An Accidental Sportswriter

An Accidental Sportswriter Read Free Page B

Book: An Accidental Sportswriter Read Free
Author: Robert Lipsyte
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they eventually left you alone and went after easier prey. Or, less likely but always possible, you could actually win.
    Nowadays, when a bully may be packing a gun or a knife (or crouched in ambush behind a computer), the conventional wisdom is very different. Run, or return to school with an AK-47 and wipe out the cafeteria. I wrote a Times 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 bullies and victims, often jocks and nerds.
    The response was overwhelming, thoughtful, and sometimes emotional, mostly from middle-aged men who remembered high school with pain and in some cases guilt. There were hundreds of letters, calls, and e-mails. Two typical examples:
    When I attended high school, I had so much built-up anger from being treated unfairly that, if I had access to guns or explosives, I would have been driven to do a similar thing to take revenge on the Italian and Irish white bastard jocks who dominated the school and made those 4 years miserable for me. After high school, I was not surprised to hear that a handful of these jocks had either died as a result of drunk driving and drug overdoses, or had spent a little time in jail for violence or drug possession. As for the dead ones, I would probably pee on their graves.
    and
    We really did get special attention both from the students, and from the teachers. We also did cruel things to other students. I have a 20th school anniversary this summer and plan on seeking forgiveness from the people I know I helped terrorize.
    In the late 1940s and early ’50s, the Halsey bullies, whom we called “hoods,” affected outlaw garb such as dungarees, muscle T-shirts, and leather jackets, but in our striver neighborhood they weren’t even petty criminals. They tended to be the better schoolyard athletes—bigger, stronger, quicker, more aggressive, more excited by the chance to intimidate. Those who went on to organized contact sports would be encouraged in those traits. That never changed.
    Nor did the tone of language. In Halsey days, the killer word “fag” had less of a homosexual connotation than one of “sissy” or, worse, “girl.” As we were taught to believe in the fifties, most women had no consequential professional futures; they might become teachers or even writers, but they would never get to do genuine men’s work such as fly fighter planes, build bridges, kill bad guys, throw touchdowns. Fags wouldn’t get that chance either.
    That wasn’t merely schoolyard talk. A book published in 1939, You and Heredity , by Amram Scheinfeld, had a chart that measured masculinity by your line of work. The top of the chart drummed with test pilots, engineers, explorers, pro athletes. On the bottom, clearly my future neighborhood, were clergymen, teachers, librarians, and writers.
    By the time I found that chart, I knew I was going to be a writer because a writer could sit alone in a corner and control his universe, create his universe, by making up stories. In the stories I wrote in junior high school, skinny kids tended to die horribly. My dream was to publish a story in Forest Trails , Halsey’s mimeographed literary magazine. The girl I adored from afar, Myriam, was the editor. She was brilliant and beautiful and had a French accent; I knew my only chance with girls like her would be as a star writer.
    But writers, according to You and Heredity , were at the bottom of the masculinity chart.
    I had found the book on one of the biweekly trips I took with Dad to the big Queens regional library. Dad and I, and later my sister, Gale, who is seven years younger than I, went to libraries the way other kids and their dads went to ball games. Dad never censored our choices, and he allowed us to check out as many books as we could carry. I’d been snooping in the Science section

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