Free An Accidental Sportswriter by Robert Lipsyte

voted for him, of course, and when my friends upbraided me as if it were my fault that Richard Nixon had beat Hubert Humphrey, I’d quote Greg: “Look, brother, you got two girls and one is a full-time prostitute and the other is a weekend prostitute. If you choose the lesser of two evils and marry the weekend prostitute, you’re only fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re marrying a whore.”
    I don’t believe that now, and I wonder if I believed it then or was merely so delighted to be able to vote for a person who had eaten in my house. The lesser of two evils is still evil, that’s true, but isn’t less evil better than more evil?
    The year after Greg didn’t win the presidency, a book I hadn’t written about the narcotics detectives Egan and Grosso came out. It was called The French Connection . The Academy Award–winning movie followed three years later, in 1971, the year I left the Times and about the time Greg left the nightclub stand-up circuit. We didn’t see much of each other for the next few years. We kept up through late-night phone calls. He faded from media view except when he made an outrageous claim, suggesting in 1981 that the seventeen black children murdered in Atlanta had been part of “fiendish” government medical experiments. His antiabortion stand infuriated Margie and troubled me.
    He began fasting in civil rights demonstrations and lost more than 60 pounds. It became the flip side of his obsession with food. He started running again, in marathons. He hawked a diet powder on the New Age circuit. He helped the boxer Riddick Bowe trim his weight on a kelp diet and win the heavyweight championship.
    We had a wonderful reunion in 1990 when he came on my WNET public affairs TV show, The Eleventh Hour . It was vintage Greg. He talked about rich women who get prescription drugs when their husbands cheat on them and poor women who go out and get crack. “Both of them are drugged out so they don’t have to deal with their problems from an ethical standpoint, from a spiritual standpoint.”
    He talked about black folks needing to change their priorities. “Michael Jackson comes to town, I buy my child a forty-dollar ticket and give him twenty dollars to buy a silly glove. I never gave that child twenty dollars to join the NAACP.”
    It was a reaffirmation of my old admiration for him. Greg has said that there have been only three comic geniuses in America: Mark Twain, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor. Pryor credited Greg with opening the door for him. I wonder if Greg would have gotten into that league had he stayed primarily in stand-up comedy, especially after late-night TV shows opened up for black comics. But Greg followed his monster. Civil rights activism made him a hero but a dangerous commodity. His forays into the New Age nutritional circuit, which I never fully understood, seemed more calling than commercial opportunism, but they diminished his mainstream reputation as a social commentator.
    In the spring of 2009, when I saw an ad for a rare appearance at Manhattan’s comedy club Caroline’s, I was torn. I desperately wanted to see him, but I was afraid of being disappointed, of having my memory smudged. I decided to show up unannounced. I’d catch him afterward. Maybe.
    It was a ten o’clock weeknight show, and the crowd was predominantly middle-aged, mostly white, lots of jeans, sweatshirts, and running shoes. Tourists. They were old enough to agree with the MC who called him “the legendary comedian.” My nervousness that he wouldn’t be funny, that he would be out of touch, evaporated quickly.
    â€œI’m suing Bernie Madoff. That’s right. A civil rights suit. He didn’t rip off any black people.”
    He was onstage for an hour and a half, sitting down, punctuating his rap with broad winks, pauses, head and eye rolls. I recognized a lot of the 1964 riffs that people talked