Southpaw #2: Exclusive Interview with Robert Lipsyte
Legendary leftist sportswriter Robert Lipsyte talks union deals, player-owned teams, and the limits of athlete activism.
Welcome to Week 2!
It’s been a pretty slow news week for everyone, so we thought we’d spice up your Sunday reading list with some exclusive content.
Below, you’ll find the transcript of our exclusive interview with the legendary leftist sportswriter Robert Lipsyte. We talked to him on Thursday, i.e. before the president contracted the ‘rona, so we didn’t get a chance to ask him about it. We’re pretty sure he would appreciate the irony.
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Robert Lipsyte on leftism, sportswriting, and the future of the “athletic revolution”
We’re living in Robert Lipsyte’s world—or, more accurately, in the world to which he has for the past sixty years served as both reluctant ambassador and ambivalent guide. This mystical continent could be called “LipsyteLand.” Instead, he calls it “SportsWorld.”
Lipstye, now 82, has spent the greater portion of his career—first as The New York Times’ sports reporter and columnist, later as a young adult novelist, and briefly as the ombudsman of ESPN—charting the contours and climate of this mysterious continent, the “sweaty Oz you’ll never find in a geography book,” as he put it in his 1975 monograph SportsWorld: An American Dreamland.
SportsWorld is not sports itself so much as it is the “grotesque distortion of sports” that results when jock culture is infused with a heavy dose of late stage capitalism. It is the conviction, embodied in screaming pee-wee soccer dads and doping athletes alike, that winning is the only thing that matters and that victory justifies any crimes committed in its name. “Sometime in the last fifty years the sports experience was perverted into a SportsWorld state of mind in which the winner was good because he won,” Lipsyte wrote in his original introduction. “[T]he loser, if not actually bad, was at least reduced, and had to prove himself over again, through competition.”
Lipsyte’s unflagging criticism of SportsWorld’s excesses and abuses has earned him a reputation as a founding father of modern sportswriting. “Robert Lipsyte invented cynicism about the world of sports,” wrote Marc Tracy in a 2013 profile for The New Republic. “Which is to say: He didn’t literally, but he may as well have.”
In Lipsyte’s lifetime, the boundaries of SportsWorld have slowly expanded. “We elect our politicians, judge our children, fight our wars, plan our vacations, oppress our minorities by SportsWorld standards that somehow justify our foulest and freakiest deeds, or at least camouflage them with jargon,” he wrote in 1975. “The values of the arena and the locker room have been imposed on daily life . . creat[ing] a dangerous and grotesque web of ethics and attitudes, an amorphous infrastructure that acts to contain our energies, divert our passions, and socialized us for work or war or depression.” The latest and most grotesque manifestation of SportWorld is, of course, President Donald Trump, whose unmistakably SportsWorldian attitude has sparked renewed interest in Lipsyte’s work. SportsWorld was reissued by Rutgers University Press with a new introduction in 2018.
Though Lipsyte’s sportswriting has taken a back seat to his career as a young adult novelist, he still writes the occasional sports column for The Nation and TomDispatch. We spoke with him this past week about the NBA strike, the limits of athlete activism, pissing in urinals, and the role of the left-wing sports media. The following transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Robert Lipsyte: Well, I'm pleased that you have singled me out. I've never thought of myself as a left-wing sportswriter. I guess in arrogance, I just said, “Hey, this is the only right way to do it, and everybody else is jerking off in one way or another.” Just because sports itself is implicitly so conservative. The owners are reactionary and the players, until they're retired for ten or fifteen years, tend to be pretty ignorant about most things political. That's why what's going on right now is such a wonderful and exciting time.
Southpaw Report: Did you feel like you were pigeonholed as a progressive sportswriter when you broke in during the sixties and seventies?
Lipsyte: I never thought of myself that way. I always thought of myself as a sportswriter. Growing up, I was not that interested in sports. I was not a mad dog sports fan. I answered an ad in The New York Times for what turned out to be a copy boy in the sports department. And that was it. I was nineteen. That was my career. But I think that my strength and my weakness were the same thing. I didn't have all the information, the backlog of statistics and feelings and memories and that real sports fan would have had coming in. On the other hand, I didn't have any of that, so I was really kind of a clean slate. Nobody meant that much to me. So I never really thought of myself as coming from a specific direction. I was just there. I arrived for a summer job. And the summer job lasted another sixty years or so.
Southpaw: Do you think that the sports media as a whole has remained as reactionary as you found it, or do you think it's become more hospitable to your style of journalism?
Lipsyte: No, absolutely not [as reactionary]. Of course a lot of it had to do with Woodward and Bernstein and that kind of the shift in journalism, but [sportswriting] attracted a lot of guys who were writers. When I entered, the basic sportswriter was a large Irishman who had played first base for Fordham, didn't make it to the Bigs, but wanted to remain in the game, so he became a sports writer. They tended to be center-right at best, and they had this kind of combination of love and hate for athletes. Love, because these were their idols, the prototypes of what they had wanted to be but didn't make, and hate, because these fuckers made it, and they didn't. So they tended to glorify them with a kind of sarcasm. It was at once worshipful, but on the other hand it was tinged with sarcasm.
Then the next generation that came in was all little Jewish guys, and they had wanted to be writers, and they ended up—their mothers would never have been satisfied— they ended up sportswriters. Now, this is about as bigoted and general as I can be, but I mean, that's basically what happened. And so a lot of them were coming from the left of center. My parents were school teachers. Why they never joined the Communist Party, I don't know. I mean, I'm glad they didn't—they would have been fired at that time in the Fifties. But I came out of that . . . And of course, I was attacked for being a commie, and I think something like that tends to push you left. You're being identified and your identification doesn't look so bad to you. And maybe, if that's what you are because this is what I was doing, I guess I was a leftist.
Southpaw: That certainly isn’t an insult coming from us, though it probably was back then.
Lipsyte: Yeah, it certainly was. Remember, when Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammad Ali, broke open and identified himself as a member of the Nation of Islam, the question that did it was, “Are you a card-carrying Muslim?” . . . Well, I mean, we all knew what “card-carrying” means. It had all the weight of, “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” So yeah, calling somebody a Communist or socialist or lefty was a major insult, something that people would shrink from.
Southpaw: The rise of the sportswriter as more than a scribe coincided with the rise of that athlete-as-activist back in the Sixties. Are we in the second golden era of athlete activism? Do you think what we're seeing with the recent NBA wildcat strike is something genuinely new in the history of sports activism?
Lipsyte: This is really different. I mean, is it kind of comparable to the second or third wave of feminism in the women’s movement. In my time, it was very narrow and was very specific: a black quarterback at the University of Washington got into a fight with his coach because he didn't want to shave [his beard]. That was the level of activism, and that's where it began. They didn't want black ballplayers to be dating white women on campus. It was by no means as specific and sophisticated as it was now. And what didn't evolve then was pretty much crushed. Tommie Smith and John Carlos [two Americans who raised their fists in protest on the podium at the 1968 Olympics]—they never got a job. Muhammad Ali certainly never got any kind of Michael Jordan money in his time, and he was driven out of the sport for three-and-a-half years. I think what athletes realized was [that] what they had better do is put all that activist energy into making money—that was Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan was the person who evolved out of the activism of the Sixties and Seventies, except it was perverted towards making money rather than any kind of idealistic alteration. I don't think that it really came about again until Kaepernick. He was really the figure—he’s the focal person. And look what happened to him. I guess he made some money from some settlements, but I certainly think his career was crushed the same way that Ali's and Smith’s and Carlos’s were.
Southpaw: About Michael Jordan, there’s his famous quote, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Do you think that athletes still have that mentality, or have we seen a post-Kaepernick shift in the way that athletes think about their own brands?
Lipsyte: I don't think that the basic selfishness has changed. Right now, it's really incredibly trendy. [In the Sixties,] not everybody was in a jock dorm. They lived in dormitories, and they walked through the campus, and they saw the protests and the signs. And some of the girls holding those signs were really good looking. And so some of them were pulled into the demonstrations, but very quickly they found out that [faced with] the other side—the coaches, the administration—there was no way they could be allowed to do that. So they kind of drifted back.
Right now, it's changed again. Even though they're in the jock box or something, [athletes] do see what's in the culture. However, you've got a pro football player, say, whose average lifetime career is about three-and-a-half years. 70 percent of them are black, a great number of them are from poor neighborhoods. They are carrying an entire community on their back. You know, mama’s got to get a new house, and a couple of siblings gotta go to community college, the cousin needs a car to get to work. They are really the breadwinners for dozens of people who are depending on him, and he really is a product of their support and community since he was 10 years old. So the idea of our pressure on them to be more active to stand up—it is kind of nearsighted. LeBron, for sure. He controls a sport right now. On the other hand, what Kaepernick did was enormously brave, especially if he had any real idea of the forces that were going to knock him down.
I'm kind of thrilled to see the people who do stand up, particularly the WNBA. I mean, that's real bravery. They don't make a lot of money, and almost every one of them has to play in Europe or Asia in their offseason to make it. So their standing up was really the signal moment in this particular wave of athletic revolution . . . But let's see what happens. In the NFL, we still have 32 [owners], most of whom paid a million dollars to the Trump inaugural, so I don’t know where that’s going to go.
Southpaw: What do you make of the tremendous political pressure that Trump and the right generally are putting on collegiate football leagues like the Big Ten and also on the NFL to play during the pandemic? Trump even took credit for saving the Big Ten during the debate on Tuesday night.
Lipsyte: I think that, as we probably agree, football is now the national pastime, and playing football really signals a kind of normalcy, whatever that means. “We've beaten the plague, everybody is back at work, everything's cool. You can vote for me.” So I think that football plays a very important part . . . [especially] with its relation to the military, to the police. That power is incredibly important. I was really, really surprised when the Big 10 and Pac-12 said they weren't going to play. I thought, “Something really, really is happening in America.” It turned out it wasn't.
Southpaw: It seems that the necessity of having football is informing public health decisions, not the other way around.
Lipsyte: Sure, of course. The idea of the “hug-less tackle”—it’s like the zipless fuck, or the Immaculate Conception. What could be more dangerous health-wise than playing football, being in the locker room, the contact, the juices being shared? But the point is that [the players] getting sick and dying is a really small price to pay for this sense of normalcy. It makes no sense . . . This seems like conspiratorial bullshit, but it’s clear: a decision was made in the larger culture that culling the herd, if it's old and it's minority, is fine. We can let them go in exchange for at least a patina of an economy that works for the upper-middle class and above. So now in its most vivified form, we see it happening in sports. The wonderful thing about football players, besides the fact that most of them are black and we don't really care about them, is that they're fungible. There's a line around the block to fill their place, other people who are young and strong and, you know, [who] will probably not die. The truth is they’re young and they’re strong and their hearts will be damaged and they'll die later on, when we don't need them to play anymore. They will outlive their usefulness . . . So that’s really the sense in which the larger culture and the sports world interact and intersect, and in a sense become models for each other.
Southpaw: What's interesting is that, in the NFL and college football, the incentive structure dissuades athletes from really pushing for material changes to their conditions. But in leagues like the NBA, players have a real ability to push for change to their conditions and to the way that the game is played—as we saw during the recent NBA strike. The players in the pro sports leagues have such a large advantage over the average American factory worker in terms of union strength. What do you think it would take for the workers—the players—to really band together and demand sizable changes that don't have to do with a salary cap or something like that?
Lipsyte: I think that’s the key question. That’s what's going to drive your work for the next few years: How is this going to continue? What kind of pressure, what kind of compromises are they going to have to make for the game. The first flare of all of this was LeBron and his buddies at the ESPYs a few years ago. They came out, and it was kind of a very exciting moment, but really nothing came of it. This seems far more advanced, and yet, it's still narrow, it’s still about this moment of time, these games, what kind of changes will be affected? What kind of changes can be in effect until some of those 32 owners are players or communities, like with Green Bay? There are no black owners in pro football . . . So I think the real changes have to come from ownership and management and a union deal. What would a union deal look like? If you were in the Union, what would you want? What would you go for? It would probably be, since all of [the players] are three-and-a-half years in and out, it would be something for your immediate health and welfare, more money, something like that. How much control could you really ask for in the game? Are they hiring and firing coaches? Are they deciding whether they’re going to play or not? Do they walk off? Do they vote on positions? Wow, how about that one?
Southpaw: Union structure and collective bargaining rights seem to be two of the issues that the sports media is more hesitant to touch. There's a certain level of political involvement that sportswriters are willing to risk, but then they stop short on the more difficult labor questions. Why do you think that’s the case?
Lipsyte: I think the basic thing is that the sports media are made up of workers whose owners are on the same level as those NFL owners. They belong to the same country club, they piss in adjoining urinals. Nothing is more important than that, ultimately. Who controls the media? Murdoch and whoever is your favorite NFL owner. They’re the same guy. Right now, there's only so far a player or a member of the media can push this thing.
Southpaw: Was that what you saw while working as Ombudsman at ESPN, that sense of fellow feeling among the folks in charge of ESPN and the folks in charge of the NFL, for example?
Lipsyte: Well, the ESPN audience, like the football audience in general, didn't want social issues intruding on what they saw as their special sacrosanct time—whether they saw it as family time or religious family time or a guilty pleasure . . .
. . . I don't really know how many people are all that thrilled with the activism of the athlete. If we really gave a shit about athletes, we wouldn't have fantasy leagues, we wouldn't have all these ways of objectifying them, we wouldn't have all this “shut up and dribble” [rhetoric] which I think is really a prevailing feeling. I'm not sure that people who see sports as their entertainment really want any kind of front-page intrusion into that entertainment.
Southpaw: Now that we do have some kind of athlete activism in the mainstream, it seems like people are always asking, “What do they want? What are the specific things that they want to change?” But is it really athletes’ responsibility to start changing the world? Or do we live in such a broken society now that for athletes to change anything, the world has to change first? Can activism on the margins, which is really what this is, make any kind of real difference at this point?
Lipsyte: I think until we have player-owned teams, we will not see real, meaningful change. However, that doesn't mean that we are supposed to wait until we have those teams before we do anything. People that you call “at the margins”—I don't necessarily say they're in the margins—but people at the margins have to keep fighting on, the athletes have to push on if they're sincere. And if they really want to make these changes, they have to fight on. The role of the left-wing sports media, if I may use that phrase, is to cover them accurately, and in its advocacy and editorial versions, to support them, to point out what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. You still have to be journalistically accurate, you have to have integrity—there’s no objectivity—but you have to have a fairness in your coverage. But you can editorialize where you do and support them where you can, and you have to agitate from that margin. I mean, come on, if Lester Rodney said, “Well, until Jackie Robinson integrates the major leagues, it’s really not worth my writing about that,” we’d still have an all-white Major Leagues.
The point is that there are always people who are not necessarily going to change things themselves, but they are going to give other people permission. I think that was kind of my role in the Sixties. I was at The New York Times, I was in a safe environment, I was not taking the kind of chances that other journalists in other publications would be taking, so I was able to give people permission to push the boundaries a little bit more. . . It's not your job to change everything by yourself—it’s just not going to happen. You're not going to, but you are going to be in the mix pushing, just as these athletes now. It's not going to happen, necessarily, that this year that we're going to have two black owners in pro football. But it is changing. Even Michael Jordan—he’s booming, he’s pushing, He's giving permission and getting permission, in a sense. So I think it's this kind of evolutionary movement of people waking up and doing things. ◼
Go Deeper:
Robert Lipsyte on . . .
. . . athlete activism in the Trump era: “American Athletes Can Decide This Year’s Election,” in The Nation (September 18, 2020).
. . . the ‘Jockpocalypse’ and the hegemony of Jock Culture: “American Jock Culture in the Trump Era,” in The Nation (June 26, 2019).
. . . the death of Muhammad Ali: “Muhammad Ali Dies at 74: Titan of Boxing and the 20th Century,” in The New York Times (June 4, 2016).
. . . ‘SportsWorld’ and the not-so-subtle exploitation of American athletes: SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, 1975 (reissued by Rutgers University Press in 2018).
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about…
. . . Congress’ latests efforts to reform the U.S. Olympic Committee? “Olympics reform bill passes House, promising sweeping change after abuse scandals rocked sports,” by Rick Maese in The Washington Post (October 1, 2020).
. . . and why it probably will not work? “Congress: The Solution For Stopping Sexual Abuse In Sports Is More Meetings,” by Diana Moskovitz in Defector (October 2, 2020).
. . . the forgotten women behind the 1968 Olympic protests? “Olympian Wyomia Tyus sprinted to gold and spoke out in Mexico City. America forgot her,” by Stephen Wilson in The Washington Post (September 23, 2020).
. . . how to spend the MLB’s $10 million donation to the Players’ Alliance? “Making Black Lives Matter On and Off the Diamond,” by Peter Dreier and Dave Zirin in The Nation (September 30, 2020).
. . . the culmination of multiple years of activism in the WNBA with the bubble finals? “The Year the Entire WNBA Became Political Players,” by Louise Radnofsky and Rachel Bachman in the Wall Street Journal (October 2, 2020).
. . .LeBron James’s political power? “LeBron James Is Now at the Center of Everything,” by Will Leitch in NY Mag’s Intelligencer (September 29, 2020).