Time has vindicated the Lipsytean approach, for today, if you’re a sportswriter and not a skeptic, you’re complicit in your own delusion.
Lipsyte follows a few simple rules. When you cover athletes, you don’t “god ‘em up.” When you write about sports (not “sportswrite”), you don’t “pipe” something even a half-step removed from the truth. And you always keep tabs on who holds power and how it’s wielded.
Read his wise and wide-ranging memoir, An Accidental Sportswriter, a highlight of this year’s crop of sports books, and you’ll understand why: Lipsyte — “Lippo the Hippo” — was bullied as a kid. This year of all years, haunted by the image of some hapless child in a shower room in Happy Valley, the bullied deserve their spokesman and the powerful deserve to be called to account.
Sports Illustrated’s Alex Wolff, making his case for veteran sportswriter Robert Lipsyte as Sportsman of the Year.
(via Dave Zirin, who seconded the Lipsyte nomination on Twitter)
