Robert Lipsyte
| Robert Lipsyte | |
|---|---|
Lipsyte
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| Born |
Robert Michael Lipsyte January 16, 1938 New York City, New York, USA |
| Residence | New York City and Shelter Island, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Sports journalist, author |
| Employer | New York Times, ESPN, CBS, NBC, various publishers |
| Home town | Rego Park, New York City |
| Children | 2 children |
| Website | http://robertlipsyte.com/ |
Robert Michael Lipsyte (born January 16, 1938) is an American sports journalist and author and former Ombudsman for ESPN. He is a member of the Board of Contributors for USA Today's Forum Page, part of the newspaper's Opinion section. He received the Margaret Edwards Award from the American Library Association in 2001 for his contribution in writing for teens.
Lipsyte was born on January 16, 1938, in New York City, the son of Fanny (Finston) and Sidney I. Lipsyte. He grew up in Rego Park, a neighborhood in the New York city borough of Queens. Lipsyte’s father was a school principal, his mother a teacher. Young Robert devoted his childhood to books rather than sports. Instead of sharing a game of catch with his father, the two often visited the library. Robert's son, Sam Lipsyte, is also an author and teacher at Columbia University in New York.
In the first chapter of his 1975 book SportsWorld, which considers the role of sports in American culture, Lipsyte points out that he did not even attend his first major league baseball game until he was thirteen years old, despite the fact that there were three major league teams in New York: the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers. Lipsyte says he was “profoundly disappointed” with his experience at the game and so went to only one more game “as a paying customer.” His third major league game was as a sports reporter for The New York Times.
As a boy, Lipsyte did play Chinese handball against the sides of brick buildings and participated in street games such as stickball, but he felt acute pressure to excel at sports which discouraged his interest. This experience later developed into a major theme in some of Lipsyte’s nonfiction works such as SportsWorld and novels like Jock and Jill (1982) and his trilogy beginning with One Fat Summer (1977). The protagonist of One Fat Summer, Bobby Marks, is similar to Lipsyte: Bobby is an adolescent in the 1950s, suffering from a weight problem, who does something about it. In 1952, Lipsyte took a summer job as a lawn boy and lost forty pounds, ridding himself of the youthful stigma of excess weight.
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