By Robert Lipsyte
In 1938, the year I was born, Paul Gallico published his valedictory Farewell to Sport, a thoughtful meditation on the “wildest, maddest, and most glamorous period in all the history of sport,” which just happened to coincide with his fourteen years as a New York Daily News sportswriter. Gallico was no mere press-box pundit. Long before the late George Plimpton’s showy turns as quarterback, pitcher, and boxer, Gallico pioneered participatory sports journalism. He swam with Johnny Weismuller, golfed with Bobby Jones, and lasted less than two minutes in the ring with Jack Dempsey.
I was about fifteen when I first read the book and readily absorbed its Galliconian pronouncements, such as “like all people who spring from what we call low origins, [Babe] Ruth never had any inhibitions”; Mildred (Babe) Did- rikson Zaharias became one of the greatest athletes of the century “simply because she would not or could not compete with women at their own and best game — man-snatching. It was an escape, a compensation. She would beat them at everything else they tried to do”; and the reason basketball “appeals to the Hebrew . . . is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness.”
Even as a Hebrew without much game, I was swept along by Gallico’s confidence. He had a cool and cocky style leavened with just enough Great Books references to connect a young 1950s smart-aleck to the elitism, sexism, and faux macho of the 1930s sportswriters who had dipped their noses as well as their pens in other men’s testosterone. I felt manlier through his access to the Manassa Mauler, the Brown Bomber, the Iron Horse. And his dismissal of women athletes was reassuring; if a girl did manage to whip you, it was only because she was likely not truly female. Boys in my day were labeled “girls” and “fags” if they didn’t at least pay lip service to the emerging values of what I now call Jock Culture, that stew of honor, self-absorption, generosity, greed, bravery, emotional constriction, tenderness, domination, and defiance that commands so much of our national life.
I was, however, slightly uncomfortable with Gallico’s remarks about the “colored brother” who is “. . . not nearly so sensible to pain as his white brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands.” It smacked of racism; my parents worked in black neighborhoods and I knew better. But I was willing to give Gallico the same pass that most of my textbooks gave the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson. Gallico, too, was a man of his times. After all, he had written Farewell a decade before Jackie Robinson.
Four years after I read the book, still a teenager, I landed in the sports department of The New York Times; I’d answered an ad for what I considered would be only a summer job before heading West to write books and movies, just like Gallico. But as much as I hated being a copyboy, I stayed on past that summer because I dreamed that someday, I, too, might be “at the tennis tournament at Forest Hills . . . drinking an ice tea . . . surrounded by beautifully dressed women and soft-spoken men in summer flannels,” and the next day be “in a frowsy, ribald fight camp, gagging over a glass of needle beer,” where I’d find “doubtful blondes . . . and blondes about whom there was no doubt.”
Eventually I got to both places, and they were as good as Gallico had promised, especially the fight camps. As a young boxing reporter, I kept two books handy, Gallico’s Farewell and A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science, which was No. 1 on Sports Illustrated’s 2002 top 100 sports books of all time (Farewell was No. 82). Liebling was ultimately discouraging; no one else could eat and drink so much and still write so well, not to mention come up with eloquent quotes from grizzled corner men who were all but mute for me.
But Gallico was my grizzled corner man whispering into my ear. I was able to take a been-there-done-that-so-can-you message from his pages to my seat at ringside on deadline, the telegrapher at my elbow, the boxers above me, the office screaming for copy. The pressure became invigorating. To be, in his phrase, “under the guns,” made writing as competitive and manly as fighting.
He also helped me understand my mixed feelings about boxing. I did love those frowzy, ribald fight camps, but never could give myself up to the fight itself. Gallico also couldn’t understand how you can beat on a wounded man, and wondered if he had always been “too romantic, sentimental, and imaginative to appreciate the true hardness and grimness of what is known as the Sweet Science; perhaps I have always approached the ring from the fiction-writer’s angle.”
But even more important was this line: “Your circulation begins to fall off if you destroy too many illusions, especially if you yourself have created them.” It helped me understand (well, sort of) why it was only after many years that I was allowed to describe Mickey Mantle — and allowed myself to describe Gallico — as anything but a noble warrior.
Gallico’s background offered me supportive parallels. He, too, was a New Yorker, born on July 26, 1897. His father, Paolo, a composer and concert pianist, wanted Paul to follow him into music, certainly not descend into sports writing. My dad, a teacher, had similar feelings about my aspirations. Gallico went to Columbia, where he captained the varsity crew. I went to Columbia, where I quit the lightweight freshman pig boat the second time it was swamped. We both saw our futures in fiction. I don’t think I would have attempted my first novel in 1967, The Contender, without his example. But by then I was growing away from him. I had other corner men.
While Gallico was describing Joe Louis’s “sly servility,” the nationally syndicated columnist Jimmy Cannon called Louis “a credit to his race, the human race,” quaint now but a bold statement then. Lester Rodney, sports editor of the Daily Worker, was leading the struggle against sports apartheid, along with black newspapermen like Sam Lacey and Wendell Smith, who wrote for the Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier , respectively. Gallico had written about Jim Crow sports and the under-the-table payments he called shamateurism, but ultimately, I thought, he was more of a cheerleader than a leader, or, to put it in his terms, more “Gee whiz” than “Oh, nuts.”
In 1971, I left the Times to write fiction full-time. Surely my fourteen years of Ali and Cosell, Billie Jean King, Vince Lombardi, Joe Namath, the 1968 Mexico Olympics, the sneaker wars, the Socialist linebacker Dave Meggyesy, and Jim Bouton’s Ball Four were the “wildest, maddest, and most glamorous period in all the history of sport.” What was left?
I was around thirty-five when I read Farewell to Sport cover to cover for the second time, as research for my own 1975 valedictory, SportsWorld: An American Dreamland. (Sports Illustrated made it No. 97, calling it “an angry screed.”) Now I saw Gallico as a prime example of what had been and was still wrong with sports writing: the jock-sniffing, the intellectual laziness, the moral cowardice.
What an old whore he was, always begging Babe Ruth or Gene Tunney to show up at some event he was promoting. How did that affect his coverage? His line about your circulation falling off if you destroy too many illusions began to sound like a justification of all those years he spent, to borrow a phrase of the great Herald Tribune sports editor Stanley Woodward, “Godding up the ball-players.”
Gallico wasn’t bashful about Godding up himself either. Take his line about Babe Didrikson honing her championship hurdling and jump-shooting skills to compensate for her man-snatching defeats. In his autobiography, The Tumult and the Shouting, the sportswriter and sportscaster Grantland Rice describes a little joke he played on his pal Gallico. During a golf match, he talked Gallico into a foot race with Didrikson, and she left him for dead. Babe tells the same story in her autobiography, This Life I’ve Led. After that race, Gallico suddenly noticed Babe’s Adam’s apple. Of course, if a woman beats you, she can’t really be a woman.
Gallico attacked prizefighting, but never amateur boxing, because he was a founder of the Golden Gloves. And for all his big talk about how blacks were unfairly treated, he went along with the segregation of his black boxers on the road. In Farewell, the chapter on black athletes was called “Eightball.” Nice. Was it Gallico’s wishful thinking that “our next Olympic team may by natural processes have only one or two Negro stars”? In any case, he reasoned that if black athletes were used and discarded (like Jesse Owens, for example?) it was their own fault. Gallico wished that the black athlete’s “racial pride carried him a few steps further than it does. His greed for the white man’s blessings and the white man’s mode of living defeats him and makes him a set-up for exploitation.” Today, we call that “blame the victim,” Paulie.
Too bad Gallico didn’t stick around into my time, I thought. I would have enjoyed writing head-to-head with that bombastic fool. Then again, he probably did less harm churning out his forty-odd sentimental novels, such as The Poseidon Adventure, The Snow Goose, and Mrs. ’Arris Goes to Paris.
I wasn’t paying attention when Gallico died of a heart attack on July 15, 1976, in Monaco, where he had been living with his fourth wife, the Baroness Virginia von Falz-Fein. He was seventy-eight years old. Nobody called me. I didn’t know about it for years.
In 1991, my generation of copyboys took over the Times and invited me to join a hot new sports section under Neil Amdur. After twenty years of writing novels and screenplays and appearing on TV, I thought it might be fun to write a column again for a year or two, tops. I signed on as a contract writer so I could hold on to all my other gigs.
The column fodder of the next thirteen years — Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Tonya Harding, the 1998 Summer of Swat, the emergence of the woman athlete, the Gay Games, the Augusta National Golf Club, the merging of sports and entertainment, the spike in crimes by athletes — might lead some to believe we were going through the “wildest, maddest, and most glamorous period in all the history of sport.” TV money fueled it and freed athletes from needing journalists to present them to the public. Athletes could control their images through ads and paid appearances. This left most sportswriters and sportscasters to choose between fawning their way into an interview with show biz-style access or making their brief, snarling encounters the story. ESPN SportsCenter’s frat-boy jokiness was the most successful since it included thrilling highlights.
This time around, Jock Culture came into sharp focus for me. Right after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, I wrote a column suggesting that the arrogant, entitled behavior of high school athletes, encouraged by the adults who lived vicariously through their overhyped deeds, had created an everlasting divide between Jocks (and their boosters) and Outsiders (geeks, nerds, greasers, burn-outs, band-fags, etc.). Too often, the pack mentality of the team turned into exclusion or violence or rape.
The response to the column was overwhelming, thoughtful, and sometimes emotional, mostly from middle-aged men who remembered high school with pain and in some cases guilt that had darkened the rest of their lives.
Several years later, reading the obits of World Trade Center victims, I was struck by how many had defined themselves as athletes or fans. Personnel executives told me they specifically tried to hire former high school and college athletes for brokerage jobs because they had discipline, were responsive to authority, knew how to overcome setbacks, and were willing to play hurt — that is, come to work sick. The firefighters, police officers, and emergency technicians who rushed in exemplified Jock Culture’s most heroic and selfless models. On the other hand, what was the president’s preening “Mission Accomplished” turn but a macho parody of a Super Bowl-winning quarterback?
Jock Culture even reached into that most sacred of precincts, The New York Times. In 2001, right after he was named executive editor but before he occupied that perch, Howell Raines took the sports department to lunch. He contemptuously dismissed the previous administration and promised us a new era of hard-driving, zone-flooding creative tension in which he would run the paper the way Coach Bear Bryant ran the Alabama football team. Being sportswriters, we assumed this Coach Bullfrog was merely trying to out-jock us. Sportswriters are used to that, and like athletes we tend to offer sly servility to alpha males. We were wrong, of course. Raines was serious. It took the courage of the news nerds to drive him out of the arena.
At the end of 2002, Raines, who apparently never much liked my sports column, declined to renew my thirteenth consecutive annual contract. Less than six months later, after he was fired, the Times sent me a new contract. I never signed it. I had reentered my Gallico mode and was writing fiction full-time again, this time for good, I hoped.
But I couldn’t stay away from Gallico’s Farewell. What drew me back to it for the third read was the steroids story, particularly the anguished cries of the baseball wonks that Barry Bonds’s chemically aided statistics had made a mockery of the game’s history and should be erased or footnoted. Who cares! I thought. (Unless you want to asterisk Babe Ruth’s records: *Never batted against colored brothers.) What matters is the discrete joy of tonight’s game, pitch by pitch, inning by inning. I remembered how touched I’d been at fifteen by Gallico’s lyrical passages on baseball as theater, the beautiful geometry of it, the small dramas, the looming threat of a home run, the liberation from everyday life.
And so it was Farewell again, from the beginning.
This time I laughed out loud when Gallico described international figure skating as “joyously crooked” and the judges as “scamps and vote-peddlers.” He knew this even before the French judge sold out to the Russians at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. I was thrilled by his paean to cars at speed and to the auto racer as athlete. In the closest I’d come to Gallico’s participatory journalism, I’d driven a stock car at 130 miles an hour while covering NASCAR in 2001. Drivers were certainly as athletic as “the stick-and-ballers.” Gallico and I also agreed that horse racing was basically gambling, and that “college football today is one of the last great strongholds of genuine old-fashioned American hypocrisy.” Gallico was railing about Yale selling its broadcast rights for $20,000.
One of the areas I reread with interest and trepidation was about women. I winced when Gallico wrote, “No matter how good they are, they can never be good enough, quite, to matter,” but in a way he was right. How else explain why women’s records, accomplishments, and attendance figures are always measured against men’s? Why does Billie Jean King beating that old clown Bobby Riggs, or Michelle Wie, the Tigress Woods inching her way into the men’s game, get so much more coverage than the revolution that Title IX has wrought in the everyday lives of girls and their families?
I think Gallico, if he were around, could have some fun in his column with the vulnerable veneer of our macho heroes — if it didn’t interfere with booking them for his TV and radio shows. He’d have to deal with jock girls calling each other “fag” for intimidation or motivation. He’d also have to explain why male pro athletes are terrified of having open gays in their locker rooms lest their relatives, friends, and fans think they are gay, too.
Gallico would have flourished in today’s atmosphere, been a multiplatform star like Mike Lupica, Stephen A. Smith, Sally Jenkins, Frank Deford, Tony Kornheiser, Christine Brennan, Jason Whitlock, and John Feinstein. Gallico would know the territory, be smart enough to navigate Jock Culture and snipe at it, be enough of a believer to never attack it systemically. While the new diversity of the current press box has sensitized coverage, the biggest problem remains the widening distance between reporter and subject — except where ex-jocks playing reporters on TV manage to straddle the gap. I have no doubt that Gallico would find a way to walk the line with style, confidence, and residuals.
I probably won’t read Farewell again cover to cover, but the presence of Gallico’s papers at Columbia University teases me. Maybe I should write about him since, after all, this piece was about me. But then I’d have to deal with Gallico’s best piece of advice: Your circulation begins to fall off if you destroy too many illusions, especially if you yourself have created them.
Robert Lipsyte is the author of the forthcoming young-adult novel, Raiders Night. With his wife, Lois B. Morris, he has been writing about opera and classical music for The New York Times.
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