SL Interview
Lessons Learned with Robert Lipsyte
by William Meiners
Maybe these are the end of times. The Cubs and the Indians in the World Series. The absurdity of a presidential election where the GOP’s best offering makes Charlie Sheen seem like a reasonable man — Winning! Or not. I’m on the lookout for those galloping four horsemen, though hopefully after the Cubbies make their own history.
I thought a lot about Robert Lipsyte this
summer, when I saw him in the O.J. documentary, and speaking of his days covering Muhammad Ali for the New York Times. If writers need role models (and why wouldn’t we?), Lipsyte would be one of mine. I shared our Ali-covered “22nd Summer” issue with him and reached out for an interview. His perspective — in a dozen answers to follow — shows he’s a man for all times, past, present, and forthcoming.
William Meiners: Between the insanity of the current presidential election and some turbulent times in an Olympic year, I suspect you’ve had a few flashbacks to 1968. Nearly half a century later, do you think we’re just rolling through some cyclical part of history or could the United States be grappling with longstanding problems that just seem insurmountable?
Robert Lipsyte: Both. We haven’t come close to solving those problems although we’ve certainly seen enough progress to make the choirs brave. We understand and in some cases even acknowledge how far we need to go in giving all Americans, especially women, African-Americans, and the poor a fair deal. I keep coming back to my Dad’s line: “Everybody should pull themselves up by their own boot straps, but it’s up to society to make sure everyone starts out with a pair of boots.” I think sports sometimes gives us a false picture of progress — there are so many rich and celebrated African-American men in football and basketball — but the injustices continue. Which puts more pressure on black athletes to step up and white athletes to support them.
WM: At the end of August, you wrote about one particular flashback, actually a great article in Slate. Recalling Tommie Smith and John Carlos, you said Colin Kaepernick’s not standing (subsequently taking a knee) for the national anthem was the “boldest display of athletic activism since the 1968 black-power salute in Mexico.” With several football players following suit, as well as a diverse group of women from other sports, do you think this is the beginning of reactivated activism in sports?
RL: A few months later, I still hope so, that this is the Athletic Revolution Redux. Smith, Carlos, and Ali were commercially crushed for their principles, none of them got their corporate endorsement due, and the athletes who followed took note and allowed themselves to be co-opted. They became shoe salesmen. My current optimism is based on the WNBA standing up with T-shirts and protests, and high school football teams taking a Kaepernick, which tells me there are thinking young players out there and progressive coaches allowing them to express themselves.
WM: Much of the reaction to Kaepernick, besides twisting his protest into a slam against military men and women, focused on the idea of “shut up and play,” or go sit on the bench. The suggestion perhaps being that he’s achieved beyond the status quo, so he should be happy with that. What impresses you most about his protest and how might his actions help in not just inspiring others, but also fostering change?
RL: Years ago, I covered a high school team whose middle linebacker came out as gay. When one of the players complained about having to undress and shower with a gay teammate, the captain said, “You’re a football player, just suck it up.” That’s always stuck with me. That’s what they’re supposed to do. We’re drawn to these players for their physical courage, which they’re proud of, but what about their moral courage? Suck it up, the way activists, single moms, the disabled, do every day. When football players suck it up it’s usually to hide pain or injury so they don’t lose their jobs. Suck it up when a principle is on the line. That’s what Kaepernick did. “Shut up and play” is for wimps.
WM: From best-selling jerseys to death threats, Kaepernick has become a focal point in this polarizing debate over issues brought forth by the Black Lives Matter movement. He kind of joked (at least hoping it wouldn’t happen), that someone murdering him would only prove his point. Of course, recent fatal police shootings in Tulsa and Charlotte continue to illustrate the problem. How can athletes bridge a gap in what seems like such a great divide?
RL: We all have responsibilities as citizens, but jocks live off the fantasies of fans, the illusion that they are special. Well, act special, at least help get the dialogue going. The danger, of course, for them is that fans see their humanity and the illusions are spoiled, better they should remain video game heroes, replaceable avatars with sportswriter back stories.
WM: The start of the NBA, which is even more of a “Black League” than the NFL, is upon us. What, if any, protests, do you anticipate? Do you think the league will try to suppress them?
RL: I’m watching this with great interest. Carmelo Anthony’s call for involvement using that powerful Instagram picture of the great black athletic activists — Ali, Jim Brown, Bill Russell, Kareem — was a reminder that there have been heroes who were willing to take risks. LeBron followed that up with a few others at the ESPY’s. Now we have to see if they are true activists or just yak-tavists, dribbling through the zeitgeist. Pro basketball players are probably in the best position to create change — the owners know they could start their own league if need be.
WM: I’m all for free speech. Let them pry the pen from my cold, dead hand. I don’t have a gun. But that means knowing that even misinformed (downright stupid) speech is allowed in this country. For some reason that makes me think of Jake and Elwood Blues running the Illinois Nazis off a bridge. I would hope most people would want to run Illinois Nazis off a bridge. But they’ve got a right to congregate. With the baseball season winding down we saw Steve Clevenger, a second-string catcher from the Seattle Mariners, suspended for the rest of the season for making insensitive remarks about protestors in Charlotte on a private Twitter account. His words actually echo a lot of what you might hear on Twitter and Facebook. Is this a double standard for two second-string signal callers?
RL: Clevenger is an exemplar of the dark side of wanting athletes to step up and speak their minds (see Curt Schilling, John Rocker.) They tend to be reactionary and ignorant (not stupid) from having existed in the tunnel of their games since they were kids, owned by rich men, and taught to roll over for alpha males. Interesting that most of the fools are white. Suspending a second-string catcher on the DL for the rest of the season in September looks better than it is. I was surprised that there was no reprisal against Kaepernick, although pleased. I think he’s a hero. I also think that he represents a coming generation who wants to do the right thing. I sense Trump — who in many ways is a model of Jock Culture’s underside of bullying, intimidation, know-nothingness — has disgusted many people and managed to make them uncomfortable with a magnified reflection of their own selfishness and bigotry.
WM: You and I first talked for a Sport Literate interview in 2000. That particular issue featured “Christmas City, U.S.A.” — Michael McColly’s basketball essay which is really about racism. There was another essay about the rise and fall of Mike Tyson. For the first time, in our pages anyway, we gave some voice to issues concerning social justice. As a young journalist for the New York Times, did you make a deliberate decision to be a “progressive writer,” or did your voice somehow shape the things you wrote about?
RL: That’s a good question I’ve been trying to answer for myself these past 50 years. I was not an avid sports fan growing up, my parents were totally unaware of sports (maybe they knew about Jackie Robinson). They were New York City public school teachers in Harlem and black Brooklyn, whose dinner table conversations were about inequality and the quest for social justice through education. So I came to the Times at 19, as a copyboy, with a flair for feature-writing and not much sports history or x’s and o’s expertise. I got a lot of freedom at the paper, became a columnist relatively quickly, and so picked my own stories, or at least chose the way I would approach them. Being sent to the 1964 Cassius Clay — Sonny Liston fight was the big break of my career, got me attention and set the course. Through Ali and the book I wrote with Dick Gregory (“Nigger”) I met Malcolm and leaders in the movement and solidified the attitude with which I came into sports. It was no deliberate decision for me to see thoroughbred horse racing and NASCAR as models of class in America, it just seemed plain. Look down at floor during a Final Four and see that something like 80 percent of the players are black and they represent 80 percent white schools. I did try to remind myself that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (I could get interested in courses for horses and restrictor plates), but I think most writers are directed by a GPS deep in their psyches, unless they are just doing shtick.
WM: You covered Muhammad Ali all the way back to his Cassius Clay days. From a pure charismatic standpoint, has there been another athlete who could touch him? If not, who has come close?
RL: I’ve always thought Billie Jean King was the most important athlete of the 20th century; consider her impact on half the world’s population for starters. Charisma? How do you measure that? She was as much fun to be around as Ali, and her impacts on ending shamateurism and opening the discussion of LGBTQ matters were enormous. She came close.
WM: In that 2000 interview, you talked about Ali being such a perfect match for the times. He simply reacted, often with great humor, to what was thrown at him. Do you think he may have been an accidental activist? Other than keeping him out of the ring in his prime, what did his three-year ban from fighting do for his legacy?
RL: Those three-plus years changed him from an uneducated boxer and dogmatic follower of the Nation of Islam to a man who came to understand his world. The only way he could make a living was on the college circuit. He was boring in the beginning, but he listened to the questions and learned from them. By the end of his exile, when he said things like he didn’t want to be another black man sent by white men to kill brown men for a country that did not give him full rights, he knew what he was talking about.
WM: You never pulled any punches writing about Ali, speaking to the cruelty in which he mercilessly hammered boxers who called him Clay and perhaps abandoning his friendship with Malcolm X. Yet everything in his life, including some three decades of living with Parkinson’s disease, formed his life story. As someone who helped share the stories of one of the famous men in history, what do you think were Ali’s three greatest accomplishments?
RL: Besides the pure joy he gave as the most entertaining athlete of our time? One — Growing Up — Being open and able to change and develop. Two — Staying Sweet — He was incredibly warm and kindly to his fans. Three — Suffering with Gallantry — He was the championship model for being a patient with unself-consciousness and dignity.
WM: I thought “O.J.: Made in America” was a stunning documentary, really putting into historical perspective all the turmoil between the Los Angeles Police Department and the city’s residents of color. Of course, it’s hard not to view O.J. Simpson as a Shakespearean hero in his own rise and fall. In that sense, what was O.J.’s tragic flaw?
RL: What was Othello’s tragic flaw? Jealousy? Pride? Self-deception? I think you’re right about O.J. as a Shakespearean hero, mostly in the context of the new documentary, a brilliant piece of film-making. But there were also more mundane flaws and they were obvious early, especially his neediness to be accepted, even loved by white men with power whose own sense of masculinity was enhanced by being in O.J.’s presence, under the testosterone shower, whether it was in movies, sports TV or Hertz commercials. They understood, if O.J. didn’t, that he worked for them, at their sufferance. O.J. was a faithless, abusive husband, and an ingratiating, accessible subject for journalists, not exactly a heroic balance. I found him easy copy, likeable, enormously cooperative, and narrowly self-absorbed — the same traits I found in Trump as a subject in the Eighties and Nineties — which made both of them, in my mind, suspect. (Chalk that up to Journalist self-doubt rather than prescience.)
WM: Ali and O.J. were contemporaries, but I don’t suspect they ran in the same circles. Yet they were superstar celebrity athletes decades before our “celebrity-obsessed” culture. How were they alike? How were they different? What lessons could each offer today’s “trending” athletes?
RL: O.J. was the alt.-Ali, also a soothing antidote to Brown, Russell, all those hard black athletes who intimidated white Americans with their uncompromising senses of self. O.J. was a grinner (see Magic Johnson), saying you’re O.K. with me to the white fans who wanted to think they were colorblind while also feeling good about themselves for bestowing their tolerance on a black man who pretended to love them back. Ali, who never denied his blackness (his put-downs of Joe Frazier’s hair, skin and facial features is a different, fascinating topic) loved everybody in a narcissistic way, while O.J. loved only his fantasy version of himself. Cautionary lessons for other athletes? First, get to be the best in your game, two, offend no one, three, make a pile and hold onto it. In other words, Be Like Mike. I’d like to think that for many of the new, more thoughtful breed of athlete, that’s no longer enough.
Robert Lipsyte, a former ESPN ombudsman, was a longtime New York Times sports columnist.
William Meiners, a freelance writer and teacher, is the editor of Sport Literate.