Interview

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 “22^nd 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.

SL Interview

Dave Zirin on Sports: Two Things at Once

by Nicholas Reading

In a sports’ world that is too often reduced to top 10 lists, highlight gifs, fantasy leagues and box scores, Dave Zirin approaches athletics as what it is and has always been, a lens through which we can view both society’s successes and failures. I spoke with Dave on the Friday before the Super Bowl, discussing his love and in-depth knowledge of sports, what drives him as a writer, and of course, the NFL (see who he liked to win the big game) complete with thoughts on Cam, Peyton, and CTE. When Zirin plays, he plays for keeps. We also touched on the political nature of athletics here and abroad, TMZ, a fitting slogan for the Olympics, and what’s looming on the sports horizon.

Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation and he writes a weekly column called the Edge of Sports. A frequent contributor to ESPN, CNN, NBC, and FOX, Zirin, in my opinion, is one of the most important sports journalists today.

Nicholas Reading: You’re a bit of a rare breed. What brought you to the intersection of sports and politics as a journalist? Was there a defining moment?
Dave Zirin: Oh, my God, that’s really kind of you. What brought me to sports writing was a lifelong love of sports. I grew up playing sports, I grew up memorizing everything about sports, and it’s something that has always meant everything to me. It’s been an essential part of my life. When I got into politics, one of the things that was interesting to me was that all of the things I thought I knew about sports were all of sudden under a different kind of lens – just some of the basic narratives that I thought I knew about – people like Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, the Olympics, the World Cup, everything started to look different. And it has been a very fascinating process for me. And at the point in my life I was really trying to understand if sports should be rejected or if it should be reclaimed because there is something good in sports. Or if it is really about that displacement – public funding for stadiums, racism, sexism, homophobia, and really coming to grips with the fact that sports are two things at once. It has two different traditions, good and bad, fair and foul. I’m trying to do my best to revive and dig up that tradition of social justice that does exist in sports and try to make it come alive for a new audience.

NR: Have you faced any blow back? Was anyone saying, “Just let sports be a game?”
DZ: You definitely do get some of that. And I feel it. I really feel it, and I’m sympathetic to it. I would love for sports to be ala carte. I really do wish sports were just the fun of the game and the artistry, no different from going to a play or an opera, just another form of cultural entertainment. Unfortunately, the very power of sports has made it something else. If I wasn’t talking about it it’s not like these things would cease to exist. The Washington football team would still be called the Redskins. The St. Louis Rams would still be moving to Los Angeles. These things would still be happening. To call out these things, and it’s not just me to doing this; I’m not some kind of lone wolf. But to say the house is on fire is not the same as being an arsonist. We’re not setting the house on fire. It’s burning independently of us. And pointing it out, that the fire is raging, is a prerequisite to putting that damn fire out. Not just reveling in the fact that the world is burning.

NR: I have to ask about Cam Newton. You wrote your own open letter, which I thought was great, and recently Cam has said, without reservation, that he felt a part of the criticism he has received is because he is African American. Will these comments open eyes or just make more folks deny any racism?
DZ: Well, it’s interesting because his exact words were that he is an African-American quarterback that no one has seen before. We have gotten past the point where it has been normalized to have African American quarterbacks. I mean, Russell Wilson has been in the last two Super Bowls, for goodness sake. What Cam Newton is trying to say is that he is going to be authentically himself, even if it puts people on edge. And that means he’s going to keep smiling, keep celebrating, he’s going to keep being him. He was acknowledging that makes people afraid, but it’s actually an important thing to address. He has to still be himself. It reminded me so much of another athlete who was also very clear that he was going to be himself and that is Muhammad Ali, who said “I don’t have to be what you want me to be” early in his career. That was his great statement of independence. Now I’m not comparing Cam Newton to Muhammad Ali in full. Ali risked years in prison opposing the Vietnam War, all manner of hate and death threats and all the rest of it. But in the 21^st century it is still very liberating for a lot of people to have Cam Newton be willing to be himself in a manner that can be described as unafraid. It’s still rare, it’s still powerful in his willingness to do that and it’s making him friends and enemies all over the place.

NR: Not to be too NFL heavy…
DZ: No, that’s okay. It’s funny that you don’t want to be NFL heavy. Sometimes people ask me why I cover the NFL. The NFL is so hegemonic in the US sports world that to be a sports and politics writer and not talk about the NFL should be utterly irrelevant; it is basically to not be a sports writer. Eighty of the top 100 sport shows watched last year were all NFL games. I mean, it’s not even close. So, I have no problem with you being NFL heavy. If we’re talking sports and politics this is the number one discussion in town.

 

NR: This has to do with CTE. Antwaan Randle El recently came forward and expressed his feelings that he wouldn’t play football again if given the chance due to his physical and mental ailments. Calvin Johnson is retiring at 30. What’s your opinion on the future of the NFL and when do fans value players’ health and future as much as our own?
DZ: It’s interesting because we really are at a point where the NFL has an existential problem. The journalist James Reston once said that the press is much better at covering revolution rather than evolution, and I think that’s what we are looking at here in that the popularity of the NFL is evidence that it’s not going anywhere this year, next year, five years from now. But there is this kind of 20-year generational issue that hangs over the league, and it has to do with everything you are saying. Science is not the league’s friend. Currently we can find out about CTE, this horrific brain disease that affects NFL players who have to have these repeated sub concussive hits. Of course, it can affect anybody who gets repeated concussions, but there’s nothing quite like the NFL where if you get a concussion it never really gets the chance to heal because you are constantly in this motion of playing this sport where you are running into other people. It’s so interesting to see what the next 20 years are going to bring because the science is going to improve and we’re going to get to the point, I think very soon, where we’re going to be able to detect CTE not just in the dead, but in the living. When that happens, you might see players retiring in mass at 26, 27. Or signing release forms that they’re never going to sue. And you’re going to have parents, so many parents, and this is already happening, that prevent their kids from playing youth football. That’s why the NFL is involved in this ferocious, and utterly unprincipled PR campaign that is all about getting kids to play this sport. This is what we’re dealing with. So who knows what it’s going to look like in two- or 30 years’ time. I think that’s the CTE issue kind of at large. What’s going to happen to a sport when more and more families aren’t letting their kids play, particularly if their kids have skills at multiple sports?

 

NR: You write not only about American sports but also sports and its politics around the world. Have you noticed any differences in the manner in which athletics, or athletes, or even fans, are viewed outside the US?
DZ: Yes. It’s not that the fanaticism is any different, and I’m talking about hyper fandom, it’s really a global phenomenon and it tends to reflect whatever country it happens to be in. What it means to be a sports fanatic in Egypt is very different from what it means in Serbia, what it means in London, what it means in New York City. I’d say the biggest difference between the US and the rest of the world is what we’ve been talking about. It’s about American football versus soccer. The big difference between football and soccer is the fact that soccer, I mean, how do you monetize soccer is what marks the biggest difference. In other countries politics is less policed. When athletes are political it is less corporatized. In Greece recently two teams sat down in the middle of the field to protest the migrant crisis and had a two minute moment of silence for the children who died in the passage from Syria over the Aegean sea and the PA announcer read out their complaints. Now imagine that happening at the Super Bowl. Or at any US sporting event. I mean, you just can’t. That’s what we’re dealing with.

 

NR: Recently Johnny Manziel was in the news again for all the wrong reasons. I feel sometimes that kind of story gets more press. Where an athlete screws up or does something wrong. What athletes do serve as good role models? Who should we be looking at?
DZ: It’s so interesting because the sports industry has become this 24-hour thing and it’s being run much more from the bottom up instead of the top down. In other words, it’s being run, in terms of what’s being covered, through the Internet and social media more than it gets run by what executives think we need to know. In some ways that’s very progressive.  For example, this Peyton Manning HGH story, or violence against women, that’s happened from the bottom up. Or the controversy over the Washington football team name. That has happened from the bottom up. Not from the top down. And that’s great. But what also happens is that profits get governed by clicks and by attention and by eyeballs because there is so much competing for attention. It’s just proven by these scandals what generate clicks, more than an athlete’s social consciousness, more than charity work, and all the rest of it. So that’s what I think creates this gutter culture. This US magazine of sports. Where TMZ can start its sports site and can have it be very popular very quickly because it is willing to dwell on these kinds of scandals. Which aren’t illustrative or indicative of how most athletes are living their life. But it is what draws the most attention.

 

NR: As a sports journalist, what is the state of the profession? Is it where it should be or has it been reduced to sound bites and 90-second highlight clips?
DZ: That’s exactly right. It’s so crazy, man. I mean the sound bite culture, the 140-character culture, the twitter culture, it makes it very difficult, sometimes, to talk about the more substantive issues. But, at the same time it makes a broader audience. And an audience that feels they are being under-served by this culture. So if anybody is listening out there, who is an aspiring sports writer, I would just say, don’t be afraid to be counter intuitive. Because there are a lot of people who do feel that they are under-served by this climate, where everything is TMZ and the rest of it.

 

NR: What sports writers do you go to? What outlets do you go to for your sports journalism?
DZ: There’s a lot out there. For me, honestly, it usually governed more by stories than by individual writers. The work by people like Jessica Luther who has a real focus on the issue of violence against women in sports, or the work by people like Christopher Gaffney, who has been covering what has been happening in Brazil with the World Cup and the Olympics. That’s the kind of stuff that I look for. What is great about this moment is that anybody can write these stories and put them up. So there’s a lot of good out there. Sports Illustrated’s new website Cauldron is really good. Medium is really good. Sports on Earth still puts good stuff up. Vice Sports, Patrick Hruby’s stuff, there’s no shortage of things for people to find. And I would suggest people search on the basis of the issue more than on the basis of the writer. Then they can discover some of these new writers who are cropping up all the time.

 

NR: A few questions about your writing. Obviously your love of sports brought you to your profession, but what brought you to writing?
DZ: For me, and for a lot of people who write, it’s just the desire for some form of self-expression. Usually we read books that really touched us. For me it was reading James Baldwin and just seeing the power of words. And then when I read James Baldwin’s articles about Sonny Liston as he prepared for his fight against young Cassius Clay. That for me was kind of mind blowing as far as what sports writing could be. The thing that I love about writing and what I love about being a writer is that we live in such a deeply, deeply superficial society where people are judged so quickly on what their jobs are. When you meet someone one of the first things they usually ask is what do you do and whatever answer you give is how they start to define you. And it’s really messed up if you think about it. So many of us don’t have the choice as to what our job is going to be, yet, people still define us by what they are. And being a writer, it really does not require someone else to sanction you or label you as such but you can self identify and you can work on your craft and it doesn’t really matter what else you’re doing to pay the bills.

 

NR: So who you like this weekend (still pre-Super Bowl)?
DZ: It’s interesting; this is the first Super Bowl in a while, largely because I’m such a Patriots hater, where I haven’t really been stressed about the Super Bowl! I really don’t give two craps about either team too much. But I do like the Carolina Panthers. I do like the way they play. I do like Cam Newton. I certainly don’t like the way that Peyton Manning has gotten such an unholy pass from the media about things that other quarterbacks would get roasted for and the latest HGH scandal just being the latest incarnation of the ways in which Peyton is protected by big media and the NFL. So I’d like to see the Panthers win only because I feel like it would upset all the right people. If the Broncos win I’m not going to be crying into my cheese dip on Sunday night, unlike last year when tears flowed in a manner that I’m ashamed to describe.

 

NR: If Peyton retires, win or lose, is the HGH story dead forever? If he comes back, will we hear more of it?
DZ: It all depends on new information. That’s the thing about it. And the reason I’m even talking about it now is that I’m kind of gob smacked by this new story that came out about these private investigators who went to the home of the HGH whistle blower and misrepresented themselves as police officers to the parents of this guy, Charlie Sly, who is the intern who gave the initial interview. And the day after the PIs go to their home and they call 911 and you can hear the 911 tape of the whistleblower’s sister in a very frightened manner calling 911 saying there are people here who are saying they’re police, we’re scared, and all the rest of it. But without new information the story will die. And if he retires with a victory, yeah, that’s all people are going to remember, absolutely and positively because that’s the way that sports works. But we’ll see what happens.

 

NR: Anything you’d like to add here that wasn’t covered?
DZ: Just that people should keep a very, very close eye on Brazil this year with the Olympics. I wrote a book called Brazil’s Dance With the Devil and went down to Brazil a bunch and looked at how the World Cup and the Olympics were being planned and everything that’s happening right now in Brazil with the economic crisis, with the spread of the Zika virus, and with a lot of dissatisfaction in the country as a whole. I mean this is the sort of thing that is keeping me up at night. I think about the uses of sports and I hope people keep a close eye on this because the Olympics could come to your town next and that’s not anything you want.

 

NR: That sounds ominous.
DZ: Yes. I’ve said before that the slogan for the Olympics shouldn’t be, “Bigger, Faster, Stronger,” or whatever it is. It should be, “Something wicked this way comes.”

 

NR: Well, like I said, we really appreciate you talking to us. I really enjoy reading your work.
DZ: Thank you.

Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbook The Party In Question (Burnside Review Press, 2007) and Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, jubilat, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, and San Pedro River Review. He serves as the managing editor for Sport Literate.

by Sean Prentiss

Sean Prentiss interviewed Jack Ridl on March 4, 2010, at Margaritas Mexican Restaurant in Holland, Michigan. Jack Ridl (pronounced Riddle) is a retired professor at Hope College in that town. Jack’s father, Buzz Ridl, was the University of Pittsburgh basketball coach from 1968 –1975. Jack’s newest book of poetry, Losing Season, is a chronological narrative of a basketball season in small town America. Jack also has another book of poetry Broken Symmetry published by Wayne State University Press to go along with three chapbooks. Sean Prentiss is assistant professor at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.

SP: How did you become a writer? How did you go from being a coach’s son to a poet?
JR: Looking backward from my current age, I see that I would have been an artist of some kind even had I not been a coach’s son. My father, without pressure, taught me how to be an athlete. But I didn’t have much skill. I became an athlete through determination and an act of imagination. I had to do that to survive the expectations of most everybody. I had to pretend to be great. Developing a life of imagination was occurring all the time. It was how I got through things. I know I daydreamed all the time. I remember my father saying, “Get back here,” meaning, “Get back to the real world.” It was never mean-spirited. My wife, if she were here, would say I’ve always been this way.

 

SP: What athletes or coaches influenced you as a writer?
JR: I’ll start with my father because he was incredibly inventive. For example almost every coach in the game today would know about the offenses and defenses he invented, whether or not they knew he pretty much invented them. My dad was doing the motion offense back in the late ’50s. He just thought, “What if I have everyone move?” He created the amoeba defense, now called a match up, that so many teams now use. The idea he had was not a zone or man-to-man but to guard or fill passing lanes. The year he died, he taught John Calipari that defense.

But why he was influential to me as a poet was because he cared about the game, not what the game would lead him to. So I care about the poem rather than where the poem will take me. And my dad taught me how to respond versus impose. So when players came to play for my dad, he looked at their strengths and worked with those strengths. That’s so valuable as a teacher and a writer. It’s very William Stafford-y. You let the material come in and work with it rather than imposing your will on the material.

The player who influenced me was Oscar Robertson. I would pretend I was him all the time. What was influential about Robertson was that he mastered everything about the game. He wasn’t just a shooter or a point guard. And then he could respond like a jazz musician. You could tell this was a guy who respected the game and learned everything. To me, every part matters. The line breaks, whatnot, they all matter in a poem. It’s not one thing, it’s all the parts.

 

SP: Can you talk about why you wanted to explore America’s obsession with sports?
JR: What little American town doesn’t have a team? Sports just seem to be so central. On news channels, there is news, sports, then weather. The big three. My father didn’t understand the obsession. He loved the game but didn’t understand the energy that goes into being a fan. He once said, “I love the game. I just don’t understand why all these people are here.”

Also, where else can we go that allows us to laugh, cry, yell, boo? Rock concerts. I wish poetry readings would be like concerts. Everyone just sits there and assesses poetry. Where else can this natural part of who I am have a place to express who I am?

 

SP: Can you talk about the similarities and differences between sports and writing?
JR: One thing that is really really important is loving to practice. I loved practice. I did theater, and I loved rehearsal. You try this and you try that. I was always experimenting. I was always wondering if I could do this or do that. That experimentation enabled me to write without feeling defensive. It was always, “Let’s see what happens if I change.”

The second thing was learning to live without knowing the outcome. An athlete needs to accept this. Athletes always talk about the next game. So you learn that you never know what is going to happen. The poet Paul Zimmer told me, “You never learn to write poetry. You must learn to write the next poem.” What the next one asks of you, you don’t know. So for me, that lack of knowing is a place I’m very used to. I sit down to write having no idea what will show up. And if it is lousy, I never worry. I go on to the next one. It’s like losing a game. Time to go on to the next one. After that it’s all those buzz words. Just do it. Discipline. Hard work. But this kind of hard work is more play. Basketball players know this.

I also just like it. I am really grateful for the fact that something happens in the doing, in the writing, that is separate from depending on success. You can win the game and score 40 points, but what happens when you’re playing the game? Whether you win or lose, what happens during the game? That time you’re spending in the game is so enriching.

When our daughter was very little, she asked, “What is art?” We said art is a place, a safe place to be yourself. I always wanted students to think about what happened when they are writing. The monks say, “We’re in prayer.” I like being in prayer.

 

SP: I’m thinking about sports movies and how so many sports movies are overly sentimental. Yet I know you promote sappiness and sentimentality in your poems. Why?
JR: Well, my friend Mary Ruefle wrote an essay about sentimentality and how the word “sentimentality” has “sentiment” and “mentality” in it. I like that idea. I’m just trying to be sort of Zen-y with that word. Though I don’t think sentimentality is the right word. I just wish we had appropriated the word for what we want it to mean. I don’t want overly emotional. I don’t want anything to do with that. So I don’t know what the word is for not telling the reader to feel but instead inviting them to feel. Showing the reader emotion, that’s not what we should be afraid of now. It’s dishonest emotion that I hate.

When I was teaching, my students would tell the class, “Sorry this is cheesy.” They didn’t understand the difference between tender and cheesy. My daughter said, “I’m worried about being cheesy.” I said, “You can’t be cheesy if you are yourself.” When a poem fails with sentimentality to me, it’s because I tell the reader what to feel.

“Dare the sentimental,” said Richard Hugo. If you pull back so far what have you got? Dead wood.

 

SP: A review said that Losing Season “is a book that can bring people into poetry.” Can you talk about this? About if you were hoping to bring people into poetry?
JR: I wasn’t trying to bring people to poetry. Now, I think this is going to sound cutesy, but I wanted to bring these poems to people not the people to poetry. By writing this book, I get a chance to give people something that has been taken from them—poetry. School is often the last train station for people. If they don’t get poetry when they are in school, they might never get it. I’d rather have them love the worst poem than take it away from them. I hold out hope that what we do enriches people’s lives. So these poems were like that. I wanted to give them to people who might be at the last train station.

And one of the things that writing does is show a culture. Poetry in general hasn’t really looked at one of the central parts of this culture—sports. It’s looked at politics, religion, the arts, education. It writes about just about anything else. Sports, uh-uh. So I thought, it’s only right to do. Then I felt permission to write about sports because Thoreau writes about beans. Melville writes about whales. Poe writes about a bird. American literature is really strange.

 

SP: This book has a sustained narrative, a beginning, middle, and end. What were the challenges and the rewards to working with a chronological narrative in a book of poetry?
JR: Well, that was not a challenge at first because I didn’t realize it was happening. Then I noticed it and said, “Oh my god. There might be a narrative.” Later I thought, “Can I try to have the narrative not be there? What if I create a series of poems in such a way that the reader goes, ‘Is this a novel in poems?’ and then thinks, ‘No, I’m making it up.’” Could I create this book of poetry in such a way that the reader turns this into a novel? It seems as if that did happen.

Once I realized this book could be novelistic, I had to search through and make sure I didn’t manipulate anything. What I expected was a response where people say, “This is more like Spoon River, the book by Edgar Lee Masters.” I thought they would see this as a documentary of a town. That’s not what I wanted. I wanted them to see this book as a novel, so I’m glad you did.

 

SP: Along with my last question, was it hard to construct a book that had to have each poem stand on its own while also working as a whole?
JR: I did write them to stand alone. Paul Zimmer said to me, “Never write a poem that can’t stand alone.” Richard Jones at Poetry East wouldn’t know a basketball from a kumquat, (don’t tell Richard I said that!) but he took a bunch of these basketball poems and published them. So I figured they were working on their own, even outside of sports. So I really tried to make them so they’d stand alone. So someone can say about each poem, “Yeah I can experience that” and not need the whole book.

 

The Gym, January

Ice hangs from the roof.
Inside, the great furnace
huffs the heat up into
the bleachers. The cement
hallways shine. The glass
in the trophy case shines.
The trophies shine. In
the locker room, each scarred
locker stands solid against
the concrete block walls,
the benches steady in front.
Against one wall, the blackboard,
chalk and an oily rag sitting
in its trough. In the corner,
a water fountain. One door
opens outside, another
to the court. The gym floor
glistens. The blue W in the center
circle glistens. Above it all,
the scoreboard. Outside,
the temperature stays below zero.

 

SP: What made you decide to have this be a losing season? Why not a successful season? Why not a championship season?
JR: Because that’s what you come to know best as a coach’s kid. You know the consequences of losing. Winning is just the absence of losing. For my sister and me, our fears were all about what happens when you lose. The barber scares you about your old man. I remember being eight-years-old and getting a haircut. The barber has his scissors in his hand and asks, “Why didn’t your dad play Doran?”

I always wanted other parents in the town’s eye like my dad was. I wanted newspaper headlines like, “Buick dealer blows sale at the end of the day” or “You call that a root canal?” for the dentist.

Being a coach’s son was just too hard on us as kids. It was an exciting world, but I don’t know how many people know how awful it is. My father always said, “It’s my world. Don’t let it bother you.” That’s not something as a child you can handle. Blood stuff. It’s tough. Tough stuff.

 

SP: This book has a very ethereal feel. There are all these quiet moments with snow falling and empty hallways and sad lives and desperate hopes. Can you talk about that mood?
JR: Hearing you call this book “ethereal” means the world to me. You being along with me in these poems, that makes me so happy.

The book opens with Coach at age fifty realizing what he can’t do anymore—hit his free throw shots anymore, hit the jump shot. So he steps outside of time and pulls weeds. The book opens with that word, but spelled t-h-y-m-e. In the first poem in the book. Coach “gets up, goes over to the garden, reaches for the ball, stops and pulls some weeds growing through the oregano, basil, sage, and thyme.”

And Scrub is forever hoping, Scrub is about neglect. He’s thinking, “I’m on the team, but not really. I’m in the family, but not really.” He’s in so many ways outside time.

There’s not a poem about an actual game. So there are no moments of high tension. Yes, the equipment manager is doing his job, but the big moment is when he looks at a car in the parking lot and reflects on his wife. Or Star goes into K Mart and has this metaphorical experience where he thinks, “Maybe I have wasted my life.”

The snow throughout the book is meant to be snow, but it’s also the objective correlative, the spirit of things. Sometimes the snow comforts, sometimes it hides a dead dog. Sometimes it just piles up against the door, like at the end.

 

Night Gym

The gym is closed, locked
for the night. Through
the windows, a quiet
beam from the streetlights
lies across center court.
The darkness wraps itself
around the trophies, lies
softly on Coach’s desk,
settles in the corners.
A few mice scratch under
the stands and at the door
of the concession booth.
The night wind rattles
the glass in the front doors.
The furnace, reliable
as grace, sends its steady
warmth through the rafters,
under the bleachers, down
the halls, into the offices
and locker rooms. Outside,
the snow falls, swirls, piles
up against the entrance.

 

SP: Can you talk about the endings of your poems? It seems like sports poems’ endings can be easily made to be loud and big. But so many of yours are slow and quiet and hushed. Why?
JR: I didn’t, um, know consciously that my endings were doing this until I was on a panel with Naomi Shihab Nye and Conrad Hilberry. A question from the audience was about structure of a poem. Conrad said the poem usually begins with something small and opens out into something big. Then he went on to add, “Except for Jack’s poems that start really big and get smaller and smaller except that the small thing in the end does something big.”

There was a poem I wrote called “Love Poem,” and because of its cheesy title, I’ll affirm it by saying it was in the Georgia Review. The beginning line is, “The smaller the talk, the better.” The ending lines are, “When we wake I want us to begin again never saying anything lovelier than garage door.” The implication at the ending is subverting the whole notion of love, that we really can’t live up to it. So, I think that these poems in Losing Season are similar. When the Equipment Manager leaves the gym, he sees these kids kissing in this car. He realizes that he’s older than when he left the building, and he thinks about his wife and all they’ve repaired, which is a great word because it also means to re-pair. It’s this quiet moment, this hush, this resonance of lifelong love.

Maybe a poem that undermines all that is where Scrub is dreaming of making his last shot. It’s all tense. But, still, the big moment disappears. There is no last shot. And what appears to end that poem is Scrub at the dance with his dream girl, “and Jennie cups her hand around Scrub’s neck.”

It’s hushed but it’s huge.

 

SP: Can you talk about your titles? They seem very telling, as if you’re letting the reader know exactly what is to come. A few examples are “Pep Rally,” “Coach Tells His Wife about the Big Game,” “The Big Snow,” and “Before the Game.”
JR: It was a big decision to do that. And these titles are very different than my other poems where I really have a great time coming up with titles like “The End of Irony.” These titles in Losing Season were like newspaper titles.

There were a couple of reasons. These weren’t poems to figure out, these were poems to experience. So with these simple titles, I was like, “Here it is, go experience.”

I think with poems, more than with novels, titles have an integral part to play. The poem’s title is doing something to the poem. In one sense, in this collection I put the narrative in the title. The poems are the lyrical response to the narrative titles.

Students very often, because they are taught that poems should be difficult, try to have their reader figure out the poem. So students think that poems should be hard. But students seldom get to experience those complicated poems. They figure them out and then they move on to the next difficult poem. But they never really read them. I don’t want to figure out that a poem is about a dog. Just tell me. Now I’m in that experience with you. All kinds of things can open up because you’ve given me the bottom line. I’m not telling someone to not write a dense poem. It’s that Donne didn’t write a poem thinking, “This will be hard to figure out.”

 

SP: Can you talk about form? Almost all of your poems, except maybe two or three, seem to be long and thin. Why?
JR: That was to embody pragmatism. Americanism. Cut to the chase. No long lines. Because it seemed appropriate for this small town, nothing artsy fartsy. The world was fix-your-car, utilitarian. How do you get a structure that suggests Americanism? Nothing fancy here. I grew up in that culture. Mill working people. Don’t put on airs here. My father was very impatient with anything that seemed to be showing off. I remember him saying, “Why do these Sports Illustrated articles always toss in things I don’t know anything about?”

 

SP: Why are readers so drawn to Scrub, the bench warmer on the team?
JR: Because he’s a dreamer, but he has a very moving reason for his dreams. He dreams to survive. He doesn’t have any way to get through life if he doesn’t dream. It’s the only world he has. Every other world has kicked him out. And then he’s so goofy when he thinks, “Someday I’m going to come back home and have a dog.” He just wants an everyday life. But he’s got no hope of getting out. He’s still going to be in the same damn town all his life. Poor guy. He doesn’t dream of getting out of there and showing up the town. He just wants to be with them, but he never gets to.

 

Walking Home Late After Practice

Walking home late after practice,
Scrub kicks the snow, imagines

each flake a phony word, a lie,
a promise he believed, floating
up off into the air, mixing
in the wind, melting. Scrub

keeps walking, passes
under the streetlight across
from his house, sees the light on
in the kitchen, pauses, looks

back, suddenly starts to dance,
dance under the long deflected pass
of the moon’s light. His feet
slide softly over the layers

of snow piled and trampled hard
by schoolkids, teachers, people
heading to a friend’s house. Scrub,
the dancer, whirling himself

into the soft night, into the wild
applause of the falling snow.

 

SP: I read that Losing Season took you 20 years to write. Can you describe the process?
JR: Twenty-five really. My wife says, “I remember you starting this. It was twenty-five at least.” This book was material that was there all along but I put it aside for very human reasons. I didn’t want to be the coach’s kid. I wanted to be my own person. So you publish three volumes of poetry and three chapbooks and you become your own person so you can write about being the coach’s son.

But what really killed me while writing this book was “belief,” “not belief,” “belief,” “not belief.” “Will this book work? Can I create a narrative in this book?”

The process was one poem at a time until there were maybe twenty of these. And then a few journals were so affirming of these poems that I thought, “I can create a town, and then I thought I could create a novel-in-poems that takes place in this small town.” So it was nice that way, just coming to me. The writing is so much smarter than I am. It’s helping me along.

 

SP: You’ve won lots of awards, and some very big ones, for your teaching. What role do you see teaching playing in your life?
JR: I can’t believe how lucky I am. I’m amazingly grateful for my students. A little tiny school like this, Hope College. I’ve had sixty-five students go on to get MFAs and do great things with their writing. It’s crazy. They went to terrific programs. It’s not me, it’s them, these great students.

I’m grateful that I love teaching so much. The poetry thing would have killed me. The competitive side of it. To place my wellbeing in that, I just don’t know if I would have survived.

I appreciate your understanding that I’m saying these things about my students in a delighted way. I love to give stuff to people.

 

SP: Jack, it’s been an absolute pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for a great conversation. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

JR: Yes. It means everything to have someone attend to the poems as thoughtfully as you have, Sean. Thanks so much.

 

Losing Season: Everybody Talks

It’s the way December
turns into March. It’s
the teeth on the right side
tight, all eyes finding a way
to see around the corner. It’s

not making the coffee,
not saying good morning
anymore, not fixing
the dent in your car,
the draft under the door,
the difference between
the two of you.
Sean Prentiss is the author of the memoir, Finding Abbey: a Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which won the 2015 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography. Prentiss is also the co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, a creative nonfiction craft anthology. And he is the co-author of the forthcoming environmental writing textbook, Environmental and Nature Writing: A Craft Guide and Anthology. He lives on a small lake in northern Vermont and serves as an assistant professor at Norwich University.