A Writer's Life (2 page)

As ineffectual as the players usually were, fumbling the football constantly, striking out habitually, and missing most of their foul shots, I never humiliated them in print. I invariably found ways to describe delicately each team defeat, each individual inadequacy. I seemed to possess in my writing a precocious flare for rhetoric and circumlocution long before I could accurately spell either word. My approach to journalism was strongly influenced throughout my high school years by a florid novelist named Frank Yerby, a Georgia-born black man who later settled in Spain and wrote prolifically about bejeweled and crinoline-skirted women of such erotic excess that, were it not for Yerby's illusory prose style, which somehow obfuscated what to me was breathtakingly obscene, his books would have been censored throughout the United States, and I would have been denied the opportunity to request each and every one of them sheepishly from the proprietress of our town library, and furthermore would not then have tried to emulate Yerby's palliative way with words in my attempts to cloak and cover up the misdeeds and deficiencies of our school's athletes in my newspaper articles.

While my evasive and roundabout reportage might be ascribed to my desire to maintain friendly relations with the athletes and encourage their continuing participation in interviews, I believe that practical matters had far less to do with it than did my own youthful identity with disappointment and the fact that, except for my skill in writing pieces that softened the harsh reality of the truth, I could do nothing exceptionally well. The grades I received from teachers in elementary as well as high school consistently placed me in the lower half of my class. Next to chemistry and math, English was my worst subject. In 1949, I was rejected by the two dozen colleges that I applied to in my native state of New Jersey and neighboring Pennsylvania and New York. That I was accepted into the freshman class at the University of Alabama was entirely the result of my father's appeals to a magnanimous Birmingham-born physician who practiced in our town and wore suits superbly designed and tailored by my father, and by this physician's own subsequent petitions on
my behalf to his onetime classmate and everlasting friend then serving as Alabama's dean of admissions.

My main achievements during my four years on the Alabama campus were being appointed sports editor of the college weekly and the popularity I gained through my authorship of a column called “Sports Gay-zing,” which, often blending humor with solicitousness and a veiled viewpoint, made the best of perhaps some of the worst displays of athleticism in the school's proud history. Even the Alabama football team, long accustomed to justifying its national reputation as a perennial top-ten powerhouse, suffered when I was a student through many days sadder than any since the Civil War. While gridiron glory would be restored after 1958 with the arrival of the now legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, the football schedule during my time was more often than not the cause of a statewide weekend wake; and the coach of the team, a New Englander named Harold “Red” Drew, was routinely burned in effigy on Saturday nights in the center of the campus by raucous crowds of fraternity men and their girlfriends from sororities in which the pledges had spent the afternoon sewing together sackcloth body-size figures with bug eyes and fat rouge-smeared faces that were supposed to replicate the features of Red Drew.

Although Drew never complained about any of this to me or my staff, I began to feel very sorry for him, and in our sports section I always tried to put a positive spin on his downward-spiraling career. In one of my columns I emphasized the valor he had shown while serving his country as a naval officer in World War I, highlighting an occasion on which he had jumped two thousand feet from a blimp into the Gulf of Mexico. This leap in 1917, when Drew was an ensign, established him as the first parachute jumper in naval history, or so I wrote after getting the information from a yellowed newspaper clipping that was pasted in an old scrapbook lent to me by the coach's wife. I also illustrated what I wrote with a World War I-vintage photograph showing a lean and broad-shouldered Ensign Drew standing in front of a double-winged navy fighter plane at a base in the Panama Canal, wearing jodhpurs and knee-high boots and an officer's cap decorated with an insignia and bearing a peak that shaded his eyes from the sun without concealing an understated smile that I hoped my readers would see as the mark of a modest and fearless warrior—thinking, naïvely, that this would arouse their patriotism and extinguish a few of the nighttime torches that they raised in vilifying Coach Drew and also at times his venerable assistant, Henry “Hank” Crisp, who specialized in directing Alabama's porous front line of defense.

In yet another futile attempt on my part to divert the fans from such disastrous performances as were customarily presented throughout such
seasons as 1951, for example, when the team lost six out of eleven games, I dramatized the tragedy partly with words lifted from Shakespeare:

I left Red Drew to his own fate following my graduation in the spring of 1953. A year later I read that he had resigned in the wake of his team's 4-5-2 record, which might have been considered outstanding if compared with the accomplishments of his successor, J. B. “Ears” Whitworth, who in 1955 lost ten games without winning even one. During these two years I did not return to the campus to witness any of these engagements, being assigned for my military service to an armored unit in Kentucky much of the time, and then stationed with that unit in Germany for part of the time, until my discharge in June of 1956 enabled me to accept a reportorial job in the sports department of the
New York Times
. I had actually worked briefly for the
Times
as a news assistant in the summer and fall of 1953 prior to entering the army, having been recommended to the paper by an Alabama classmate and friend whose uncle from Mississippi, the journalist and editor Turner Catledge, had become managing editor of the
Times
in 1951. Mr. Catledge had arranged for my initial hiring after seeing me in his office and fingering through some of my clippings; and during the time I was away in the military, as you might well imagine, I was not remiss in remaining in touch with him.

It was he who later proposed that I work in the sports department, which he made no secret of criticizing for what he saw as its tendency to cover games in the same serious and stodgy manner that the
Times
then covered everything else; but for some reason he singled out the sports section for reform, hinting that the writing there might be more diverting, original, and (since the
Times
did not publish comics) more entertaining. And while he said nothing clearly disapproving of the sports editor, a rotund and rosy-cheeked elderly man known in the office for his long lunches at Longchamps, I somehow got the impression that the career
prospects of the sports editor were no more auspicious than those of Red Drew.

As an ambitious young sports journalist, I nevertheless continued to read and be influenced primarily by writers of fiction, although my tastes were no longer exemplified by the lingerie literature that had heated up my hormones in high school. At Alabama I had read novels and short stories by William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and other southern-born writers who had been urged upon me by Turner Catledge's nephew, who himself possessed such poetic sensibilities that he swore to me in advance that he would never do what I would later do so eagerly—capitalize on his uncle's connections in journalism.

Each day in the
Times
building I made note of the authors whose names I saw on the covers of the books held under the arms of my elders in the elevators, and sometimes I overheard discussions about these books while lunching in the cafeteria. Since I was now reading literary supplements and subscribing to
The New Yorker
for the first time, I was becoming aware that even some renowned fiction writers occasionally dealt with sporting events and athletes in their novels and short stories. When reading examples of these, I kept reminding myself that what I was reading had been
imagined
; these efforts were, after all, labeled “fiction.” And yet after finishing a short story by John O'Hara, for example, one in which the esoteric game of court tennis was precisely and gracefully described as it presented itself within the oddly angled interior walls of the New York Racquet & Tennis Club—a locale that I had visited and was familiar with—it did not seem to matter in this case whether or not O'Hara was writing “fiction”; insofar as he had woven into his story the facts and details about the club and the game, he had met the demanding standards of accuracy as upheld daily by the desk editors in the Times sports department.

I had moreover been impressed by O'Hara's ability to make me feel as if I was there within the Racquet & Tennis Club, watching the game from a bench overlooking the court; and I was also
there
, on a football field, rooting for a swivel-hipped halfback who elbows his way toward a touchdown in Irwin Shaw's story “The Eighty-Yard Run”; and
there
on a snow-covered golf course, shivering next to a lovelorn caddy in F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Winter Dreams”; and
there
in the dining room of a racetrack, sitting next to a horse trainer, who, looking up from his meal, notices that he is about to be joined by a jockey friend—an aging, ill-tempered rider presently experiencing much difficulty in controlling his weight—and the trainer is overheard saying in a voice that the jockey does not hear (but is quoted in the excerpt of Carson McCullers's “The Ballad of the
Sad Café” that I had read in
The New Yorker
): “If he eats a lamb chop, you can see the shape of it in his stomach an hour afterward.”

I wanted quotes like these in my sports pieces, but I also knew I could not make them up. I was a reporter, not a fiction writer. And yet if I could get close enough to some of these athletes I was now meeting in New York and could convince them to trust me and confide in me as had many of the players I had known back in high school and college—when I used to commiserate with them and encourage them after each defeat; I was the Miss Lonelyhearts of locker rooms—I might be able to write factually accurate but very revealing personal stories about big-time athletes while using their
real
names, and then get these stories published in the straitlaced
New York Times
, which Mr. Catledge was trying to loosen up in the area where I worked. Again, without faking the facts, my reportorial approach would be fictional, with lots of intimate detail, scene-setting, dialogue, and a close identity with my chosen characters and their conflicts.

And so while I sat in the back of the sports department one afternoon interviewing a glamorous visitor named Frank Gifford, the star halfback of the New York Giants, I was thinking about “The Eighty-Yard Run”; and when I was at Yankee Stadium trying to communicate with the unglamorous Roger Maris, a home-run king on a team led by the beloved Mickey Mantle, I was as empathetic as I usually am with those who are designated second-best; and after I had befriended an up-and-coming pugilist named José Torres, I shortened my sentences, like Hemingway, and wrote:

Although baseball as played by the Yankees would continue to command my emotions as a fan, it was the realm of professional prizefighting—as personified by boxers who were inevitably disappointed, who were often ignored in defeat, and who just as often contemplated comebacks—that I tried hardest to ennoble in the sports pages of the
Times
, being joined in this quest by a nearby novelist or two who were regulars at ringside. It was fortunate for me that during the late 1950s into the 1960s the heavyweight ranks included a remarkably candid and articulate champion named Floyd Patterson, whom I got to know so well that I often thought of him as my literary property. I wrote more than thirty articles about Patterson during my nine years as a
Times
reporter (from 1956 through 1965); and although I left sports in 1958 in order to have access to the more varied subject matter available in general news, I nonetheless continued to volunteer constantly for sports assignments—particularly if it was a World Series game involving the Yankees, or a heavyweight fight in which Patterson was a contestant.

On the late afternoons of fight nights I would sometimes spend an hour or more talking to him near his bed in a hotel suite, surrounded by his trainers and sparring partners, who were either playing cards on the dining room table or snoozing on one of the sofas. Later, as fight time approached, and I squeezed into the limousine that would transport him and his invited guests to the arena, I could feel my sweat rising as I anticipated what might be inflicted upon the body and face of this amiable, well-mannered man who sat silently in the back, glancing out at the sidewalk with seeming nonchalance, indistinguishable in his conservatively tailored suit and subdued silk tie from an average black executive who might be employed by IBM. Soon he will be standing nearly naked in the ring, I kept thinking, along with other thoughts that might seem simplistic and melodramatically banal except at times like this, when I feared that he was a few hours away from becoming seriously hurt, battered and knocked senseless because he was not really vicious and talented enough, and because he was also very light for a heavyweight, perhaps twenty pounds lighter and with a much shorter reach than his primary contenders—the menacing Sonny Liston and the arrogantly confident Muhammad Ali, both of whom would eventually annihilate him.