century, sports was often a safe harbor), it meant staying in the closet and/or looking “feminine.” Babe Didrikson married, started wearing makeup, and even seemed to grow her bosoms, which sportswriters noted approvingly, as if she had done it for them. The rumors of her lesbianism, which may have been true, dropped away. Maureen Orcutt came to the office nicely dressed and coiffed, but she was built for football and acted like one of the boys.

  We covered few women’s sports events at the Times then, except in Olympic years; the Cold War with the Soviet bloc was measured in medals as well as missiles, and women’s medals counted as much as men’s. Thus, right after the willowy sprinter Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals in track and field at the 1960 Rome Olympics, she was brought to the Times office to be interviewed by the rookie on rewrite, me. She was a real story; an African-American polio survivor and one of the most beautiful women in the world. She had gently brushed off Cassius Clay when he had hit on her in the Olympic Village. Now she was in town for a medal from the mayor, some banquets, and an appearance at the children’s ward of a local hospital. Classy lady, as we said then. Worth six hundred of our precious words that began, “The speediest woman in the world ambled through New York yesterday, using up the seconds she had saved in the Olympics.”

  Cute. Most of the rest of my story concentrated on her aching feet and how hard it was to get up in the morning. Would I have treated Ralph Boston, who had won the Olympic broad jump and was also in town, as breezily? Ignorance is no excuse, but it didn’t hurt in those days to write in the bubble of clever, especially when you had no context, no sense of history. There are plenty of absorbing books now on women’s mighty efforts to get leagues of their own; if there were books then, I didn’t know about them.

  Four years later, Althea Gibson was delivered to my desk for an interview. She had recently become the first African American on the women’s pro golf tour. Golf was a new sport for the barrier-breaking tennis champion. I’m sure I treated her respectfully (I was still a polite boy in those days), but I knew only the bones of her life, not the flesh and blood. What it must have taken—and taken out of her—to become the first black woman to make it in the white country club world of amateur tennis! She was reviled, shunned, patronized, and then exhibited like a prize horse when she became a box-office draw. I understood this intellectually but had no idea of all the women, not to mention black women, who had struggled before her. Althea won Wimbledon forty-three years before Venus Williams became only the second African-American woman to win it. I wonder how much our covering Althea as an anomaly, a sister from another planet, added to SportsWorld’s ingrained sexism and racism.

  Althea was nowhere near as nice as Wilma Rudolph nor as easy an interview, but by then I was a cajoler of quotes and the story was fine, the sort of faux-Talese fast feature that was my signature in the days when I could write, “In her bland, round face and in her cool measured words still lurk the drives of a little girl who fought like a boy through the streets of Harlem and a lanky young woman who slammed her way to amateur and professional tennis supremacy.” (It would be a few years more before I got a taste of those slams, some coming right at me.)

  And then I met Billie Jean King.

  As with Ali, it takes an effort to rewind, to feel again that tingle, breathe the stir in the air when you are first meeting someone who not only radiates such joy and possibility but includes you in her aura. In 1968, I wrote, “Billie Jean is a delight, perhaps the best woman tennis player in the world, certainly the most human. She throws off vibrations on the court, and when she nets an easy return and punishes herself with a sharp slap on the face, the stands rock gently with laughter. . . . Her muscular thighs make her seem chunky, although she is slim, and from the grandstand her face seems snubby instead of perky.”

  Does a whiff of condescension, sexism, rise off the page? Sorry. But Bobbin was in love. I was besotted by Billie Jean’s looks, her charm, her skill, and her attitude. She was also great copy—ten minutes with her, and my notebook was fat—which has always affected my feelings.

  There was more. I was thirty, a columnist, married to my second wife, Marjorie Rubin, who had started as a secretary in the Times music department, written a number of well-received features and reviews, and worked her way up to a demanding but unsatisfying job as an editor/writer in the women’s ghetto of the family/style department. She’d quit because she didn’t think she could handle both the job and our relationship, which was conventional wisdom then; her editor, the trailblazing, unmarried Charlotte Curtis, agreed.

  Our second child, Sam, had just been born (the first had died at birth). Professionally, I was confident, gaining attention as a different voice in the sports page
s; adjectives such as “irreverent” and “iconoclastic” were used to describe me, as well as “uninformed,” “self-consciously liberal,” and “commiekikefag.” The changes in sports, especially the increasing distance between reporter and subject, were working to my advantage as an outsider, a critic of the status quo.

  But personally, I was struggling to figure out my role, at least my posture, in the changing dynamic between men and women. What did the “liberated” woman want? Liberation from the likes of me? Did I want to be a liberated man? In SportsWorld, that seemed faggy.

  And here was Billie Jean, this dazzlingly smart, accomplished, daring woman, who not only was great copy but seemed to have some answers. Once she complained to me with a certain wonder that “almost every day for the last four years someone comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, when are you going to have children?’ I say, ‘I’m not ready yet.’ They say, ‘Why aren’t you at home?’ I say, ‘Why don’t you go ask Rod Laver why he isn’t at home.’

  “They say, ‘Oh, but Rod Laver’s the breadwinner.’”

  At that point, those blue eyes flashed, just thinking about the top male tennis player. “Well, that’s not the point at all. I love to play tennis. My husband understands this. But people don’t. If I was a ballet dancer or an actress people wouldn’t pester me to retire right away to have kids. I’m twenty-six, I’ve got time, but they don’t seem to understand how I could find such great satisfaction in improving, in putting it together for a good match. I’m winning. When you’ve made the right moves for the right shot at the right time, it’s a very aesthetic feeling.”

  Hearing those words in 1968, writing them into my notebook, reading them in my column the next day, began a pattern of thinking about men and women that zigzagged through the next forty years. There was no question that Billie Jean was a jock, as invested in her talent, as fierce in her ambition, as serious in her preparation as any man. So why couldn’t we treat her like one instead of as a delightful or—in the case of the tight-assed tennis establishment—a pesky aberration? Most of the press liked Billie Jean for her accessibility and provocative quotes yet still regarded her as a second-class (read: nonmale) athlete. Was it because sports was considered an exclusive crucible for men, a place to get strong and tough, to prepare for competition in business, politics, war, academia? Was the presence of challenging women intimidating? Had Gallico been right to feel threatened?