An Accidental Sportswriter by Robert Lipsyte

under fly balls. He was chugging after them, stiff-legged. I was also underwhelmed by the Stadium itself, less grand than I had imagined. But such disappointments were minor. Dad and I at a ball game, like other fathers and sons! Maybe the library trips weren’t enough. In any case, DiMaggio was now linked in my mind with Dad, and so his star shone for me even after he retired, married Marilyn, lost her, then handled her funeral with such class. A fresh rose on her grave, every day, forever! He remained a distant luminary in SportsWorld.
    We finally ran into each other—literally—one gray, chilly day in Fort Lauderdale that spring training. I was studying a roster as I hurried along a plank walkway over wet ground that led from the Yankees’ locker room out to the field. DiMaggio’s head was down to avoid eye contact as he strode toward me. We collided. Face-to-face with me, DiMaggio froze. With his long, melancholy face, the deer-in-the-headlights cliché seemed appropriate.
    After an embarrassingly long time, I finally blurted, “Not baseball weather.”
    He blinked, took a breath, and looked up. “That’s an outfielder’s sky.”
    And then, as if he were Michelangelo describing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he talked about the roof of his world, about the danger of losing balls in the clouds as easily as in the sun, about smog and shadows and smoke, about the line of the ball, rising or looping, about the spin. I was mesmerized. I took no notes. I barely breathed, afraid to break the spell. I suddenly understood (but maybe I inserted the revelation later) that he hadn’t just “drifted” after all, that he was a scholar, that he had prepared for every kind of sky, patch of blue, burst of sun. He always knew where he was going to meet the ball.
    He paused only once, to notice I was shivering. “Rook!” he roared at a young pitcher sprinting by. It was Stan Bahnsen, a prize prospect who would be the American League’s Rookie of the Year the next season. “Get this man a jacket.” Bahnsen stripped off his warm-up jacket and gave it to me. DiMaggio helped me put it on.
    We might be talking still, but a Yankees PR official made a big show of rescuing DiMaggio from what he assumed was a media ambush. DiMaggio seemed reluctant to leave. The PR man said DiMaggio was late for an appointment. It sounded like a lie, but DiMaggio was too much the gentleman to show the man up. He asked my name. He said, “Good-bye, Lippy,” and gravely shook my hand.
    Lippy. All through childhood and adolescence I had battled that hated nickname. Now it was an honorific.
    The Mantle at First experiment failed, and he retired the next year. He referred to the next five years as a kind of death; he felt excluded and forgotten. And when he was remembered, it was not always with reverence. In 1970, Ball Four , the locker-room-wall-shattering valentine to baseball that former Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton wrote with Len Shecter, portrayed Mantle as a lovable teammate, a hard drinker, and somewhat adolescent; he led Yankees on “beaver-shooting” expeditions to hotel roofs to spy on women undressing. Bouton didn’t spare himself as a cutup and carouser (although, as one of the most intelligent and politically sophisticated major leaguers, he demonstrated against South African apartheid and for American civil rights). Bouton was attacked by the baseball establishment (which included sportswriters such as Dick Young) for betraying the sanctity of the locker room. Sportswriters felt burned; here they had prostituted their calling by writing claptrap in exchange for access, and they had been scooped by a bona fide insider. Bouton, who loved Mantle, was hurt when told incorrectly that The Mick was angry. It was many years before that was reconciled.
    In 1974, Mantle was inducted into the Hall of Fame, with the attention and memorabilia bonanza that comes with