An Accidental Sportswriter Read Online Free Page B

London, hosted by classmates who live there, and someday we hope to meet in Rio de Janeiro or South Beach because one classmate, Teddy, lives in both places. Teddy, a dentist, left his wife and kids some years ago, came out of the closet, and ran off with a Brazilian heavy metal drummer whose band he manages. He’s up for introducing his old and new lives. Some of us have stayed young.
    So there are ample opportunities for me to interrogate witnesses about me.
    Paul Stolley, M.D., draws a blank. He’s a prominent epidemiologist and public health activist (Google him yourself, this is my book) but I remember Paul as the fourteen-year-old classmate who taught me to throw like a boy. I had just returned to Rego Park from a summer upstate, cutting lawns, during which I think I lost at least 40 pounds (I always jumped off the scale as the little black dagger headed toward 200), and Paul was the first person who spotted me in the schoolyard. In delight, he cried out, “Hey, fatty,” a name he had never called me when it fit. I was thrilled. He threw me a ball. I threw it back. He shook his head and hurried over to demonstrate how to bring the ball behind my head before I let it go. That’s all there was to not throwing like a girl, he said. Then I threw it like a boy, he smiled, and we played catch. It was the late start of my athletic career, such as it is.
    Fifty-seven years later, in 2009, I recounted that story to Paul. He liked it but wondered if it was a self-defining myth. Scientist . Did he remember how fat I’d been? He shook his head. What about Willy? He shrugged. Didn’t remember him.
    The two girls who inspired my triumphant battle, both of whom I later briefly dated, Rose Ballenzweig and Barbara Rosenberg, are dead. In fact, it was at lunch after Rose’s funeral in the spring of 2009, with the former Marcia Dollin, Anne Kanfer, and Doris Kameny, that I maneuvered a conversation about the addictive cupcakes from Shelley’s, the bakery owned and run by Rose’s family, to my belly and my bully.
    The three women looked at me.
    You weren’t that fat, they said. You were bullied?
    Willie, I said. But I can’t remember his last name.
    They looked blank. They didn’t know his first name.
    On the long drive home, I thought about that fight with Willie. Didn’t everyone know about it? It was Hector and Achilles, Beowulf and Grendel’s mother, Ali and Frazier.
    I’m a reporter, I could find Willie. So I made some phone calls, sent some e-mails, Googled and Facebooked. No Willie.
    So for now I’ll just keep Willie in his little room in my mind until I need him again. I’m sure I will.

Chapter Two
The Piper
    W hen I was twenty-five,” wrote my idol Gay Talese of his early New York Times career, “I was chasing stray cats around Manhattan. . . . The year was 1957.”
    When I was nineteen, in 1957, I was chasing Gay Talese. I was a copyboy in the Times sports department, and Gay was a sports reporter whose feature stories were turning the so-called Old Gray Lady into Technicolor. He was showing the style that would make him the most influential of the so-called New Journalists of the sixties. He would soon write for Esquire what is considered the quintessential celebrity magazine article, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” and publish such best sellers as The Kingdom and the Power , about the Times , and Honor Thy Father , about a Mafia family.
    You could learn from him, I thought; actually, I started out by slavishly imitating him, not only trying to write in his cadences but to observe as he did, being totally open to the half hidden and the unexpected, then stringing the precise details into elegant loops. I thought that his choice of subject—the forgotten, the ignored, the loser—was the closest a newspaperman could come to being John Steinbeck or Ernest Hemingway or Anton Chekhov, my youthful literary heroes. Gay used the grand