Gil at the Olympics

This Post has everything to do with summertime, as have the last few, and everything to do with my time at Sports Illustrated, which was the subject of the previous several. The lede may explain. May.

I’m sorry I’ve gone quiet here for a week or more; yet another thing came up, as things tend to do, and I was unable to visit my comfort zone at Substack. I fear other commitments may distract me yet again during the next couple of weeks — we shall see — and if they do, please allow me to apologize again, in advance. I do want to post when I can.

I’ve been scribbling some thoughts over the weekend that only last night began to be take some shape as a possible Substack post, if only I could find a way in.

I don’t think I have, actually. I’m thinking of the old “Answer One Question Lede.”

I’ve been watching the Olympics when I can, as have most of us, and when I focused on the fact that they’re returning to L.A. in four years’ time, I started remembering my own time at the 1984 Games there, working for SI. Flashbacks made me smile: covering water polo in Malibu, the Press Box betting at the swim meet (which was held at an outdoor pool!), Greg Louganis’s majestic dives, Joanie Benoit running into the Coliseum all alone, winning the first-evcr women’s marathon for America — and Maine, Gil screaming bloody murder, Gil editing at the hotel, Gil exultant . . .

I recalled five or six Gil anecdotes, one of which I thought you might get a kick out of as we all watch the Games from Paris – if only I could find a way in. I couldn’t just lay it out there; it only worked if someone knew a little something about Gil. I was struggling with that, and then I said to myself, just answer this for them: Who’s this Gil?

Ah. Okay.

Gil Rogin was the extraordinary man who was our boss of bsoses at Sports Illustrated from 1979 through 1984. If you read the SI Posts here at “That Reminds Me of a Story,” you met him a few times, if briefly. Gil was the fellow who all but tried to talk me out of taking the job he was about to offer in late 1979. As I got to know Gil better, I realized he hadn’t really been trying to dissuade me. He was Gil being Gil, which is to say inscrutable, often for his own amusement. Whether his mind games in that case were for his audience or just himself I do not know.

Rogin was a ne plus ultra, sine qua non and all but certifiably crazy guy. The late Gil himself would never have claimed to be other than one of New York City’s mercurial eccentrics, a subspecies of Urbanite of which Manhattan had plenty of examples. For the two of you who’ve read and enjoyed it as I have: Gil Rogin was our Harold Ross character in James Thurber’s memoir, The Years with Ross. For you others: He was ever-colorful — ever out there — in the way of Meryl Streep’s Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada.

To offer a taste of the man, I’ll take a selective traipse through the long New York Times obituary of Rogin that appeared on November 10, 2017 after Gil, 87, died at 87 at the house in Westport, Connecticut, he shared with his wife, Jackie Duvoisin, a former SI photographer who we SI Bullpenners of the ’80s had known as Gil’s partner:

“Talented and idiosyncratic, Mr. Rogin was managing editor of Sports Illustrated for five years beginning in 1979, a stretch when the magazine was dominant in sports journalism and ESPN was just a fledgling. 

“Before that, though, it seemed as if he might be on his way to a career as a fiction writer. The New Yorker published more than 30 of his stories beginning in 1963, humorous tales that often seemed at least somewhat autobiographical, and he had written several well-received books. But in 1980 Roger Angell, the magazine’s fiction editor, rejected one of his submissions on the grounds — as Mr. Rogin later told the tale — that he was repeating himself. He stopped writing fiction entirely. . . .

“Mr. Rogin grew up in Manhattan and graduated from Columbia College. In 1951 he began a brief stint at The New Yorker as an office gofer; his assignment on his second day on the job was to bring a suit of clothes to a funeral home for Harold Ross to be laid out in. Mr. Ross, the magazine’s founding editor, had just died.

“In 1955, after two years in the Army, Mr. Rogin joined Sports Illustrated, which Time Inc. had begun the year before. His job was to clip stories from newspapers and the wire services for filing in the magazine’s library, but he began writing almost immediately, and soon was a reporter. He became known for elegant phrasing and carefully observed profiles of figures like the boxer Floyd Patterson and the basketball star Bill Russell. In 2014, when the magazine commemorated its 60^th anniversary by republishing 60 of its best articles, one by Mr. Rogin was among them: “12 Years Before the Mast,” his account of participating in a sailing race from California to Hawaii aboard a 55-foot yawl. Not a sailing fan, he found the experience underwhelming. ‘It was a numbing, embittering and largely useless 12 days,’ he wrote. ‘There was no plot, no suspense. Our progress was as lacking in memorable incident as the passage of an hour hand across the face of a clock. We proved only that a curving, erratic line is not the shortest distance between two points.’ . . . 

“In 1971 Mr. Rogin published his first novel, What Happens Next?. The poet L.E. Sissman, reviewing that book in The New York Times, called it ‘a novel of the first importance.’ . . . 

“Mr. Rogin’s shift away from fiction coincided with his rise to the top editing spot at Sports Illustrated, where his eccentric style alienated some writers — Dan Jenkins was one — but was embraced by others. ‘He’d make his changes with a touch so light that you could only nod appreciatively,’ Jerry Kirschenbaum, a writer and editor at the magazine for 30 years, wrote in an email. ‘You didn’t feel like your fingers were being chopped off the way it was with some other editors. With Gil, it was like having a manicure.’

“Yet there could also be bellowing and red-penciled rage, and savvy staff members learned that Mr. Rogin was a man of sometimes strange routines that were not to be disrupted. . . . Breakfast was always Bumble Bee tuna eaten from the can. He would often edit in the bathroom adjacent to his office. When he traveled, his assistant had to be sure not only that the hotel had a pool but that it was suitable for Mr. Rogin to swim his daily laps in — no kidney shapes allowed. Once on the road, Mr. Rogin turned up for his swim to find that the hotel pool was being drained; he frantically swam his mile’s worth of laps anyway, racing the declining water level. . . .”

The obit continued on. It was complemented by photographs, the most arresting of which was of Gil smiling tightly in a tight bathtub. The picture’s caption noted that he napped daily at the office; it implied that we staffers saw an otherwise invisible Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the door. The implication was spot-on.

Obviously not everyone liked Gil. Dan didn’t, for instance. I did. Gil fascinated me; we hadn’t had people like him in our midst in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, or Concord, New Hampshire. I found him entertaining and thought him brilliant. For reasons I can’t now figure, I wasn’t frightened by him even when I was concerned about how he might react to my work. I realize that I should have been scared shitless — he was capable of chopping off heads. But he seemed to me more of a humorous Peter Sellers-type human than a bloody Vincent Price madman, and I think he thought of himself as midway. I do know he was sometimes contrite.

I had an interesting year with Gil in 1984, his last at SI before the bigwigs assigned him, against his will, to right Time Inc.’s sinking science magazine, Discover, which Gil quickly guided to a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. (Later still, in 1987, the bigwigs reeled him up to their sanctum on the 34^th Floor as the firm’s Corporate Editor.) I was on both SI Olympic units in ’84, the platoon sent to Sarajevo in February and the larger batallion dispatched to L.A. for a good chunk of that summer. A funny episode developed at the end of the Sarajevo Games, wherein I was sent to partner Jackie, then Gil’s favorite pal and a shooter in the Photo department, on a postscript Eurozone assignment in Bucharest for a Davis Cup match featuring not only Romania’s notorious Nastase but our twin demons McEnroe and Connors. I’ll recount that episode a later Post sometime, maybe. In the anecdote  I’ll drop here, since the Summer Games are on as we speak, I’m at the Los Angeles Games, which have just begun the evening before.

During the Opening Ceremonies, we in the Coliseum all saw the great decathlete of yore (yore being L.A. in 1960), Rafer Johnson, revealed as the torchbearer anointed to light the Olympic cauldron. One of our photographers had taken a splendid picture of the moment and Gil had quickly decided to run it as a double-truck (a two-page horizontal spread). He wanted to reserve a column of white space on the right-hand page for perhaps 500 or 750 words of type — “some kind of tone-poem crap about what Rafer was feeling right then.” He pointed at the torch in the photo printout. “Some crap to open things up for us.”

I know this reasonable approximation of his orders because, for reasons I’ll never recall, I was one of the half-dozen people in the room when Gil was choosing “selects” from a pile of printouts. I remember he was looking at stats – quality hardback printouts — not at slides through a photo editor’s loup.

 Gil looked up from the image and surveyed the room. The other staffers on hand mustn’t have included Frank, Kenny, Bill nor any others fully capable of conjuring and delivering a tone poem on the spot. Gil’s attendees could sense he was in his impulsive or maybe his impatient mode, which was always a fine line, often a toss-up. “Sully,” he said, spotting me. “Talk to Johnson. Show me something tomorrow. Give it your ol’ Robert Frost.” He was entertaining himself. I had never indicated Frost tendencies or allegiances although, sure, I liked him fine. Who didn’t?

I left the room with an assignment. Step one was to contact Rafer Johnson, which in a pre-internet age must have taken me a bit of strategizing and a little time. I’m sure I went to a brethren reporter at the L.A. Times for a phone number, or maybe Kenny Moore, or maybe the press office with the Olympic Committee. I clearly did talk to Johnson either that night or the next morning. Today in 2024, I have a very positive view of Rafer Johnson, so he must have been accommodating. I know for a fact he was very smart, so I’m sure his comments were thoughtful. I knocked out something at the keys and shaved it to length with subsequent drafts. I remember it being, let’s say, effusive, playing off a theme I’d concocted: The Torchbearer. Frost would have been far more elliptical, subtle and, well, poetic. I’m not going to look it up on SI Vault and quote from it, because the essay itself is beside the point. This is a Gil story.

Gil’s top deputy Peter Carry was serving as our Mission Chief in L.A. I called him from my bungalow or called SI Headquarters and asked for him.

(Yes, I had a bungalow. Gil was staying at his favorite Los Angeles hotel, the Beverly Hills; Peter was in whatever hotel was home base for our headquarters: Mission Control, or Headquarters, or the Kremlin. We writers and reporters each had a private bungalow, one of a little village of them ringing the spacious back lawn of the grand Ambassador Hotel, which was best known to me and most of us as the place where Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. While I’m thinking of the Ambassador, I’ll note: Bill Eppridge, who was in 1984 an SI photographer who earlier in the year, having arrived in Sarajevo a week ahead of most of the writers and reporters, had taught me the tricks of covering the luge track, had made the famous picture of RFK mortally wounded on the floor at the Ambassador after being shot by Sirhan Sirhan; One of Bill’s closest friends on the staff, Bob Boyle, told me that Bill had come to revere Bobby, and was never quite the same guy after that night in 1968. Whether he wondered if he should have made that picture or tried to assist in that frantic moment, I do not know. Interestingly also, perhaps: One who did assist as he was also right there at the scene was one of Kennedy’s bodyguards, the former decathlete Rafer Johnson. Sirhan was tackled by, get this, a true murderer’s row: Johnson, NFL star Rosie Grier and, of course he’s always on hand, George Plimpton All of these vigorous men were Bobby disciples, Plimpton being only slightly more journalistically neutral than the big guys. What a strange world we live in.)

“Peter,” I said on the phone of my Ambassador bungalow, “I’ve finished a try on this thing Gil wanted. How do I get it to him.”

“Send it in to Copy. I’ll get it here. But I’ll have to print it out because Gil wants to see everything soonest and he’s working on hard-copy this afternoon. Come over here and I’ll tell you where to go.”

I drove to whatever hotel was hosting SI HQ. (Yes, we each had our own rental car for a month out there, too. We were Sports Illustrated.) Peter gave me the hard-copy. “Gil’s at the Beverly Hills,” Peter said. “I think he’s still at the pool.”

I may have been thinking “you gotta be shittin' me” but then again, probably not — I would have realized that of course he was. I hit the freeway and found relatively smooth sailing. An irony of being in Los Angeles for the Games, as all the Angelenos were saying, was that traffic was so much lighter than usual, what with the locals having fled the city if they could, and the tourists taking Olympic shuttles or — get this! — walking. 

I asked at the desk and learned that, indeed, “Mr. Rogin is at the pool. Down that corridor, and . . .”

As I strolled the corridor I was worried that Gil would be just diving in or in mid-swim. I was worried about a few things, but that was one of them. If he had in fact finished his swim, I was hoping it had gone well. 

I spotted him as soon as I stepped back into the sunshine. Gil was alone. He was reclining on a chaise longue, the back half of which was nearly upright at an 80-degree slant. Ours was a day of characteristically fine weather, calm, standardly low humidity, 87-degree heat. I heard no birds chirping but you can add chirping birds to the scene if it pleases you.

There was a coffee mug of red pencils reachable on the pool deck, immediately to Gil’s right. A small pile of hard-copy rested on a glass-topped table to his left. Gil was garbed in one of the hotel’s fluffy terrycloth bathrobes. “Resplendent" just about says it. He was working; it’d hard to say he was hard at work. He was, rather, the very model of a happy top editor on holiday from New York City. Instead of announcing to nobody in particular on the 20^th Floor of the Time & Life Building, “I’m goin’ to the crapper and get some work done in private,” he was a self-contented 20^th century Nero rendered at toil by David Hockney. He was, in this peculiar motif, ruler of an empire, which was the city-state of All Sports Journalism.

Oh, yes, Gil knew this, and he would revel in it throughout this, his first (and, as it would eventuate, only) Olympics as emperor. When Jimmy Carter had boycotted the Moscow Games in 1980, he had deprived the athletes a chance to compete, sure, but to Gil’s mind, he had deprived Gilbert Rogin, in his second year as Managing Editor of Sports Illustrated magazine, his own shot at greater glory.

Yes, the world does have its way of working: Here was Rafer Johnson, veteran of the top podium spot at the 1960 Olympics and also the horror at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, lighting the flame to open the 1984 Games — all contained in an L.A. mile. And here was Gil Rogin, finally . . . Gil the Great . . . same mile: Editor/Emperor/Conqueror, presiding as chants of “USA, USA!” began to echo throughout the land. 

Or so I amused myself thinking when I spotted him, easy to spot as he was. Gil was clearly in hog heaven with whomsoever were his gods. I took this as a good sign. 

“Hey Gil, I’ve got something for your pile. I’m not sure . . .” 

“Hello, Sully!” Gil all but exulted. “Would you like a lemonade?” 

“I gotta get . . .”

“Stay here. Give me that.” I handed over the printout. He tossed the pencil he had been using to the pool deck and withdrew a sharply pointed one. I took this as a bad sign. “Let me see . . .”

Although L.A. is famously dry, I was sweating. I later concluded that I must have stumbled into Gil Rogin’s most-lighthearted-ever editing session — most la-de-da of his professional life.

He made one mark in my lede graf: one little squiggle of a line deleting one word. He made another a few sentences on. He made maybe three in all. He was done in five minutes. He red-penciled his initials and said, “Here you go, Sully. Move that along. Good stuff.” I took the copy from him. He immediately returned to the sheet he’d been working on when I’d arrived.

“Thanks, Gil.”

“ ‘The Torchbearer,’ ” Gil said absently (although I have no idea if we headlined the spread with that). “Good stuff. Let the Games begin!” 

“See ya.”

I drove back to HQ with a song in my heart. I think I was humming, or singing very loudly, Jerry Jeff’s version of Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway.” I handed in the copy to Peter, knowing Gil’s large, red-penciled initials in the right margin precluded any Senior Editor or Blue Pencil stages being needed. This was any writer’s impossibly sublime circumstance.

I told this story with a smile that night over beers at a bar. One of my colleagues said, “Damn. I’m bringing my shit there tomorrow. What time’s Gil swim?”