Andrew Ladd reviews Robert Lipsyte’s An Accidental Sportswriter and considers the problem of homophobia in professional sports.
When the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) released a new PSA this month, featuring professional basketball players telling us not to call things “gay” as an insult, it was a step in the right direction but difficult to take seriously. The Phoenix Suns, the only team to feature in the spot, hardly suffers from the same degree of homophobia so deeply entrenched in the rest of sporting culture: their president is openly gay, and their star player Steve Nash has spoken publicly in support of same-sex marriage.
To add insult to injury, the spot was filmed on the same day Kobe Bryant called a ref a “faggot” live on TNT, and aired mere weeks before Joakim Noah called a fan much the same thing.
Some might downplay the importance of these homophobic incidents, to point out that professional athletes are a small segment of the population and that their effect on the rest of us is debatable. On that basis you could also make more or less the same argument about homosexuals (small segment of the population, little effect on the rest of us, not worth worrying about).
But I suspect most people wouldn’t dispute that homosexuals are changing our culture and our values—I would say for the positive—and so it’s silly to argue that athletes, who have far more money, power, and media exposure than the average gay American, don’t also have an influence.
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Indeed, according to author Robert Lipsyte, whose new memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter (Ecco, $25.99), is out this month, what he calls “Jock Culture,” or occasionally “SportsWorld,” is “a defining strand in American life.” It extends, Lipsyte says, into “business, politics, and family,” and has helped shape many of our contemporary values, from the positive—“hard work, bravery, and fellowship”—to the negative: “intimidation, domination, and cheating to win.”
Jock Culture has also helped perpetuate contempt for outsiders, and outsiders are Lipsyte’s starting point both in his memoir and in his life. As a child he was a nerdy kid, a “fag” in the parlance of his jockish bullies, and that outsider status has followed him, he says, now prideful, ever since. First he was a newspaperman who knew nothing about newspapers, then a sportswriter who didn’t care all that much about sports, and throughout his career a scrappy journalist trying to peer into a variety of subcultures he was not himself a part of: baseball, Black Power; NASCAR, Native Americans.
Each of these chapters in his life gets, natch, a chapter in the book, exploring either a specific person or a broader issue, or sometimes both. There’s little to connect these disparate subjects other than Lipsyte himself, which is a lamentably uneven approach to an interesting life. I often found my eyes glazing over, in the particularly long-winded sections about minor historical figures, only to be jolted back to the present with a gripping personal portrait of Mickey Mantle, say, or Lipsyte’s father.
The material about the his father is telling, actually, because it’s one of the few places where we get a sustained look at Lipsyte’s life and emotions; other than the opening chapters about his childhood bullying and early days in the business Lipsyte manages, in true journalistic fashion, to stay mainly off the page. Yes, he makes a valiant attempt to write this book as memoir, and includes many tantalizing details about his life—his battles
with cancer, his multiple failed marriages, his relationship with his kids—but he mostly skirts the edges of these issues, hiding behind the other people he’s profiled over the years, and so fails to plumb the emotional depths of any of them. His subjects, ultimately, are still his subject.
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Lipsyte’s reluctance to stick with his weightier material extends to his critique of Jock Culture too, which he introduces masterfully in the opening pages and then lets slide. There are a few passing mentions throughout the book, but otherwise the most sustained look at the topic is in a chapter called “Queer Studies” near the end, which revolves around his work outing professional athletes, starting with former outfielder Billy Bean. “I wanted that story,” recalls Lipsyte.
I’d been leading up to it for years … A major-league ballplayer! This would be a chance to crack open the cynical homophobia of Jock Culture … Interviewing Bean over several days, I felt the excitement I remembered from the early years at the paper, when every story was a new experience, a window opening on a new world. No question this guy was a jock, and a successful one. He’d made it to the top. Yet he was a “fag.”
After the story about Bean appeared, however, Lipsyte was disappointed to see “little follow-up or commentary in the mainstream sports media.” That disappointment grew in response to the “agonizingly incremental” progress of acceptance as he outed more players in subsequent years, to the point where Lipsyte felt “disgusted” by “the mainstream sports media’s refusal to take these stories seriously.”
This, for me, is where the book gets the most troublesome. Elsewhere Lipsyte shows a keen appreciation of journalistic ethics, and an almost pathological obsession with his relationship to his subjects. Is he too close to Muhammad Ali? What are his reportorial obligations in his piece on Jack Scott, a 1970s Berkeley revolutionary? How much of his own life should he feed to Mantle to get the man to give up more of his?
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And yet when it comes to athletic homophobia, Lipsyte seems curiously oblivious to these same issues. Hounding a source to expose the facts of a story is one thing. But is it right to use a source clearly uncomfortable with his sexuality, as Lipsyte does, as a tool to advance his own, cynicism-cracking agenda? And when, having done so, the mainstream sports media still refuses to cover the issue, is it right to abandon that person’s story, to write a glib chapter in a memoir about it, and then skip onto a light-hearted discussion of how awesome driving a stock car is?
I don’t mean to completely dismiss Lipsyte’s analysis of Jock Culture in general, nor his treatment of homophobia in sports in particular. This is, after all, a memoir—a fascinating one, in places—and not an ideological tract, so perhaps too heavy-handed a cultural critique would have seemed out of place.
But my question, then, is why not an ideological tract? If Lipsyte really is so disgusted by the darker side of Jock Culture and the mainstream sports media, even as he celebrates their accomplishments, why stay “in the lodge” and let them get away with it? Why not more vigorously take them to task, as he has in the past, for the outrageous beliefs and behaviours they’re still allowing?
Because, while Lipsyte is less an outsider these days than he’d probably like to admit, he still seems to have the spirit of an iconoclast, too. And if Kobe’s recent shamelessness is anything to go by, we need people like that, today, to speak up more than ever.