The Someone You're Not: True Stories of Sports, Celebrity, Politics & Pornography

INTRODUCTION

Suspending Disbelief

I’m proud to welcome you to my fourth collection. The pub date coincides roughly with the anniversary of the evening, thirty-three years ago, when Watergate investigator Bob Woodward summoned me to his fishbowl of a glass office in the newsroom of the Washington Post. Forgive me if I reminisce.

For just under a year, I’d been working full time on the graveyard shift as a copy boy, doing my best to freelance during the days. I’d come to Washington from Atlanta for an abortive, three-week stint in law school, an unwitting stowaway on the bandwagon carrying Jimmy Carter’s peanut mafia into town. Previously I’d majored in history with a minor in creative writing, spent two years editing college publications, and served a transformative internship at the pioneering alt-weekly Creative Loafing. (How clever it felt to be able to say I’d actually worked at Creative Loafing—until the afternoon the legendary executive editor of the Post, Ben Bradlee, bid me to recite my curriculum vitae.)

Now I was sitting on the seat edge of one of the egg-shaped chairs that populated the acre-square newsroom, in the office of this living historical figure. He’d taken down a crooked president and inspired a generation of boomer kids to become journalists. This was the late 1970s, an era when journalism felt more like Hemingway than TMZ, a calling at once macho and noble. Following his investigative triumphs, Woodward was trying his hand at management. As assistant managing editor of the Metro section, he was being groomed for Bradlee’s job.

As you may remember, Woodward was played in the movie version of All the President’s Men by Robert Redford. One afternoon Redford would come to visit Woodward in his fishbowl. As it happened there was a copy machine right behind it. The line of female employees—from all floors of the building—waiting to make copies snaked past the National desk and all the way back to Business. The real-life Woodward has a broad Midwestern accent normally associated with a rube; in person (unless you’re being interrogated, as I would be a few years later, in connection with Janet Cooke’s Pulitzer scandal—see Janet’s World in Scary Monsters and Super Freaks) there is no hint of his relentless killer instinct. He chewed gum incessantly and walked with his head thrown back a little, like a guy exhaling smoke from an expensive cigar. On his strolls through the rows of desks in his Metro fiefdom, he’d stop at your chair and mug. "Hihowareya?" he’d say, sounding like the church lady’s husband. Often he’d ask the same personal question two days in a row. Which mattered not a bit, because you were talking to Bob frickin Woodward! He even showed up some Sunday mornings to play coed touch football in the field stretching north from the Washington Monument. (Full disclosure: Back in the day, Maureen Dowd could really haul ass!) When my parents came to visit, Woodward even autographed a book for them, easing to some degree the pain of my law school debacle, I am sure.

On this evening in September 1978—right around the 6 p.m. deadline on Wednesday, September 12, to be exact—I was running on fumes. I’d been up most of the night working my shift on the city desk— answering phones, logging tips, fetching food and coffee, taking modest dictation, running copies of corrections lists around the building. (My favorite stop was the typesetters on four. They were all of them deaf; their furious and animated signing amid the din of the machines and conveyor belts and Orwell-like pneumatic tubes carrying copy in plastic capsules from the newsroom was like a cacophonous silent dance of hands and animated faces. I still have on my desk the lead lines of type that spell out my byline, gifted by a fourth-floor friend.)

Since the moment I’d finally entered the Post’s employ—denied a job at first for my failure to pass the spelling and typing tests administered upstairs in human resources—I’d waged a relentless, if well mannered, campaign to get myself promoted to reporter. I did everything I was asked and always more—I stayed late, volunteered for scut work, ran errands at actual double time, offered a suggestion where needed, took initiative, sometimes too much. If there was a job posted, no matter what it was, I applied—religion news aide, assistant city editor, Moscow bureau chief: the Post was a union shop, they had to interview any union member who signed up. If there was a section that used stringers, I went to see the editor with a list of ideas. I even wrote a whole (awful) story for the Post magazine on spec about handicapped people, having been inspired by the courage of my blind cousin. If some of the older editors asked me along after work for wee hours hard drinking I went. If some of the younger writers invited me to party I showed. At night I’d handle my shift in a T-shirt and jeans. During the day I’d dress like an adult and find a vacant desk from which to work the stories I’d managed to get myself assigned. It got to the point where these famously driven Washington journos were starting to notice me and my bylines. Are you sleeping under a desk somewhere? You must have a twin who works here, too. Not to mention the catastrophic onset of male pattern baldness. Looking back, that was a fortunate occurrence as well. Without hair, I looked older and less healthy, more in line with the other sleep-deprived go-getters who were my role models in the newsroom. All of us wore our eye bags like badges of our unflagging fidelity to the mother Post.

At the moment I was wearing my three-piece Glen plaid law school interview suit and no shoes. I’d spent the sweaty, Indian summer day trampling through landfills in Virginia and Maryland and a sewage treatment plant in D.C., hunting for evidence of U.S. government-owned furniture and office equipment that had been illegally removed by a garbage hauling firm from a storage room at the U.S. Department of Agriculture—part of an investigation I’d undertaken during my off-hours. My crusty wingtips were stashed in a (reasonably) airtight bag in the copy aide station. I know I must have reeked.

Luckily, in this particular line of work, smelling like sludge is sometimes taken as a plus. Beneath the fold of this morning’s paper was my first front-page story. The previous day, I’d sat for nearly eight hours in a windowsill at USDA headquarters, at Fourteenth Street and Independence Avenue SW, staking out the dumpsters three stories down in the internal courtyard. Late in the afternoon, my confidence flagging, my ass killing me, I witnessed at last the act of theft a whistle-blowing secretary had called the city desk late one night to report. (That I kept the tip for myself instead of handing it over to the night city editor is another long bit; besides journalism, the Post was all about office politics, played for keeps by people who covered the Washington professionals. As my first mentor, Tom Sherwood, instructed, "People at the Post don’t stab you in the back, they stab you in the chest." More valuable training for life.)

When Woodward summoned me to his fishbowl, I was sitting at somebody’s borrowed desk, typing—on an IBM Selectric self-correcting typewriter and six-ply paper—the second day follow-up to my story: The General Services Administration had undertaken an investigation into the theft of the furniture. I was twenty-two and probably high on methane fumes. I’d hardly slept for the last eleven months. Woodward knew me fairly well. I’d stalked and dogged and cajoled him at every opportunity. I’d even attended a party or two at his house, albeit as a sub class of invitee, a member of the support staff. Once, at football, I got him with a pretty good cross-body block. For months I’d written features and small-town news stories and police shorts. Every time I scored a byline I’d stolen into this very fishbowl at night and left the clipping on his keyboard with a note. (How many times do you figure I rewrote those notes?) Finally, I had the kind of story it took to get noticed at the Post. What it took to get Woodward to notice.

Now he looked at me, his thin lips upturned into a wizened smirk. His chewing gum crackled and snapped. He pointed to my article on the front page. "You’ve done what I said you had to do. You’ve proven yourself indispensable to the Washington Post."

I felt faint and out of breath, a little nauseous. I was never great talking to teachers. Does this mean I get a raise?

The bestselling author looked at me peevishly, like maybe he’d just made a huge mistake. Sure, Sager. You can have what I get. One dollar a year.

Though it would be some time before I was given an actual desk, business card, nameplate, and phone number—I was too young to care or understand at the time, but Woodward had bestowed upon me this battlefield promotion without the necessary clearance from the business side; there was no actual reporter slot for me to fill—I thus began in earnest a period I now see as my six years of journalism graduate studies at one of the best newspapers in the world. Had I been any less naïve, I certainly would have been intimidated, but youth has its strengths, and overestimation of one’s abilities (and underestimation of the size of obstacles) are great ones, to be sure.

Besides Woodward, Bradlee, his glamorous media-celeb wife, Sally Quinn . . . besides our dear matriarch Katherine Graham and her man-of-the-people son Don, who could be seen during softball season bounding out of the employee entrance with his cap and glove underarm, en route to play with his fond buddies on the company team . . . there was assembled on the fifth floor (and throughout the three connected buildings) a dream team of daily journalism’s biggest names. Bill Greider, David Broder, Jim Hoagland, Richard Cohen, Paul Hendrickson, Tom Shales, Jonathan Yardley, Joel Garreau, Henry Allen, Bill Raspberry, Juan Williams, Scott Armstrong, David Maraniss. The son of national poet laureate James Dickey sat a few desks away from me. Teddy Roosevelt’s great-granddaughter sat across the room in National. Over in Style, future New Yorker editor David Remnick was finishing up his summer internship. There were Pulitzer winners past and future, J school deans and professors of tomorrow, people you would recognize today as influential radio and television news and sports reporter/commentators, the guy who broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a future Seinfeld writer/producer, a future successful movie and TV screenwriter/producer, even the wildly popular ESPN duo Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, who loved to hang out and give each other tons of shit. (And boy, were they merciless on their buddy, the future author and sports commentator John Feinstein. When Feinstein was an intern, by the way, during a time before computers, one of the editors ordered Feinstein go to the men’s room to wash some used carbon paper—an inked sheet once employed to make copies while typing. You can imagine the mess. And the jokes. Eventually Feinstein would go on to write Season on the Brink and A Good Walk Spoiled, two of the bestselling sports books of our times.)

In a newsroom populated with legacies and swells and Ivy Leaguers—and the absolute best minority candidates the Post’s pioneering affirmative action team could find—I figured out early on that I couldn’t hope to compete, at least not head-on. My colleagues were all older, super smart, politically savvy—way more well-read and well-educated. Many had gone to boarding schools. They spoke French—or at least they knew how to pronounce words like ennui. Their parents knew important people. By the very fact of their birth, some of them were important people in their own right. I was the son of a suburban Jewish doctor from Virginia, raised in Baltimore. I’m not sure I ever read a newspaper cover to cover until I started working at one. I never even heard of Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson or New Journalism until I’d been at the paper two years and met Walt Harrington, a great friend and crucial mentor to me and thousands of others, the future author of the landmark textbook Intimate Journalism.

All I knew is that I wanted to write. Somehow I was smart enough to realize I was too young to have anything important to say as a writer, and that journalism seemed the perfect fit. A place to throw myself into life. A place to write and learn every day. A place to help fill the tremendous void I felt when I tried to understand the world and my place in it. When I was typing I felt at home, lord of my page. One letter at a time, one line at a time, I was able to make sense of things.

I threw myself into the mechanism as would any young True Believer; I learned on the job from the best. Thanks to Don Graham’s attention (Graham was a Vietnam vet, a former D.C. cop, mailroom paper handler, and Sports section staffer who identified with my bootstrap story and thought I should be schooled the old-fashioned way) I worked all the beats from the ground up. Night police, cops and courts, night rewrite, general assignment, enterprise rover. I wrote breaking news, crime, politics, finance, science, sports, human interest features, in-depth series, lead-alls for gang bangs—the macho newsroom term for sending out scores of staffers to report an important happening, like the return of the Iran hostages or the Pope’s visit or a crippling storm. Sometimes I’d be in the office fielding the memos from everyone and writing the front-page piece, the editor standing over my shoulder watching me type every word. (One time that editor was Bradlee himself, with his Gordon Gekko slicked back white hair and his commanding gravel voice, generated from the deep region of his brass balls. Talk about a schvitz.) Because I was low in seniority and always pulled Sundays, even I wrote a lot of offbeat weather pieces—stories about nothing, one editor used to say with his exhilarating sense of newsroom irony. All I saw was another chance to write something that would be published . . . and read.

Being young and fearless, I dove into things some of the older staffers (with mortgages and children and good sense or an outside life) thought twice about. I went into dangerous neighborhoods in the middle of the night to talk to the families of dead gangbangers and innocents. Sometimes I arrived before cops or clergy. Imagine being a little pisher like me in grownup clothes bringing that news to the mom. If an editor wanted the Fourteenth Street drug and prostitution bazaar staked out, I volunteered to do so on foot. If I had to climb some dangerous and high scaffolding to meet the guy fixing the roof of the tower of the Old Post Office, or do a hammerhead stall in a (seemingly) rickety old plane for a story about a flying circus, or go to some seedy gay bar in Alexandria, Virginia, to meet a man who—I still don’t know what the hell that guy wanted, other than a date with me—I was down. I felt like I was wearing this amazing cape that gave me extra rights and safe access to everything—even though I once got three speeding tickets in one week, ample evidence that nobody else thought I was above any common law. I was mugged on assignment on the worst street in town. Woodward gave me a first-person piece on the front page; he allowed me to expense the thirteen dollars that was stolen (I was young but no idiot; I’d left my wallet at the office). In the dead of winter, I rode my puny Honda 360 motorcycle seventy or so miles along the shoulder of a traffic-snarled Interstate to find and interview the driver of a bus that had been involved in a fatal rush-hour crash. By the time I returned to the newsroom it was quite late. I was so cold I couldn’t stop shaking. An old relic of a newsman named Bill Gold brought me back to his office, opened his bottom desk drawer, and offered me a snort of bourbon in a paper cup. He kept his fedora on a coat rack behind him. Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite. I felt like I was living The Front Page.

Because I didn’t really know what I was doing, and because, honestly, I am a shy writer-type who would rather be at his desk than wandering around meeting strange and dangerous people, I developed over time a sort of anthropological approach to my reporting technique. (God bless Anthro 101.) My deadline allowing, rather than coming in with questions blazing as some reporters will, l learned to take a quiet seat by the campfire, to watch and listen and learn and pay attention, to hang out and gain trust first and ask questions later.

I guess I’ve always been known as a good listener. Back as far as middle school, when kids came to me with their love lives, I was one of those intermediaries between the boys and the girls. In college I became the unlikely two-term president of my frat. Go talk to Sages, people used to say. I don’t know why this is. Maybe I’m just nosy and love to have people tell me things. Maybe I’m just good at keeping my mouth shut and not completing the circle of gossip. Maybe it has something to do with genetics—my dad was an ob-gyn, well-loved and known for his bedside manner; he was also a counselor of other men, a past frat and temple president. Or maybe it has to do with my upbringing—my parents grew up feeling embattled, Jews in the small-town South. The silk cocoon in which they took pains to raise me and my sister left me with a strong sense of myself. Generally, I don’t feel threatened by the differences of others. Let them believe what they want to believe. I’m fascinated to know how they think. I want to know.

Many years after my stint at the Post, I was doing a story about the actress and comedian Roseanne Barr. Once known as television’s domestic goddess, she’d revealed to me, during the course of a short interview at her snow-dusted cabin at Lake Arrowhead, that she suffered from multiple personality syndrome. Over the course of the next six months or so we did a longer piece for Esquire. (The Multitudes of Roseanne, Revenge of the Donut Boys.)

After some thirty-six years of doing stories, you learn to recognize things when you see them, mad genius among them. One time I called Roseanne on the phone. As usual I was put on hold by one of her minions for like twenty minutes. As usual, when she finally picked up, there was no salutation. The conversation burst forth as if ongoing.

All hate is just fear, she sneered, her familiar TV tone. All fear is insecurity.

Huh? I replied. With Roseanne it always felt like I was a step slow. She’d taken to calling me You Idiot.

"All hate is just fear, she said louder. All fear is insecurity. What are you, deaf?"

And that’s when it hit me.

Warming my hands by the cultural fires of so many diverse characters and groups and settings over nearly four decades, the thing that has haunted me the most is observing how strongly our world depends upon our hate and fear, our cultural stereotypes, our political correctness, our mythology and pat misunderstandings, our notions of what is supposed to be true, what is considered to be true, what other people say you should think and do, what is the gospel. Wherever I have gone, by keeping my mind open—I call it suspending disbelief—I have unfailingly returned home from every assignment with a new sort of understanding, a new insight, something I’d never have even imagined unless I’d walked without judgment the proverbial mile in someone’s shoes. You can’t know what Rush Limbaugh is saying if you’re yelling back at the radio. You have to listen. You know what I mean?

As I put together this collection, it occurred to me that the headline of one of the articles (the work of my beloved editor of fifteen years, Peter Griffin of Esquire) suggested the theme of this volume, and beyond that, the overarching theme of my work spanning nearly four decades: The Someone You’re Not. Every subject in this gathering of pieces is someone who’s been misunderstood, publicly or privately. Someone who’s been under-understood. Someone who has lived with the reality that people, for one reason or another, don’t get them, and because of that fact they suffer. Labeled, lampooned, lumped into category, judged out of context, ridiculed, or just embarrassed, most of us have known the sting.

Thankfully, my editors and the publications (and purses) they represent—starting with Woodward and the Post, and on through the 2010s with David Granger and Griffin at Esquire—have afforded me the time to submerge myself into these subjects, the days and weeks in the field. From RoboQB Todd Marinovich to socialite Paris Hilton. From marine vets suffering PTSD (and misunderstood by the government who sent them to war) to a man wrongly convicted of raping a young girl. From a non-Arab Muslim man shot in the face by a white supremacist as pay back for 9/11 to a cuckolded writer suffering the faceplant of divorce, these stories all take the time to breach the barriers of fear and under-understanding, to seek a kernel of universal wisdom.

Walk a mile in the shoes of these others. Suspend your disbelief. I hope you enjoy.

Mike Sager,

La Jolla, CA, August 15, 2012

The Man Who Never Was

Todd Marinovich was once known as RoboQuarterback, engineered from birth by his father to be a Hall of Famer. But his career never happened; twenty years later, he’s in recovery. A cautionary tale of fathers, sons, and sports, this is the thirty-thousand word nonvella version of the 2010 ASME award winner for best profile, the inspiration for ESPN’s award-winning documentary The Marinovich Project.

So what ended your career?

The Fallbrook Midget Chiefs were fanned out across the practice field at Potter Intermediate School on a sunny autumn day in Southern California, two dozen eighth graders in red-and-white helmets and bulbous pads, some with downy mustaches and hairy legs, others a head shorter and still singing soprano, none of them yet old enough, in their last year of Pop Warner eligibility, to discount the plausibility of a Division I college scholarship and a career in the National Football League. Whistles trilled and coaches barked, mothers camped in folding chairs in the welcoming shade of the school building, younger siblings romped; a trio of adolescent females, dressed distractingly, flitted and prowled along the sidelines. Fathers hovered here and there on the periphery, wincing with every blow and dropped ball as if experiencing it themselves, gathering material for the inevitable postmortem on the ride home.

Into this tableau ambled an unusually tall man with faded orange hair cropped close around a crowning bald spot, giving him the aspect of a tonsured monk. There was a certain glow on the faces of the four who accompanied him—a man in riding togs, a fortyish mother with fake boobs, a short guy with a tape recorder, an older man with bull shoulders and a pronounced limp. The tall man himself wore dark sunglasses. His face was all angles, his fair skin was sunburned and heavily freckled, his lips deeply lined; the back of his neck was weathered like an old farmer’s. He was six foot five, 212 pounds, the same as when he’d reported for duty twenty-one years ago as a redshirt freshman quarterback at the University of Southern California, the Touchdown Club’s 1987 national high school player of the year. The press had dubbed him RoboQuarterback; he was the total package. His Orange County record for all-time passing yardage, 9,182, stood for more than two decades; had he played the second halves of many blowouts, it would still be untouched.

Now he was thirty-nine. He wore a T-shirt and surfer shorts, rubber flip-flops. He moved across the parking lot to the field in the manner of an athlete, loose-limbed and physically confident—a lanky, coltish, nonchalant stride that revealed nothing of the long and tortured trail he’d left behind.

A coach hustled out to meet the party, the offensive coordinator for the Midget Chiefs. He was wearing a black and silver baseball cap with an Oakland Raiders logo on the front. Around his neck was a Raiders pendant. His name was William Hopkins, but everybody called him Raider Bill. Todd Marinovich! he enthused. Would you mind signing these?

Raider Bill produced a Sharpie and a couple of 8-by-11 plastic sheets, the kind collectors use, with individual pockets and loose-leaf binder holes. In all of the pockets were bubblegum cards featuring Todd in his playing days, number thirteen at USC, his grandpa’s old high school number; number twelve as a Los Angeles Raider, before the team moved to the Bay Area. As Todd signed dutifully, everybody gathered and copped a squat. Like a speaking stick, somebody tossed Todd a football.

"Hi, my name is Todd. I’m an old player. I played waaaay before you guys were even born. Without his sunglasses, resting now atop his head, his blue eyes looked pale and unsure. Raised much of his life on the picturesque Balboa Peninsula, connected to the mainland by a bridge and a three-car ferry, he spoke in the loopy dialect of a surfer dude. He once told a reporter in jest that he enjoyed surfing naked at a spot near a nuclear power plant in San Onofre, California. The water’s warmer down there, he’d explained, goofing with the dude. The quote circulated around the world. Thereafter, among his other transgressions—nine arrests, two felonies, a year in jail—Todd would be known derisively for naked surfing. One thing that I am today and that’s completely honest, he told the Midget Chiefs. I won’t BS you, I won’t lie to you, I’ll tell you exactly my experience. Because that’s all I have, my experience. I wouldn’t change anything for the world."

As he spoke, Todd fondled and flipped and spun the ball. It seemed small in his hands and very well behaved, like it belonged there. When he was born, his father put a big plush football in his crib. Marv Marinovich was the cocaptain of John McKay’s undefeated USC team of 1962. He played offensive tackle and defensive end, every minute of every game. The team won the National Championship; Marv was ejected from the Rose Bowl for fighting. After a short NFL career, during the height of the Cold War, Marv began studying Eastern Bloc training techniques. The Raiders’ colorful owner, Al Davis, made him one of the NFL’s first strength-and-conditioning coaches. Before Todd could walk, Marv had him on a balance beam. He would stretch the boy’s little hamstrings in his crib. Years later, an ESPN columnist would name Marv number two on a list of worst sports fathers. (After Jim Pierce, father of tennis player Mary, famous for verbally abusing opponents during matches.)

Marv sat at the back of the Midget Chief gathering, resting his bum knee, eating an organic apple he’d just picked in a nearby orchard. His own pale blue eyes were focused intently on his son’s performance, as they had been from day one.

I don’t know if you guys have heard of Mater Dei high school, it’s a prominent sports school, Todd said, speaking of the perennial OC powerhouse. "I played football as a freshman on varsity, which was kind of a big deal back then—I was the first freshman quarterback in OC to ever start a varsity game. I broke a lot of records. Then I chose to go to USC, and I played in some really big games. I beat UCLA. I won a Rose Bowl. It’s quite an experience playing in front of one hundred thousand people. It’s quite a rush. You’ve got the ball in your hands, and everyone is holding their breath, wondering: What’s he gonna do next? After my third year of college, I turned pro. Here’s a name you probably know: I was drafted ahead of Brett Favre in the 1991 draft. I was picked number one by the Raiders. Favre went in the second round. I played for three years.

The best thing about it was my teammates. Howie Long, Marcus Allen, Ronnie Lott—there’s a long list. A lot of guys I’m still in touch with today. There is something about the team game of football that is like none other.

Having said this last bit, Todd scanned the young faces that surrounded him. In a little over a minute—about the time it once took him to run the 440 (his father’s suggestion, the longest sprint event in track)—he had summarized the entire first half of his life. He looked down at the football in his hands, not quite sure what to say next. He gripped the ball along the laces with his left hand like he was going to throw it. His long, reddish-pink fingers brought to mind something oceanic, like a squid. He pump-faked once and then again, and then he took the ball and spun it magically on his palm. Any questions?

A moment of dumbfounded silence gave way—several kids raised their hands, oohing and ahhing the way they do at that age. Todd pointed the ball at a kid, who asked if Todd had fumbled a lot, and everyone laughed. Another kid wanted to know how far he could throw. Another asked about his greatest moment. Raider Bill asked Todd how he got along with his coaches, eliciting a huge guffaw from both Todd and Marv, which made everybody else crack up as well. Then Todd pointed the football at a kid with freckles.

You said you only played three years in the NFL, the kid said, more a statement than a question.

Correctamundo, Todd