An Accidental Sportswriter Read Free Page A

contract. Hurt and angry, but not surprised, I slinked off.
    Less than six months after I left, right after Raines was fired, Lelyveld returned as interim coach and the Times sent me a new contract. I never signed it. I had moved on again, back to young adult fiction and TV, ahead to online sportswriting. But I never stopped thinking about Jock Culture and manhood, about the psychosocial-political aspect of games, and about the people, most of them subjects, whose stories had informed my career and my life. Their stories begat my story.

Chapter One
My Bully
    A t Stephen A. Halsey Junior High School 157 in Rego Park, Queens, New York City, I belonged to a group that was a bully magnet. We were members of the Special Progress (S.P.) class, selected for our above-average IQ scores (120 was supposedly the threshold), a fact we flaunted like a varsity letter. Not only were we smarter, but we were too cool for this school; we would leave for high school after completing the three-year curriculum in two. There were some good athletes among us, but we were clearly nerds.
    We were easy to spot. We moved from class to class in a clump and were individually identified by heavy brown leather briefcases filled with books. The non-S.P. boys called our briefcases “fag bags” and tried to kick them out of our hands. They also shouldered us in the halls and pushed us around on the streets.
    There were ways to minimize the damage. Most S.P. boys kept their mouths shut and heads down when the bullies called them “fag.” I thought that was giving in to them. You could also join them. One of my S.P. classmates was notorious for holding their jackets while they beat us up. He went on to become a famous television executive. (Twenty-five years later, when I worked on a show under his supervision, he turned away when he reached me in a group waiting to shake his hand. I had his number, which did me no good.)
    I became a particular target of the bullies because I compulsively talked back and was too fat to run away afterward. My weight has always been higher than my IQ.
    I hated getting beaten up, hated having friends, especially the girls, be sorry for me, hated feeling my scabs harden and my insides shrivel, but it seemed preferable to giving in or sucking up or hiding. I don’t think I was principled. I just couldn’t help myself from sneering back at them when they kicked my bag or pushed me down or called me “Lippy” or “Lippo the Hippo.” I couldn’t stop myself from making some asinine retort and then trying ineffectually to defend myself. What a fag!
    Though the school tended to separate us from the general student population, it didn’t protect us. The principal of the school, Dr. Nussey, who taught Latin to the S.P. class and ran the schoolwide softball tournament, apparently believed in survival of the fittest. He would allow a little roughhouse as long as his own authority wasn’t challenged. Boys will be boys.
    Our S.P. homeroom teacher, Mrs. McDermott, made an effort to stop fights before we were hurt, but she couldn’t be everywhere. The school enforcers, the beefy gym and shop teachers, would wait until the fight was nearly over, then peel the bullies off their victims and boot them down the street in a tough, humorous way that did nothing to condemn the ritual—in fact, probably reinforced it. The bullies loved the attention, the contact with bully teachers. They would posture while we slunk away.
    The conventional wisdom in those days, dispensed by older friends and relatives, was that bullies would back down if you stood up to them, that they were basically cowards. This was not true. I think I sensed even then that fighting back was about finding out that the beating was bearable, that bullies couldn’t kill you. Simply by standing up to them and surviving, you won a small victory that would give you the courage to keep challenging, to keep standing up, until