DAN’S PAPERS
danspapers.com
September 20, 2013 Page 29
Who’s Here By dan rattiner
obert Lipsyte, the current ESPN Ombudsman, former New York Times sportswriter, Emmy-winning TV commentator and the author of numerous best-selling books for young adults, was born and raised in Rego Park, Queens, in the 1940s and 1950s. His mother, Fanny, was an elementary school teacher. His father, Sidney, was a school principal and later headed up the City’s schools for emotionally disturbed students. “Dad sometimes took me to school with him,” Lipsyte says. “He was like the captain of a ship. He’d take me through those rough halls and introduce me to some of the toughest kids in the city. I loved the way they respected him. “Dad also took me to the library every week,” he said. “That was like going to a ballgame for us.” Three teams played in New York City back then, the Yankees, the Giants and Dodgers, so baseball was all around. They went to one baseball game together. Lipsyte did not go to another one until he covered baseball for The New York Times. Lipsyte was bookish, nonathletic and overweight. Kids teased him about his weight. One of his three bestknown novels for young adults in later years, One Fat Summer, was about a kid who was overweight. In the book, the kid loses weight. In real life, Lipsyte lost weight at the age of 14 simply by mowing lawns and doing landscaping for a mean old man in the neighborhood. “I think I lost 40 pounds that summer,” he said. “Before that, I wouldn’t stay on a scale. I’d see it heading up toward 200 and hop off before it could get there.” Lipsyte took accelerated courses at Forest Hills High School, and graduated Columbia University with a degree in English at the age of 19. He applied to, and was accepted into, the Claremont (California) College’s PhD program. He sent a room deposit. But he needed a summer job before school began and answered an ad for a job as a copy boy at The New York Times. Lipsyte said he was among dozens of people in line for one of those jobs. The interviewers were chilly, arrogant people who said they were looking for Rhodes Scholars for copy boy jobs at the Times. He had no illusions he’d be getting the job. Later that day, he came home to hear his mother tell him that some crank call had come
Courtesy ESPN
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time sportswriter at any daily paper in the city of New York. He would achieve that at the age of 21. “I was one of three sports copy boys,” he said. “We rotated on shifts from 5 p.m. to 3 a.m. so there always was one of us there. We worked in the back of the City Room at the Times, a vast hall where the reporters, editors, clerks and copy boys worked. I’d deliver messages, go up to the composing room, talk to the reporters, sharpen pencils, bring copy to the makeup people. “We’d write up all the statistics, schedules, and if we wanted to we could go out and cover sermons on the weekends, attending churches or synagogues in the city, writing 200 or 300 words for five bucks.” Lipsyte said the priests sometimes would invite “the reporter from The New York Times” into the back after the service to share a scotch. He was free to take notes in church pews, but in Synagogues, he had to do so under a shawl. In the office, he made friends with the legendary reporter Gay Talese, who became his mentor. “He was very generous with his time and advice,” Lipsyte said. “I learned his secret. Work hard.” Needless to say, Lipsyte decided not to go to California, even though it meant losing the room deposit. He eventually received a Masters Degree in Journalism from Columbia while working as a copy boy. Lipsyte was a junior sportswriter at the Times when the upstart heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay got a date to fight the champion Sonny Liston in Miami Beach in 1964. “Everybody was convinced this fight would last about nine seconds. And the only thing we would be able to be report on was the condition Cassius Clay was in afterwards. He would be taken to a hospital. The editors felt it would be a waste of the real boxing reporter’s time to go all the way to Florida for this. So they sent The Kid. Me.” Lipsyte’s first assignment when he got to the Miami Airport a week before the fight was to rent a car, locate the most likely hospitals where Clay might be taken, and then drive from the arena to these hospitals and memorize the fastest way to get there. The idea was to beat the other reporters to the scene. After checking out the hospital routes, Lipsyte went to the gym where Clay was training. (Continued on page 32) When he got there,
Robert Lipsyte WRITER
The Cassius Clay vs. Sonny Liston fight made his career. for him from someone saying they were from The New York Times and they wanted to talk to him. Bob Lipsyte was to become the youngest full-