An Accidental Sportswriter Read Free

until I began to write this book that sports would also reveal my own story to me. And maybe that was what I was looking for all along.
    Sports helped confirm my sense of myself as an outsider, a lurker in the shadows, a spy gathering intelligence in an alien world for people who want to know the truth. “That’s pretty gaudy,” as Jim Roach, the sports editor who nurtured my early Times career, would describe the most overheated of my most painfully know-it-all prose. But outsider was the way I had come to feel as a fat kid, and as a sportswriter. I also thought of myself as smarter and a better writer than my colleagues, free to leave for higher pastures when I felt my mission of wringing truth from the locker room was completed.
    Because of this sanctimonious attitude, I knew, I would never be a universally beloved scribe. In the 1960s, after I wrote about boxing’s cynical use of racial and ethnic rivalries to boost the box office, Madison Square Garden demanded that the Times take me off the beat. I was thrilled and thought of President John F. Kennedy demanding that the Times bring Halberstam home from Vietnam—his boots-on-the-ground reporting was giving the lie to the generals’ falsely optimistic press conferences. I didn’t equate my judgmental stories with David’s brave dispatches, but the Garden’s reaction confirmed my belief that there was a calling in sports journalism.
    (Forty-odd years later, in 2008, I had a welcome flashback when the Professional Golfers’ Association of America mounted a campaign to have me removed from USA Today ’s Board of Op-Ed Contributors. I had written what I thought was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece about the Masters tournament being “all that’s retrograde in American life.” Fortunately, USA Today , as had the Times , seemed gratified by the attention.)
    I wonder now if that outsider armor was something I wore as psychic protection in the planet of the jocks. Or did I stay a sportswriter because I felt more comfortable as an outsider?
    In 1971, I left the Times to write fiction. After twenty years that also included television journalism, screenplays, and young adult novels, all unforeseen opportunities, I was called back to the paper. Joseph Lelyveld was about to become the executive editor and Neil Amdur, another friend, the sports editor. They wanted an edgy voice among the columns. That was 1991, and I thought I’d write the column for a year or two, tops. Another summer job. But I fell in love with the Times all over again and was entranced anew by the looking glass of sports. That time, the summer job lasted twelve years and ended with another lesson in Jock Culture.
    In the summer of 2001, soon after he was named executive editor, Howell Raines invited the sports department upstairs to an executive dining room for lunch. He contemptuously dismissed the Lelyveld administration (“wussies” was the implicit criticism) and promised a new era of hard-driving, zone-flooding, competitive tension in which he would run the paper the way Coach Bear Bryant had run the University of Alabama football team. College sports, he said, was the mortar that held America together.
    Being sportswriters, we assumed that this Coach Bullfrog was merely trying to out-jock us. Sportswriters are used to that, and, like jocks, we tend to offer sly servility to alpha males. We were wrong. Raines was serious. He was ruthless, capricious, and inaccessible, and for all his micromanaging, he was careless. Maybe he was scared, in over his head. He ignored warnings about a young reporter, Jayson Blair, who was ultimately fired for plagiarisms and fabrications. Using that as a weapon, the newsroom rose up and drove Raines out of the arena. But not before he got me. At the end of 2002, Raines, who may have felt personally defied by my columns on the corruption of college football, refused to renew my thirteenth consecutive annual