An Accidental Sportswriter: A Memoir

Celebrated sports journalist Robert Lipsyte—the New York Times’ longtime lead sports columnist—mines pure gold from his long and very eventful career to bring readers a memoir like no other. An enthralling book, as much about personal relationships and the culture of sports as the athletes and teams themselves, An Accidental Sportswriter interweaves stories from Lipsyte’s life and the events he covered to explore the connections between the games we play and the lives we lead.

Robert Lipsyte has been there—from the Mets’ first Spring Training to the fight that made Muhammad Ali an international icon to the current steroids scandals that rewired our view of sports—and in An Accidental Sportswriter he offers a fresh and refreshing view of the world of professional athletes as seen through the eyes of a journalist who always managed to remain independent of our jock-obsessed culture.

A career spent telling it like it is delivers unforgettable stories:

• Behind-the-Scenes Sports: From the cigarette-charred desks of The New York Times to the locker rooms of Yankee Stadium, an unflinching look at how the sausage of sports journalism gets made.
• Athlete Hero Worship: Candid encounters with Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio that peel back the layers of myth to reveal the complicated men underneath the uniforms.
• Muhammad Ali Up Close: A ringside seat for the evolution of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, chronicling the champion’s controversial politics, religious transformation, and magnetic personality over decades.
• Sports and Civil Rights: The explosive story of collaborating with comedian and activist Dick Gregory on his landmark autobiography, Nigger, during the height of the civil rights movement.

Growing up, Robert Lipsyte was the smart-aleck fat kid, the bully magnet who went to the library instead of the ballpark. As the perpetual outsider, even into adulthood, his alienation from Jock Culture made him a rarity in the press box: the sportswriter who wasn't a sports fan. This feeling of otherness has colored Lipsyte's sports writing for fifty years, much of it spent as a columnist for the New York Times. He didn't follow particular athletes or teams; he wasn't awed by the access afforded by his press pass or his familiarity with the players in the locker room.

The experience and insight earned over a half-century infuse An Accidental Sportswriter. Going beyond the usual memoir, Lipsyte has written "a memory loop, a circular search for lost or forgotten pieces in the puzzle of a life." In telling his own story, Lipsyte grapples with American sports and society—from Mickey Mantle to Bill Simmons—arguing that Jock Culture has seeped into our business, politics, and family life, and its definitions have become the standard to measure value. Full of wisdom and an understanding of American sports that contextualizes rather than celebrates athletes, An Accidental Sportswriter is the crowning achievement of a rich career and a book that will speak to us for years to come.

“If accident is the greatest of all inventors, then fate did us all a solid in making Bob Lipsyte a sportswriter. By turns critical and self-critical, restless and rigorous, vigilant and clear-eyed, An Accidental Sportswriter documents fifty years of upheaval in the games we play and how we view them. With his original and iconoclastic voice, Lipsyte compels us to become not just fans but fans of conscience.” - Jane Leavy , author of The Last Boy and Sandy Koufax

“Robert Lipsyte taught me what it meant to truly write about sports without the hyped-up regurgitation. His memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, is his best work yet—graceful, moving without melodrama, funny, anecdotal, and superbly intelligent. He is still the best there is.” - Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights and Three Nights in August

“Bob Lipsyte became the most respected sportswriter in America without being a sports fan-which of course is why he was so good. Now he has written about what that world is really like, a Ball Four of sports coverage.” - Richard Reeves, author of Daring Young Men and President Reagan

“Jock Culture glorifies the young, the strong and the beautiful, and Lipsyte, the would-be Chekhov, gets the tragic implications. That’s why his columns, and this marvelous memoir, ‘An Accidental Sportswriter,’ are so affecting.” - Ann Levin, Associated Press

“An Accidental Sportswriter reminds us why Howard Cosell once crowned Lipsyte ‘the greatest sportswriter of our time.’ He renders many affecting portraits, notably of his father, and proffers much wisdom, laced with cynicism, to aspiring sportswriters.” - Boston Globe

“An Accidental Sportswriter is irresistibly readable. I flew through the 244-page book in one night. It made me laugh, cry and cheer, while taking me through some of the biggest moments in sports. I couldn’t put it down. True to form, Lipsyte is brutally honest and controversial. But he’s also poignant, both about himself and the sports icons he covered. His revelations about his encounters with Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Billy Jean King, Ali, Greg Louganis and Lance Armstrong kept me wanting more. Yet they are tempered with humor….But I never read Lipsyte as a great sportswriter. Sportswriters cover what goes on between the lines. Lipsyte didn’t care much about that. He lived outside the lines, where the questions and stories that matter more reside. That’s where he had the homefield advantage over other scribes. His irreverent questions and bold stories forced us all to reexamine the way we look at sports and life. His new book does the same thing, only on a much grander scale.” - si.com

“A likable new memoir. . . . [Lipsyte] is astute in assessing the changing relationship between sportswriters and athletes” - New York Times Book Review

“Lipsyte’s achievement—much harder than it looks —is to have remained an outsider among insiders. . . . All that time was invested -- and the dividend is a sportswriter’s memoir different from all the rest.” - Bloomberg News