American Experience; 1964; Interview with Robert Lipsyte, Sportswriter, part 2 of 2

Yeah, so the culture that you as a coffee boy entered into in the New York Times, and what did you say? Well, that was 57. That was 57 too early, but a little later then, the one that you're working in in 1964. Oh, that culture still existed in 1964. I mean, in 1964, the New York Times would not use the word Miz in 1964. The New York Times would not allow its reporters to refer to him as Muhammad Ali. Why? Well, he hadn't changed his name in a legal court. Now, what else do you have to know about, you know, the intrinsic protectionism and conservatism of large institutions? So, there were these terrible convolutions that, you know, I'd write Muhammad Ali, and it would be changed to Cassius Clay. Now, it would fight with the desk, and so, okay, so because they liked me, it was Cassius Clay who prefers to be called Muhammad Ali.

And I hated that, and I remember once saying something to him, you know, sorry, that's the way it is. And I remember, and this was the worst part of it, he patented me on the head, and he said, okay, you're just a little brother of the establishment. And I was, of course, I was a New York Times reporter, but I think that it was a combination, well, in those days, I saw it as, you know, a high bound rigidity. Now, I think I understand it, it was fear. The Beatles, Cassius Clay, Barry Goldwater, anti-war demonstrated, tear up your draft card, sit in places where they don't want to give you a coke. I mean, this was the toppling of the order, of the way we know things, maybe it should be done more gradually, and maybe it should be done by the Supreme Court or young, strong, vigorous people that we're not afraid of.

I mean, nobody was afraid of me, but that was my generation, and it was thrilling to see that they could scare old people. I mean, I liked that. Yeah, there was a moment, it seems, in 64, where the forks in the row just sort of start to appear. Like, are you four civil rights, or against, are you four Johnson's or Goldwater's much more start? Right. Some people could argue that there wasn't much between Nelson, Rockefeller, Linda Johnson. But Goldwater, Johnson, and it feels the same way in terms of what Clay represented, kind of what the Beatles began to represent. There is a counter culture, and you've got to choose, is it Phil Strathley, or, was it a year of choices, that one?

Well, I think it certainly was, and there were many arguments. I was in lots of arguments about, you know, Cassius Clay, Muhammad Ali, because so much of what he represented was really difficult for people to take. So, the rejection of Christianity, and changing your name, I mean, you know, with all the Kwame's around now, it seems so queen, but the idea of changing your name, changing your religion, Southern Baptist slash Methodist boy, to be against civil rights, to be part of this scary organization. I mean, because the point was that white people really didn't know a lot about black people in 1964. So, the nation of Islam really seemed scary, and if the heavyweight champion of the world was not going to be drafted, he was never going to fight in that war, he said early on, then that probably meant that no black guys in America would go in the army. There was kind of no sense.

I had a little more, I was lucky, I knew a little more, only because I had written Dick Gregory's autobiography, Nigger, and I spent a lot of time with him, and on the circuit of civil rights and comedy. And so, I really wasn't so scared, you know, I just kind of understood how much of all of this, including how much of Muhammad Ali, I mean, from Muhammad Ali to Jesse Jackson and on, we're talking trash talk. You know, we're talking wolf tickets, we're talking about, you know, this kind of puff fish in the ghetto, which white people really didn't understand, they were going to get scared right away. And so, he represented that, I mean, it's another thing to remember that, and then maybe this might be the least that Cassius Clay can be remembered for or gave us, but he gave us trash talk.

You know, from, you know, the most contemporary basketball player of today, you know, mowling off. That's Cassius Clay. That's why he's such an incredible break. And you see that break in so many aspects of the culture, feminine and steep. And nobody knew that it could be, I mean, who would have thought, you know, they're not happy, you know, what do they want? I mean, men didn't know women, I mean, white didn't know black, I mean, we hope some of that has changed, but it was in 1964 that those fishers, those ethnic, religious, gender. Every kind of split in American life suddenly became open and visible.

Great. Do you remember the Ford Mustang? Yeah. Did you really did it at the World's Fair? I remember the, oh, absolutely. What was the World's Fair like? The World's Fair was kind of overwhelming. And it had a little bit of a stain to it because I think it was not a world-recognized World's Fair. One of those. Well, I think you have to have 10 years before World's Fair and New York jumped the gun, of course. But it was, I remember roaming around and it was kind of fun. You know, my wife worked at the World's Fair, so I went there a lot and hung out and did things. It was fun. It was great. I'm a New Yorker. It seemed like a tourist attraction to me. And by this time, you know, I was going around with Muhammad Ali. There were civil rights corps and some other groups threatened to do sit-ins and slowdowns and blockades in a way to disrupt the start of the fair.

So it wasn't a meme. It was, as well, kind of a barometer of the sort of racial divide that was breaking out. And then, an authority police officer kills a young black youth, supposedly slashed him with a knife. Right. And all hell breaks loose. Well, I mean, the Harlem riots, as they came to be called, I think may have been the very first of the urban riots, of the reaction. And I think this is really kind of all of a piece, the demonstrations, dancing in the aisles of rock concerts, expressing yourself, do your thing. I think that in almost every corner of the society in 1964, people were expressing themselves. Some really kind of what we would consider self-indulgent, silly ways.

And some really important expressions of incredible oppression and frustration. And do you remember what it was like in New York when Harlem kind of started burning? I think that I was living on 93rd Street at the time, and I was fairly secure that there was a blue line at 96th Street, which is where white New York truly began, and people wouldn't make it down. So I think that that what that offered us, really right away, was the two Americas. So in 1964, certainly in the city, something that we kind of knew that there were two Americas. I've been to Harlem a lot, but I'd always been there as a reporter, going to boxing gyms or with Dick Gregory, something that he was appearing at Nepal, or we were meeting somebody or covering something.

So I always felt protected and in a crowd, but I don't think that at that time people went up to Harlem as tourists, as of course they do now, or just to hang out. So the SDS is created in 1964. I guess it's actually created a little earlier. Yeah, when is the fourth year on stake, when is that? Yeah, that was spent a little early on. I'm trying to find a scene that anchors SDS in this, because it's a basket one. He's going to give me a leave on that. But there are these two political sort of divides, and there's young Americans for freedom, you know, the Goldwater Army.

Do you remember Barry Goldwater? Very well, sure. And of course I remember the Dandelion and the explosion. I was not particularly political in those days, and of course I was spending much more time than I should have in Bullparks. But I had a kind of cynical attitude towards both those groups. I mean, SDS or the Young Republicans, because for coverage, I mean, I think it's never good if you're a street reporter and you're actually covering people. I remember the thing that really stuck in my mind is the great joy, and this was explained to me by a young militant. The great joy is when you throw a brick through the window of a bank with your girlfriend watching.

And then you go home in time for the six o'clock news, and you get in bed, and you're having sex when the picture comes on of the broken window. So that's what it's about. So in many ways, you know, that really colored some of my attitudes towards that. I think I was a much more drawn to what I thought was the incredibly thoughtful and courageous young black men and women of core and snaked. You know, these were the people who really were putting their lives on the line in powerful ways, and then going on campuses, and so much of the anti-war ferment at that time seemed not wanting to go into the army. It seemed fair enough. I'd been in the army, and so I had kind of mixed feelings about that. It seems odd to me thinking about all this now, because I've always considered myself left of center, but I was not always convinced of the ideological sincerity of people.

That there was something self-serving, and Berkeley free speech movement. That was from a distance. I think that was cool. You know, one thing I think we ought to do, let's cut percent. So looking back for you personally, 1964 was this... What did it feel like, and how do you extrapolate that to what it did to the country? I'm not sure that I can. It was... I'm just interested in it personally. Yeah, I mean, it was such an amazing confluence of events.

You know, these rivers coming together and parting, but I certainly don't think that I was that aware of that at the moment. I didn't know where it was all going to go. I know that Cassius Clay changed my life. That's all that seemed really important at that moment. I put me on the front page, made my career. I think that to a large extent that year, I was isolated in the press box, and I was very skeptical. There were a lot of the other things that were happening out in the culture, which to me seemed as manipulated as I knew boxing and sports to be.

There's one thing, if you get to know something about anything, I guess there's a tendency to use those frameworks for almost everything else. What was that Greenwich Village townhouse blew up, where SDS was making balls? Not your year. No, unfortunately. That would have been a way to situate SDS in our story. I remember one of the guys who was blown up in there was getting Ted Gold, and the line that people used about him was something the effect of. It had to do with his love of Willie Mays. As soon as I made that connection, these little assholes were sports fans. Who could believe any of the crap that they were saying?

The art world, do you have any connection with it at all? Not that, no. Because Warhol is just kind of connected. The cultural stuff is just something we're sort of playing around with. Johnson and that daisy ad. It was the oil-dane birdbock, the same guy that did the Volkswagen campaign. That's very hard. That takes you into the world of advertising and kind of amazing life. Wasn't the war on poverty that year? Yeah. Johnson. One of the great wars that we lost right. When did the Peace Corps begin?

Kennedy started in, I think, 61. So it started to drive our limber running successfully for a while when he gets pulled off of it. John's just calls me and says, you're running the war on poverty. Why is a few big picture questions really up in the 30,000? Why should we remember 1960, 40, think? I think it's really hard to make sense of where we are now and how we got here and how we'll do the same sort of silly things again. Unless we see nowhere, it started. Now, I'm not ready to say that if Liston had won. And if the Beatles had bombed and rightly so, Rolling Stones had been seen as the best band, that everything would have been different. But maybe it might have the empowerment that Black youth felt from Muhammad Ali.

He was big. He was beautiful. He made no apologies for himself. He said, here I am. Certainly in 1964, he didn't seem like a politician. He just seemed like somebody who had come out of the neighborhood bigger and better and stronger than they were. But somebody who's going to stand up to the man and say what he believed in, the man of principle. Well, that's pretty powerful stuff. To go against your parents, religion, change your name, go against so many of the prevailing myths and trends and political streams of the time. And then, of course, he would only get bigger and more powerful, had to be a tremendous role model for young people, particularly Black young people.

So that was incredibly important. How did this feed in to the civil rights movement? Well, you talk to anybody, Julian Bond, to anybody in the civil rights movement, and they want to tell you where they were when Muhammad Ali did this or that. Obviously, he was very important in so many ways, even if only as a boxer, but they understood that he was more than a boxer. Had Liston crushed him that first night in February, would things have been different? No, the butterfly effect, it seems like something might have been different. Again, if the Beatles had bombed, if so many things, if Goldwater had been derailed, so many things could have been different or lost its steam, or John Lewis went into advertising. I mean, who knows, who knows what, you know, little thing might have happened. And I mean, just thinking personally, you know, how it changed my, I stayed in journalism, I stayed in sports writing, which I was not that interested in, just because I wanted to stay with him.

I wanted to see where Muhammad Ali's story would end up. And so I stayed there, and I think that psychically, a lot of people stayed in one form or another with this stream. So I think it would have been, you know, in terms of where we are now, to road not, you know, to road not take it, of course. But I mean, you know, where it would have gone, maybe things would have been better. You know, I don't know. Maybe that was not the way to stop the Vietnam War. Maybe it would have been stopped earlier. Maybe something else might have happened. But I don't think that we can really understand where we've gotten to. The problem is, of course, that, you know, we're doing the same shit now, and, you know, we see, you know, the friends of where it's taken us. We don't really learn.

Do you think we're living with 1964 today, and the blue state, red state divide that we live in, or in, in other kind of cultural, cultural ways? I think that 1964 vivified so many of those schisms in American life, but they were all there. It's as if, you know, they were kind of traveling along in black and white, and then technical or was invented in 1964. Suddenly, everything was in color, and it was exciting, and it was easy to see. But I don't think, I don't think those trends weren't there. Everything was there. I mean, we could probably go to 1924 and find it. Let's get room time, but is that somebody snoring in the back room? Hello? Hang on, quiet please, we're getting room time. 30 seconds for our lip sync.

You got it. Good.