I went to the paper’s headquarters on South Street in Lower Manhattan, facing the East River and the landmark Brooklyn Bridge, to see the sports editor. Mushnick had warned me: Jerry Lisker was more Runyonesque character than ink-stained wretch. I wore a suit, neatly brushed my longish brown hair, carried my résumé and clips. Without looking up from his desk, Lisker barked, “You know sports?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you type?”
“Yes,” I said, omitting that my skills were limited to my index fingers.
“Come in tonight at eight,” he said.
I arrived a few minutes early to an empty office, until a gangly young guy with dark flowing hair, Jackson Browne cut, ambled in.
“You Araton?” he said.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“Bob Drury,” he said, offering a hand. “I was hired today by Jerry Lisker. He told me to ask for you.”
I guessed I was not only hired, but already in charge.
Within a year, Drury was the beat reporter for the NFL’s Giants and I was covering the Knicks. Such was the fast-changing state of affairs at a newspaper founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton and published for decades by the passionately liberal Dorothy Schiff until 1976. She cashed out and let her beloved progressive baby, which had crusaded against the likes of Joe McCarthy and European fascism before its many competitors, fall into the sensational, right-wing clutches of Rupert Murdoch.
Veteran reporters were largely resistant to the Murdoch way, adding “the Post has learned” to any negligible news exclusively obtained and “told the Post” to the most innocuous of quotes. Their young replacements, myself included, were less dedicated to traditional norms of journalistic circumspection, even when the results were difficult to stomach.
In my earliest days on the Knicks beat I was promoted to in 1978, I wrote about Willis Reed’s plaintive cry for clarity on his head-coaching position. When I asked him if he was worried about circulating rumors that Sonny Werblin, the Madison Square Garden president, wanted to replace him, Reed said that his youthful team was naturally affected by such instability. The players needed to know if he was “in or out.”
We were in Seattle at the time, three hours behind New York, too late to call the Garden for a response from Werblin. The next day, my carefully constructed lede was dismissively rewritten to fit a screaming back-page headline: IN OR OUT. As soon as I heard about it, I called Werblin to explain that Reed’s quote was actually expressed as more of a plea. He thanked me for the clarification, but fired Reed a few days later, telling people inside the organization that nobody was going to give him an ultimatum. My editors were naturally thrilled about my tabloid baptism in what amounted to a trial run on the beat—helping to get Reed, one of my basketball heroes, fired.
Every day at the Post pretty much began with an exhortation from the desk—“Write for the back page”—reverberating in my brain. That was meant as pressure to report something newsy, splashy, that would grab readers by the collar as soon as they flipped the paper over, front to back. We all worked with the daily terror of being beaten by our competitors—to the point where some nights I would drive from my apartment in Staten Island to a newsstand in Midtown for copies of the night editions of the Times and Daily News.
I slept better knowing there would be no morning surprise.
Even more ominous was the searing scrutiny of the Post’s own Peter Vecsey, the city’s most renowned basketball columnist, a beat watchdog and self-appointed critic of competing basketball reporters, including his own colleagues. Journalists and especially young journalists lead anxious lives, imagining themselves a blown story or two from career extinction. At Murdoch’s blood-and-guts tabloid, that pressure was amplified and infused into our daily regimen: back page or bust.
I was as insecure as the next guy, perhaps more so. I hadn’t come from a family of journalists, or professional strivers, people who had experienced and understood the burden of a competitive work environment. In retrospect, I don’t know which I needed more during those early Post years: a friend to keep me grounded, an adviser to keep me directed, or a well-placed source to help keep me enlightened—and employed.
When I met Michelle, I lucked into all three.
Four Courtship
If there is one time-honored truth in sports journalism—or journalism of any kind, really—it’s that nobody wants to talk to a nobody. Such was my predicament when Greg Gallo, my editor at the Post, walked over to my desk one summer morning in 1979 and told me to “get Steinbrenner on the phone.”
At the time, I had virtually no name recognition outside Madison Square Garden. And far more than any basketball player, George Steinbrenner was the most sought-after sports figure in New York, while his two-time defending champion Yankees were the city’s hottest story—in no small part because Steinbrenner was a walking, talking back-page headline. On this day, word got around that his general manager, Al Rosen, was leaving the organization, which meant either that he’d been fired or that he couldn’t take another day of being screamed at by the volcanic owner. On summer hiatus from my new Knicks beat responsibilities, I was working the day rewrite desk—cobbling together breaking news for the afternoon editions and, on occasion, covering for another beat reporter who was traveling or unreachable in the days long before cell phones.
Get Steinbrenner on the phone. Sure, right away, no problem. I dialed the office he mainly worked out of in Tampa, Florida, and was predictably stonewalled by his secretary, who had me on hold for
