Accidental Sportswriter, An: A Memoir Review

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(More customer reviews)Robert Lipsyte admits quickly in his memoir AN ACCIDENTIAL SPORTSWRITER that he never was much of a sports fan. What he wanted to be was a writer, and after he was given a foot in the door at the NY TIMES, he was able to write about what mattered to him most--the social issues of the day--through the vehicle of sports.
The best chapters of the book have to do with Lipsyte's journalistic role models, Gay Talese and Howard Cosell. Known for being a "piper," that is, flirting with the line on the truthfulness of his accounts, Talese represented the opportunity to go beyond the traditional boundaries of journalism. Talese would deliberately focus on the minority, the over-looked, and doing so would always ask the question "why?" Lipsyte would run with this insight. Covering sports didn't mean that he was stuck with covering sports. Lipsyte credits Talese not only with helping him see this, but also with giving him the confidence to do pursue this type of reporting. At a low point as a TIMES copy boy, Lipsyte wondered openly about his writing future to Talese who on the spot offered to sponsor Lipsyte's writing career. Talese's offer infused the young scribe with the boast he needed, but what Lipsyte realizes after approaching his old mentor for the first time in 40 years is that Talese had "piped" him in making the offer to finance his career.
Lipsyte's other role model was entirely the opposite of Talese's gentlemanly attire and attitude. Howard Cosell was a bull running wild in the open field of TV and radio media. Knowing that he couldn't be both popular with everyone and still be accurate, Cosell sought out the truth as he saw it. Lipsyte soon adopted the same approach, and seemingly enjoyed offending in the name of the truth. But, as the memoir indicates, in retrospect, Lipsyte--like Cosell--could often be wrong about what was the gospel. And very unlikeable.
The athlete that dominates the narrative is Ali. Lipsyte sees him in all of his phyisical beauty. Bigger, quicker, faster than Sonny Liston, Lipsyte realizes immediately with a chance assignment to cover the then Clay/Liston fight that Clay was something special in every way. In the aftermath, athlete and scrible become linked and their careers take off together. Lipsyte sees Ali as a social reformer, but wishes for more than the image that Ali projected for public consumption. Turning his back on Malcolm X, openly disregarding the moral teaching of Islam, Ali frustrates Lipsyte, but Lipsyte is always drawn back to him just as American society would be.
Some chapters on social issues seem forced, as does Lipsyte's humility. He seems to recognize how pompous he can be both in life and in print. But, the narrative never drags, and Lipsyte's prose is always first-rate.

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A longtime sports columnist for the New York Times interweaves stories from his life and the events he covered to explore the relationships between the games we play and the lives we lead

Growing up, Robert Lipsyte was the smart-aleck fat kid, the bully magnet who went to the library instead of the ballpark. As the perpetual outsider, even into adulthood, Lipsyte's alienation from Jock Culture made him a rarity in the press box: the sportswriter who wasn't a sports fan. This feeling of otherness has colored Lipsyte's sports writing for fifty years, much of it spent as a columnist for the New York Times. He didn't follow particular athletes or teams; he wasn't awed by the access afforded by his press pass or his familiarity with the players in the locker room. Between bouts at the Times, he launched a successful career writing young adult fiction, often about sports.

The experience and insight he earned over a half century infuse An Accidental Sportswriter. Going beyond the usual memoir, Lipsyte has written "a memory loop, a circular search for lost or forgotten pieces in the puzzle of a life." In telling his own story, he grapples with American sports and society-from Mickey Mantle to Bill Simmons-arguing that Jock Culture has seeped into our business, politics, and family life, and its definitions have become the standard to measure value. Full of wisdom and an understanding of American sports that contextualizes rather than celebrates athletes, An Accidental Sportswriter is the crowning achievement of a rich career and a book that will speak to us for years to come.

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Hank Greenberg: The Hero Who Didn't Want to Be One (Jewish Lives) Review

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(More customer reviews)Kurlansky's biography of Hank Greenberg, part of the "Jewish Lives" series of Yale University Press, places Greenberg's career within the context of the anti-Semitism of the Depression and early post-World War II era. The author is at his best in describing how Jews in various sports changed their names to avoid anti-Semitism and to hide their involvement in sports from their parents who disapproved of such activities. Even a number of popular Hollywood actors and actresses also changed their names. (Edward G. Robinson, John Garfield, and Paulette Goddard are such examples.)
Greenberg responded to anti-Jewish tauts by fans and opposing players with restraint and used such insults to motivate him. Early in his minor league days, he employed physical confrontation on the diamond, but quickly came to realize such action was self-defeating. His restraint, coupled with his superstar status, made him a hero to the Jewish community, something he did not want to be. Kurlansky suggests that Greenberg's way of dealing with blatant racism was used by Branch Rickey as a model for Jackie Robinson.
The author also shatters a number of myths surrounding Greenberg. One such myth concerns his quest to shatter Babe Ruth's single-season homerun record in 1938. With five games left in the season and sitting at 58 homeruns, no one in baseball, the story goes, wanted a Jew to break the record of 60. Therefore, the anti-Semitic owners, managers, pitchers conspired to throw him nothing to hit in the season's final days. Kurlansky skillfully demolishes this myth, pointing out that Greenberg himself renounced it on several occasions.
However, the book provides limited information about Greenberg's baseball career. For example, the author goes from the homerun chase in 1938 to a quick summary of the 1940 season, skipping the year 1939 altogether. Mickey Cochrane, the Hall of Fame catcher and manager of the Detroit Tigers in the mid-1930s, is not even mentioned in the book. A table of Greenberg's career stats and any citation of sources are also absent.
Yet, Kurlansky presents some interesting stories about Greenberg's years in baseball and after. When the slugger was called up to the Tigers at the tail end of the 1930 season, no veteran spoke to him. Greenberg swore that he would not do the same, and later in his career he befriended youngsters like Rudy York and Ralph Kiner. In his only year with the Pirates, he negotiated a one-year contract without the reserve clause. He also testified on behalf of Curt Flood in the law-suit involving that clause. Once he retired from baseball as a player and a general manager, he became obsessed with tennis and played it competitively until his early 70s.
If you are interested in a typical sports biography with a lot of stats, memorable confrontations between batter and pitcher, rivalries between teams and/or star players, thrilling pennant races, game-by-game World Series clashes, and a season-by-season account of the player's life, this book is not for you. However, if you are interested in Greenberg the person, what obstacles Jews faced during these years and how and why he became a hero to fellow Jews, then Kurlansky will help you understand these things in an lively and engaging manner.


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One of the reasons baseball fans so love the sport is that it involves certain physical acts of beauty. And one of the most beautiful sights in the history of baseball was Hank Greenberg's swing. His calmly poised body seemed to have some special set of springs with a trigger release that snapped his arms and swept the bat through the air with the clean speed and strength of a propeller. But what is even more extraordinary than his grace and his power is that in Detroit of 1934, his swing—or its absence—became entwined with American Jewish history. Though Hank Greenberg was one of the first players to challenge Babe Ruth's single-season record of sixty home runs, it was the game Greenberg did not play for which he is best remembered. With his decision to sit out a 1934 game between his Tigers and the New York Yankees because it fell on Yom Kippur, Hank Greenberg became a hero to Jews throughout America. Yet, as Kurlansky writes, he was the quintessential secular Jew, and to celebrate him for his loyalty to religious observance is to ignore who this man was.
In Hank Greenberg Mark Kurlansky explores the truth behind the slugger's legend: his Bronx boyhood, his spectacular discipline as an aspiring ballplayer, the complexity of his decision not to play on Yom Kippur, and the cultural context of virulent anti-Semitism in which his career played out.
What Kurlansky discovers is a man of immense dignity and restraint with a passion for sport who became a great reader—a man, too, who was an inspiration to the young Jackie Robinson, who said, "Class tells. It sticks out all over Mr. Greenberg." (20110617)

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