An Accidental Sportswriter (19 page)

Sheehan had been a guru of the fitness boom of the 1970s and '80s, his practical advice on running refined and thickened with anecdotes from millions of his own footsteps and quotes from the experiential philosophers, poured into newspaper and magazine columns and into seven books including the best-selling
Running and Being
.

We had first met a few hours before the 1968 Boston Marathon. I was trolling for a column among the 890 entrants waiting for their prerace physical in a Hopkinton high school gym. I'm not sure whether I discovered him—those glittering eyes in a pale, hawkish face—or he spotted my notebook. He became a recurring character of mine for the next thirty-five years simply by telling me that morning that he regarded the race as a Greek tragedy. “There is hubris, and there is nemesis. The beginning of the course is downhill, and everyone is charged up. They run too fast, and their pride destroys them. By the time they reach the Newton Hills, they're walking.”

My kind of subject. But for all his rhetoric, he was down to earth. When he heard I jogged in my old army boots like the boxers I covered, he suggested that, based on my build, I might do well to concentrate on swimming and cycling. If I did decide to keep jogging, I should wear old Hush Puppies for starters instead of expensive running shoes and drink lots of water, never soda or the new sports drinks.

I enjoyed talking to him, hearing his story. The oldest of fourteen children of a Brooklyn doctor, Sheehan ran at Manhattan College but gave it up for squash and tennis when he became a cardiologist. In 1962, the forty-three-year-old father of twelve, feeling trapped in his life, snapped after getting a 2
A.M.
call to the hospital and punched a wall. He broke his hand. To stay in shape while it healed, he began to run again.

He was feeling very good about himself in 1984 when another running guru, Dr. Kenneth Cooper of Dallas, gave him the good news—he had just scored in the 99th percentile on a stress test—and the bad news—he had cancer.

“I was very angry,” remembered Sheehan. “Everything was going my way. But I wasn't surprised. I'm a passive type, the kind who die of cancer. And my lifestyle prevented heart attack.”

Then he spun his diagnosis into a metaphor: “I think of dying as a blood sport, like bullfighting. The bull, of course, is death, and I am defending myself, dancing with death, creating this beautiful aesthetic. The blood sports show us that death is not defeat.”

This was on a day of gorgeous life in the summer of 1993, four months before he died, the sun splashing off the ocean, filling the living room of Sheehan's beachside New Jersey home, glinting off his pale blue eyes. On the road beneath the windows, joggers huffed by.

“Certain qualities are brought out in the race,” said Sheehan, clawing through piles of books, notes, mail on the floor beside his chair. “In the contest, what the Greeks called the
agon
, you find out you have what it takes and you're altered by the experience. To meet the challenge of death is now my race.”

Prostate cancer rides to metastasis on currents of male hormone. The hypothalamic hormone he took to block his body's production of testosterone, GnRH, performed a chemical castration. For the first time in his life his mind was clear.

“I am the eye in the sky now,” he crowed, “and I see how ludicrous men are, acting out a script written by a gland in their bodies. It's all testosterone. The only thing that protects us against it is good manners.”

But that was the philosopher talking. The jock had begun tinkering with his dosage of GnRH, which might have been holding back the cancer but was surely holding back George. To run faster, he needed the juice. He cut back on GnRH while in heavy training and skipped it altogether when a race was coming up. He was willing to whittle days off the end of his life so he could run at his best. I wish I could talk to him right now about McGwire and A-Rod and Bonds. Even about Harold and Lance. I'm sure he'd find something in Heidegger or Saint Augustine that applied. And a personal judgment. And a suggestion for what chemical they
should
be taking.

While it was George who suggested I was built for bike riding, it was Lance who got me onto a bike again. (I had ridden as a kid, of course, and while in college I delivered telegrams for Western Union, which I guess makes me a former professional bike rider.)

In July 1999, after he won the Tour de France for the first time, I ran out and bought a Specialized hybrid and began chanting “LanceArmstrong” up hills. I followed him avidly, read his superb book with Sally Jenkins,
It's Not About the Bike
, and in 2001, when he asked me to moderate a Stanford University panel under the auspices of his cancer research and education foundation, I flew right out.

It was a first for me, working for a subject, and I wasn't quite sure of the conflict-of-interest issues. In my old monkish days I would have righteously just said no. But this was Lance and cancer. The fee I charged was a thirty-minute private interview with Lance. We got off to a shaky start when I asked about the allegations against him.

“Drugs, there you go,” snorted Armstrong. We were sitting in a sunny hotel courtyard in Palo Alto, California. “The media, including your newspaper, loves to print all these rumors of what I'm supposed to be taking. When my tests come up negative the stories are much smaller, if you print them at all.”

It got better. He was direct, engaged, friendly, twitchy. He was clearly the man I had expected, focused on the interview once he realized he had to do it, honest, still the the hard case who grew with psychic pain he apparently still shuts down with self-inflicted physical pain.

His mother was seventeen when Lance was born, and his father left them when the boy was two. Armstrong dismisses him as “a nonfactor” who merely “provided the DNA.” When a Texas newspaper tracked down his biological father, Armstrong not only expressed lack of interest in finally meeting him but called the man's expression of pride opportunistic. It was as if he were trying to abandon the old man right back.

Lance described his stepfather, Terry Armstrong, as “a Christian who used to beat me for silly things.” Maybe that's why he described himself as an agnostic. At seven, he was liberated by a Schwinn Mag Scrambler. “Cycling is so hard,” he says. “The suffering is so intense that it's absolutely cleansing.”

He was a perfect candidate for chemotherapy.

The precancerous Lance Armstrong was known as the Texas Bull, an aggressive, disrespectful rider fueled by the rage that covered his fears. He has said he likes himself much better now. Unlike most public cancer survivors, who profess moral improvement, his claim seems to be more than a way of finding something worthwhile in bad luck.

Though he says that cancer made him a better person, more certainly it made him a better racer. Before his months of chemo, he had been a star of one-day races. After chemo, he discovered his forte was in endurance for the long haul, which is what the twenty-three-day, 2,274-mile Tour de France is about. As is life. Without cancer, he believes, he would not have won the Tour.

For all his calls to “Live strong” and his now-ubiquitous yellow bracelets, Lance was no bumper-sticker motivationalist. But he did say one thing that stuck with me: “We can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave.”

It seemed like a powerful mantra, in sickness or sport. I gave it my own spin, of course. That doesn't mean that if we win or lose, live or die, the credit or blame is all ours. The kind of cancer cells that ambushed Lance and me were vulnerable to a chemotherapy protocol that wouldn't have helped if we'd had, say, pancreatic or lung cancer. You have to take charge of your health and goals, do the best you can, face what happens. Control what you can control. The rest is luck.

The panel discussion at Stanford, “Athletes Winning the War Against Cancer,” went well. Armstrong was joined by Eric Davis, whose seventeen-year major-league baseball career had been briefly interrupted by colon cancer, and Tom Gullikson, the tennis player and coach, who had cared for his twin, Tim, before his death from brain cancer. I can't remember when professional male athletes have offered themselves up so openly as having been frightened, vulnerable, and out of control of their lives. There were no sports questions from a crowd as raptly quiet as a symphony audience.

Davis, Gullikson, and Armstrong, conditioned as male athletes to “suck it up” and play through pain, had waited longer than most male nonathletes, certainly longer than most women, to present their symptoms. Also, despite their celebrity, they all had their problems with patronizing and insensitive doctors. But typically, as athletes, once they submitted to a medical program they were model patients.

“I approached cancer the way I would prepare for the Tour,” Armstrong said. “Get in shape. Find out as much as you can, be motivated by small results. The lesion shrinking a little gave me the same kind of encouragement to keep going that I would get when my uphill times get slightly faster.”

On our way out of the arena, a woman stopped Armstrong and asked him how his belief in God had helped him as a cancer patient.

“Everyone should believe in something,” he said in his direct, almost chilly way, “and I believed in surgery, chemotherapy, and my doctors.”

The questioner looked disappointed, but I felt a surge of relief. Armstrong had held his ground. We had agreed that the intrusion of faith-based treatment can be pernicious, almost blaming the victim, and he had pointed out that “good, strong people get cancer and they do all the right things to beat it, and they still die.”

As we left, Lance grinned at me. “I guess I won't be able to go into politics when I stop bike racing.”

I was charmed at the time, although after eight more years of Lance watching I wasn't convinced he would ever stop bike racing or consider anything, including politics, closed to him. There is a steely, messianic aspect of Lance that never quits—against cancer, against competitors, and against the forces that seem determined to prove he used performance-enhancing drugs and bring him down, including French antidrug authorities, some of the media, rivals such as former Tour champions Greg LeMond and the disgraced Floyd Landis, and the Javert-like federal investigator, Jeff Novitzky, who has made a career of dogging athletes.

I wish they would give it up, do something useful. I'm not sure if this is Bobbin, the fan, talking or Lippy, the scribe, or both of us in concert. The “war” on drugs was lost a long time ago, and you'd have to be a fool to go up the Pyrenees without a push.

Chapter Sixteen
The Lodge Brothers

S
cenes from the dawn and from the twilight.

The feisty little tabloid columnist Jimmy Cannon, at a press conference in the early 1960s, is screaming “You're blinding me! You're blinding me!” as he kicks over the TV light stands. He believes he can delay the start of the New Sports Order. Less obviously, the
Daily News
baseball writer Dick Young is scurrying around the room unplugging the light-stand electrical cords.

Nearly fifty years later, as endearingly quixotic, the Pulitzer Prize winner and
Friday Night Lights
author Buzz Bissinger is screaming at Will Leitch, the founder of the snarkish sports Web site Deadspin, that “blogs are dedicated to cruelty, dedicated to journalistic dishonesty,” which “pisses the shit out of me.” This is on HBO. Host Bob Costas, pretending it is not great TV, has his faintly disapproving schoolmarm face on.

When I started on the path from Cannon's kick to Bissinger's rant, athletes still needed off-season jobs and access was easy. The biggest problem interviewing Joe Namath in the days leading up to Super Bowl III was pushing through the kids and old ladies who clustered around him at the hotel pool. That was another country.

The price for that long-gone access was the promise of protection. Athletes could be sure that their binges, brawls, and bimbos would not be reported. The covenant fractured as the economic and social gap between hack and jock widened, as the financial value of sports grew, as newspaper writers became obsolete as brokers between athletes and fans. TV freed athletes from needing print journalists to present them to the public, and most TV sports journalists (my bloggingheads.tv partner, the writer and editor Bryan Curtis, has called sportscasting “a halfway house for halfwits”) were thrilled to be part of the show on the industry's terms. Athletes could also control their images through ads and paid appearances. Blogs and tweets and Facebook pages would give teams and athletes direct access to their fans. They could spin their own news. Mass media conferences are tightly controlled now. One-on-one interviews are negotiated with agents and public relations advisers. Sportswriting has become another department of celebrity journalism.

As it should be. I may feel nostalgic about interviewing Namath at the pool or Casey Stengel at the bar, but those memories seem like tribal legends. Of the most famous athletes of this century, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, little was known beyond their performances for a very long time. Most reporters didn't report, happy to be allowed to watch them and god them up. When Tiger's facade of chilly control cracked in 2009, the media's predictable response echoed back a century to Grantland Rice's “Gee whiz” and W. O. McGeehan's “Aw nuts.”

The Neo Gee Whizzers declared for Tiger's right to privacy; why he had fled from his Florida mansion at 2
A.M.
with his wife in pursuit and crashed his Cadillac SUV into a nearby hydrant and tree, knocking himself out, was his business. All he owed us was continued greatness as a golfer. The Modern Aw Nutsies demanded a full disclosure; why was his wife holding a golf club, and was there any truth to the supermarket tabloid stories about his grand-slam philandering? Tiger is too important to us, they implied, not to clear the air and soothe our concerns. Speak to us now!

Most golf writers tended to be quiet at first, soaking in their shame, I'd like to think. What a crew of house pets! All those years of Tiger's remoteness, his often surly on-course behavior, the changes in his physical appearance were never adequately covered. Were they clues?

When the depth of Tiger's decadent life became apparent, there were the usual bleats of betrayal from “the lodge brothers” (as my old “Sports of the
Times
” colleague, Arthur Daley, called his press box brethren) but little about their own willingness to take Tiger's world at face value. Or to make the connection between Tiger and Andre Agassi, whose compelling autobiography,
Open
, I was reading at the same time the scandal broke. The overwhelming message of the Agassi book was the tennis star's hatred for his game and the life it had forced on him. I wondered if Tiger might have come to the same feeling. Both men were child prodigies driven relentlessly by fathers who lived through them. At twenty-one, already marked as the Mozart of the links (and a “chaser,” by the way), Tiger was complaining that he couldn't live a “normal” life. (Famously, Arnold Palmer told the kid that if he wanted to be normal, he should start by giving back all the money.)

Another story I blew. In the early nineties, while writing the
Times
sports column, I was approached by an old black golfer on a public course in Los Angeles. He told me to drop what I was covering (a women's golf story) and track down this fifteen-year-old phenom who would soon overwhelm the game. The key to his success, he told me, was the furious ambition of his father, a former army colonel. The defining moment had come when the boy was five or six and Dad, in civvies, had taken him to a military course. Two white admirals had spotted the prodigy and said, “That's some golfer you've got there, Sergeant.”

By assuming that Earl Woods was an enlisted man because of his color, the black golfer told me, the admirals had reinforced Dad's determination to send his little tiger out to dominate the world. Earl, who died in 2006 at seventy-four, once said of his boy, “There is no limit because he has the guidance. I don't know yet exactly what form this will take. But he is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations. The world is just getting a taste of his power.” He sounded like Don King.

I felt sorry for Tiger when he cracked up; he had never seemed quite human to me before. I wondered if the trail of voice mails and sext messages he had so carelessly strewn was an unconscious destructive urge, a cry for help. That will come out eventually, as have the mea culpas of the golf writers who never wondered too hard what Tiger was doing when he wasn't on the course. Tiger was golf's franchise player, and scribes learn early never to attack the sport that gives them work; you can trash most athletes, some officials and owners, a few rules and conventions, but systemic criticism is for “rippers” with other sources of income.

No wonder that most big off-field sports news comes from police blotters and PR releases, not from the lamestream sports media. Mark McGwire's whimpering sort-of admission of steroids use (it was to get healthy, he said, not to hit more homers) was no newshound coup, rather a media tour under the supervision of President George W. Bush's former press secretary Ari Fleischer. This was twelve years after McGwire's steroid-fueled 70-homer season and five years after he told a congressional hearing on steroid use, “I'm not here to discuss the past.” The former St. Louis Cardinals slugger was taking his swing at salvation, an increasingly important theme in the media narrative, especially appreciated when it involves some jock groveling. Alex Rodriguez, never a lodge brother favorite, was thrashed in the media when they found out he had taken steroids. But a weepy confession and then, most critically, a terrific 2009 season that ended in a World Series championship, was all the redemption necessary, a complete A-Rod moral makeover.

McGwire desperately needed a moral makeover in 2010. He wanted to get into the Hall of Fame with its perks, props, and profits after having been rejected by the electorate—veteran baseball writers. He wanted a soft landing into his new job as Cardinals hitting coach (what drugs would he be suggesting?), reuniting him with the manager who had seemingly been blind to his steroid use at Oakland and St. Louis, Tony LaRussa (the subject of admiring books by Bissinger and the conservative political sage George F. Will).

Fleischer's orchestration included a statement to the Associated Press, short interviews with the AP and selected media (the hometown
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, the
New York Times
,
USA Today
, and ESPN), and then a sit-down TV interview with Bob Costas, who had left HBO to be the lead face on Major League Baseball's own house network. As is his professed style, Costas interviewed McGwire “civilly and politely.” He never asked him exactly which steroids he had used and how McGwire knew they were “low dosage.” With a certain detachment (Costas often reminds me of straight actors who keep a distance from their characters while playing gay roles), he gently pressed McGwire on his assertion that his years of drug use had been designed to heal his injuries rather than bulk him up and enhance his performance. McGwire was adamant; drugs were only for healing. He sniffled throughout.

The lodge brothers piled on, dismissing McGwire's tears as phony and his confession as incomplete. Among the traditional mainstream media commentaries, I was most taken with a posting by Bernie Miklasz of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. He wrote, “A lot of the holier-than-thou folks who suddenly have found religion on this issue—mostly media people—want me and others to forget the role they played as carnival barkers in 1998. As I have said many times before, at least I am willing to admit to my hypocrisy. I enjoyed the McGwire-Sosa show. And writing about it sold lots of extra newspapers and advertising in the newspaper. I didn't ask any tough questions. I didn't follow up on my suspicions. I had fun writing about the homers; I didn't want to be the gadfly on the clubhouse wall. But at least I acknowledge that today. Pardon me, however, if I snicker just a little at colleagues across our industry who write and say all of these tough, hard-hitting things about McGwire these days. These are some of the same people who were all but cheering in the press box in the summer of 1998. Some wrote books or freelance pieces and actually made money off McGwire. What, did they forget?”

Take that, Mike Lupica! And as for you, Bernie, admitting your hypocrisy is too easy. You ate your cake; did you forget you can't have it, too?

Since 2003, when I stopped practicing daily newspaper journalism and began consuming it, I've felt increasingly disappointed by my old trade, its failures, its cowardice, its emotional corruption. (Not that I think political and business reporters have done much better.) But I can also understand the problems and empathize.

When Coach Bob Knight was annoyed by the best-selling book about him,
A Season on the Brink
, he called the writer, John Feinstein, a pimp and a whore. Feinstein's famous response was “I wish he'd make up his mind so I'd know how to dress.”

This was in the eighties, the book was terrific, and Feinstein, a
Washington Post
sportswriter, was and still is an indefatigable reporter. It seemed he was speaking for all of us, bitch-slapping the bullying, sneering bad-boy coach. Yet, over time, I've wondered if Knight hadn't made a point that applied to us all. Just who do we think we are?

There are all kinds of sportswriters, simply because we are not sure if we are supposed to be reporters, critics, analysts, investigators, fabulists, moralists, comics, or shills for the games that make us possible. That identity quest has become more complicated as many of us shuttle among competing platforms—print publications, the Internet, and radio and TV shows, often on networks that have financial relationships with the leagues.

In spasms of bravery and timidity, we sportswriters lurch back and forth between breaking valid news stories about drugs, sex, and college recruiting violations and then rewriting publicity releases for upcoming blockbusters that always seem to sound something like a grudge rematch between smack-mouth regional rivals overcoming the tragedies of heartbreaking defeats. Somewhere in between are reports of games our audience has already seen and quasi-racist feature stories about fatherless delinquents who rose from ghetto hellholes to become vicious linebackers who, off the field, played bass guitar, surprised Mama with a house, and ran a foundation for kids like they had been.

Now that sports has lost almost all its moral cachet and is accepted as a branch of the entertainment industry, the customers seem to want the same rigorous scandalmongering that music and politics fans enjoy. It was no surprise that
National Enquirer
led the pack in breaking Tiger tidbits. That exposed yet again the lesson we had learned from the steroid coverage: most of the lodge brothers are unable or unwilling to cover news beats as real journalists. This is nothing new. The stories about the 1986 New York Mets as out-of-control bad boys came not from reporters assigned to the club but from female
city-side
reporters looking for features.

Female sports reporters, a growing minority, tend to become lodge sisters when they can, which is understandable. They were treated poorly. When I started out, women were not allowed into press boxes, much less locker rooms, lest the lodge brothers' faux jockhood be threatened. By the late seventies, most teams in most of the major sports had opened their locker rooms, and the only discernible change was that the quality of feature writing perked up. Baseball held out against women, thanks to the stiff-necked commissioner, Bowie Kuhn. In 1977, an accredited
Sports Illustrated
reporter, Melissa Ludtke, was not allowed into the Yankees' locker room during the World Series because, she was told, “the players' wives had not been consulted and, if she entered, their children would be embarrassed in school the next day.” This despite a vote by the Yankees ballplayers earlier in the season to open their locker room to women reporters.

Ludtke's successful suit to desegregate baseball reporting was the female sports journalists' equivalent of Title IX. But as with that landmark legislation, enforcement and attitude adjustment lagged. Neanderthal jocks created nasty incidents, and Neanderthal scribes didn't always stand up for their female colleagues. The mediocre ones had a right to feel threatened.