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MEDIA Out In Left Field

Skip Bayless doesn’t care if you like him, as long as you read him.
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SKIP BAYLESS PRIDES HIMSELF ON keeping secrets about others and keeping no secrets about himself. Or so he tells you during a long and, it seems, quite revealing talk. Then you pick up the paper a few days later and-surprise! You learn that Bayless is taking a six-month semi-hiatus from his spot as lead sports colum-nist for the Dallas Times Herald, reducing his output from almost five columns a week to Sundays and occasional other pieces. He’s going to write a book about the Dallas Cowboys and Tom Landry. Brace yourself. Due from Simon and Schuster next year, the Bayless take on the Cowboys is not going to waste much space on Phil Poz-derac’s sticky fingers or the leveling tendencies of King Parity. No, he has bigger fish to fry. What Bayless has in mind, he says from atop his morning exercise bike, is an almost metaphysical tome about a most physical game:

“Basically, it’s about the ongoing conflict of religion and corruption upon which this organization was built. It is truly the rise and fall of an American empire. In a nutshell, it’s the conflict of Tom Landry being sold by the most powerful PR machine in the history of sports as God’s coach and figurehead for an organization that often belonged to the devil.”

Gulp.

Now that Tom Landry has met Arkansas’ answer to Brutus and moody Mark Aguirre has found a new hanger for his mink coat, Skip Bay less stands as this town’s most enigmatic and complex sports character. Want some help in figuring him out? Hey, just ask his younger brother Rick to explain the mind of Skip Bayless:

“Well, I haven’t talked to him in a couple of years. Really, it’s like we grew up in different families…You know; I wish I could help you. But I really don’t know who he is.”

If Bayless’s brother hesitates to describe him, scores of apoplectic readers don’t. Bayless may be the only Dallas writer since Joe Bob Briggs to earn semi-organized opposition; numerous voices on local call-in sports shows proudly claim membership in something called the “I Skipped Bayless” club. It’s not unusual to hear him derisively dismissed as “Skippy” by fans who sound like they just spit their morning coffee all over his column.

At times, Bayless seems to play the deliberate contrarian, reaching out and whacking the hornet’s nest when things get too quiet. He was needling Herschel Walker (“The Lord is my shepherd and Donald Trump is my shepherd too?”) long before Walker humbly, meekly agreed to take several million dollars in exchange for moving his God-given talents to Minnesota. And he made a subtler point than most sports columnists would dare when he asked a touchy question not about Walker, really, but about Dallas fans: had not-so-sweet Tony Dorsett been married to a white woman, as Walker is, can you imagine how the redneck mothers would have blasted Tony D? Bayless took heavy shrapnel from all over the map on that one.

Does Bayless thrive on turmoil? He recently gave most of a column to his girl-friend, “my Peggy,” who wistfully recalled bygone Cowboy glamour boys and dissected the pock marks and nose hairs belonging to this season’s sorry cast. All that was missing was a foldout of Drew Pearson in a loincloth.

To understand Skip Bayless even a little bit, you must first recall that old television series, “The Odd Couple.” Oscar Madison was the cigar-chomping, beer-with-the-boys sportswriter. His roommate, Felix Unger, was the fastidious, cultured influence. Imagine Felix linger in the press box, and you’ve got Bayless. As one friend said, Bayless is “not a wimp, not a nerd. He’s a misfit-especially in Dallas. He’s not going to sit down and have a beer with the guys. He can’t fake it.” And the feeling is mutual with Bayless’s colleagues. “My gawd,” spat one fellow sportswriter, “what do the rest of us have in common with some goombah who brings his own [no-oil] salad dressing to a Mavericks game?”

Bayless, who has not only written about marathons but run them, admits that his spartan diet is only one of many compulsions in his life. The thirty-eight-year-old writer remains addicted to exercise and to the similar rush brought on by self-inflicted deadline pressure. Not long ago, Sports Illustrated came calling, offering a cushy gig that would have called for a leisurely ten or twenty vignettes a year. Bayless chose to stay in the high-profile pressure cooker of the Herald. Now he wonders how he’ll stand six months away from the hornet’s nest.



BY ANY STANDARDS, SKIP BAYLESS WAS AN UNhappy Oklahoma City teenager. Bayless readers know that his mother, Levita, was a saint who took to drinking too much. Bayless has written with surprising candor of his mother’s struggle for sobriety, drawing on her experiences to illuminate the addictive nature and repeated falls of Dallas Maverick Roy Tarpley.

Bayless’s late father, who owned a barbecue place, was also an alcoholic. “He wanted me to be average,” Bayless says matter-of-factly. “My father couldn’t deal with the fact that 1 was good at sports and at school.” For the first time, Bayless’s tone changes from helpful and reflective to bitter. The young man had set goals, both athletic and academic, but he got no help from his father. “He discouraged it, laughed at it. Scoffed at it.” Before long, open scoffing turned to open warfare; Skip vividly recalls one physical clash wherein Dad’s head ended up in the potato salad. ’’All he said after that was ’Go home to your mother.’”

During Bayless’s senior year in high school, Vanderbilt offered him the coveted Grantland Rice Scholarship in journalism. Normally, a kid would turn to his dad for advice at such a juncture, but having ’’ruined a perfectly good batch of potato salad” with Dad’s head not long before, the all-city baseball player was left to consult with his girlfriend Liz, the head cheerleader. They had been dating since Liz was twelve years old and had broken up and gotten back together ’’about 482 times,” Bayless says. To Skip, the Vanderbilt decision came down to living in Oklahoma the rest of his not overly happy life or getting the hell out. He was gone.

After finishing at Vanderbilt, Bayless had planned to go to work for the Daily Oklahonmn’s legendary Frank Boggs. But two nights before graduation, Bayless received a call from his soon-to-be boss. “He said, ’1 don’t want you to come here. You’ll get stuck here and you won’t have a way out, and $150 [a week] is an insult to you.’ ” Boggs spared Bayless the insult by making enough phone calls to get the Miami Herald interested. Skip and Liz, predictable June ’75 newlyweds, spent two years in Miami before going on to The Los Angeles Times and a predictable separation. By the time the Morning News called in 1978, Bayless was ready to leave and no wakeup call could have saved the marriage.

Things were weird when Bayless moved in with Liz’s parents for a while upon reaching Dallas, but weird personified was the Morning News sports department, which Walter Robertson ran with a whip and a chair. No Felix Lingers (here. As Bayless surveyed his peers, he could spot one colleague whose everyday diet consisted of five pieces of copy paper and three quarts of Lone Star beer. Another seemed to spend an enormous amount of time on the phone each day barking orders to his “love slave.” No one would have dreamed of wearing a tie to that pound. In a matter of days, Bayless had an office as far away as physically possible from this belching hoi polloi. One fellow columnist summed up Bayless’s time at the Morning News this way: “He set out not to make friends and he succeeded.”

Bayless, who jumped ship to the Herald in 1982, perhaps needs few friends. He thinks that isolation from the rest of the sports-writing pack brings fresh insight. “Too many writers wait for all [the opinions] of the other guys in the press box. In all our denying insecurity, we want our peers to say we’re okay.” Long pause. “I don’t really care.”

To this day, Bayless and fellow Herald columnist Frank Luksa are never seated together, the result of a feud grown ten years old. Though Bayless denies any conscious effort to hype sales through a deliberate point-counterpoint, the two couldn’t be more different. Luksa has led the pack in his unmerciful gutting of the Cowboys’ new ownership, while lone-wolf Bayless rides the almost-empty Jones & Johnson bandwagon. Perhaps Bayless, the outsider, is more sympathetic to the JJs because he knows how it feels to be the new guy that people don’t invite to happy hour.

As a result of his indifference to peers’ opinions, Bayless says, he has “a lot of gears that other guys won’t try… I’m not as good at trivia stuff or at telling you why Raphael Palmeiro should be hitting second instead of third as 1 am at telling you that something is missing with Bobby Valentine.” The Rangers manager, of course, thinks there is something missing with Bayless and has told his coaches and other insiders that he “hates’’ the Herald columnist.

For his part, Bayless probably would rather eat a plateful of red meat than spend an evening in Valentine’s company. “I just can’t connect with him. He’s very sarcastic with me. Finally I decided, why do I need him to waste my time? I don’t need him for my opinion.”

What Bayless desperately does need in order to form his opinion is women-lots of ’em. As readers.

“I write for women,” Bayless brags. Demographic surveys at the Herald show that surprising numbers of women read Bayless. Sometimes, Bayless reads his column aloud to his girlfriend and fellow Vanderbilt graduate Peggy Black, who lives conveniently across the street from the Bayless digs near Lemmon and Lomo Alto.

Now in his third “real relationship” Bayless says he tries hard to juggle his schedule to give enough time to Peggy, while wondering if the duet can take the pace. Often, he finds himself listening with one ear to the vicissitudes of Peggy’s day-but the television is on in the background, and “the other ear knows that Charlie Hough is being shelled again.”

Skip Bayless may be an enigma-even unto himself. Then again, he might just be a boy from Oklahoma with good college manners writing about boys’ games for women. A writing craftsman whose construction and creativity sometimes get lost in far-flung opinion. A boy who grew up without smoking or drinking or cheating on his girlfriends and who, when he gets a rational piece of mail, actually answers it. “Check this out,” says Bayless. “I handwrite every one of them.”

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