An Accidental Sportswriter by Robert Lipsyte

Author:Robert Lipsyte
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Bisacsh, Publishers, Journalists, Sportswriters, Lipsyte, Sports & Recreation, Editors, United States, Sociology of Sports, Personal Memoirs, Sportswriters - United States, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs., General, Robert, Biography
ISBN: 9780061769139
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2011-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

The Saint Wore Black Leather

For all my hard line on sports heroes, I think I was looking for—at least willing to find—someone I could admire who did something of real value to justify my own version of godding up. Especially on television, it’s hard not to be promoting the subject of your story. The trick becomes picking the subject.

That’s why, for three decades, I have had some version of the following conversation with Gerard Papa. This particular time, we were sitting in the kitchen of the Bensonhurst, Brookyn, house he shared with his mother when Papa suddenly said, “The only time Christ ever got hostile, expressed any kind of wrath, it was for the religious leaders of his day. The ‘whited sepulchers,’ He called them.” Papa took a breath and laughed a little bark of punctuation he uses to signal irony. “The Catholic Church taught me all this stuff.”

The year was 1997, and he was preparing to battle the bishops in State Supreme Court.

“So the bishops are evil,” I said.

“I am not saying they are evil men, I say they are doing evil.” He gave me the baleful look he calls his ghetto stare. “You understand what I’m saying? How long do you know me?”

“Fifteen years, Gerard.” I gave him my own version of a baleful look. “So you’re Jesus in this story.”

“C’mon, Bob, I’m not comparing myself to Jesus. Any more than the kids on my team compare themselves to Michael Jordan. But you got to strive toward an ideal.”

“You’re the good man in this story?”

“I am not perfect,” said Papa. “No one is. But . . . yes.”

I probably snickered then, but, yes, Papa is the good man in this story. Maybe the good man in this book.

The conversation usually begins—in his house, my house, a gym, a schoolyard, a courtroom, a restaurant, walking the Coney Island boardwalk, or riding in his car—with the Flames, the name of a basketball team Papa founded in 1974 that eventually became an interracial youth organization that has served more than fifteen thousand kids. The conversation quickly broadens into discussions of good and evil and then on to Jesus as a role model. Papa insists that despite my Facebook declaration of being a “lapsed atheist”—my way of saying that even denying the existence of God is too religious for me—I am one of the most spiritual people he knows.

I don’t snicker at that. Four years before I met Papa, I had a conversion of sorts.

In August 1978, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer and began a two-year campaign against that bully. I needed to see the disease in that way to keep up my fighting spirit. There were two operations and a river of chemotherapy, which had just ended when my wife, Margie, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Those intense years in the country of illness topped off what I think of as my post-Times emotional growth spurt. Now I was a grown-up. The fourteen years at the Times, which began

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