By Noah Perkins, Bulletin Staff
Phil Rizzuto interviews a basketball player during his days reporting for the Cambridge (Mass.) Chronicle.
Phil Rizzuto has an encyclopedic knowledge of Major League Baseball. Ask him about Kid Nichols, the 19th century Boston Beaneaters pitcher from the old National League, and he’ll rattle off his earned run average and career wins like it’s second nature.
“When you start watching sports as a kid, it’s a connection with your family,” Rizzuto said. “It’s exhilarating. It’s one of the few things that is more or less fair. There aren’t the same discriminations and biases that go into other things.”
His first window into professional sports came as a 5-year-old. Rizzuto remembers being captivated by news coverage of the well-publicized low-speed police chase involving former football star O.J. Simpson. In the 22 years since, sports fandom has become one of the central elements of Rizzuto’s identity.
“When I was in middle school, I would write articles about games just for myself,” Rizzuto said. “Sports have always been a big part of my life.”
As he got older, Rizzuto continued to write about sports, publishing his opinions for friends on social media as Facebook notes.
In September 2009, after dropping out of Suffolk University, Rizzuto, a lifelong resident of Cambridge, Mass., found a larger audience after offering his services to the Cambridge Chronicle. After submitting a sample of his work, Rizzuto became the sole provider of local high school sports coverage for the Chronicle.
“I wasn’t in school, I was looking for things to occupy my time, and I noticed there wasn’t really any local coverage for sports in the Chronicle, which I thought was kind of the point of having a local newspaper,” Rizzuto said. “I emailed the editor. He told me to go to a game and send in a writing sample. He liked it and said they’d pay me to do it, and if I wanted to keep doing it to let him know.”
For four years, Rizzuto contributed a weekly story to the Chronicle. His coverage encompassed athletics at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. His fondest memories are of the feature stories he wrote, in which more of an emotional connection was made.
“It was gratifying to see my name in print,” Rizzuto said. “I felt like someone who was making a positive impact on the community. To give kids pride in their accomplishments was certainly a good feeling. I got to meet a lot of student athletes, coaches and administrators. For someone from here who wants to stay here, it was useful making those connections.”
Rizzuto, while writing for the Chronicle, went back to school, umpired Little League baseball games, scooped ice cream at Lizzy’s Ice Cream in Cambridge and worked for an after-school program.
With too many commitments and a desire to pursue other things, he left the Chronicle in 2013.
In January, after nine years behind the counter, Rizzuto obtained an interim license to run Lizzy’s Ice Cream in Harvard Square as he waited for his purchase of the business to be finalized so he could officially become its owner.
Ironically, it was originally unrequited love that brought him to Lizzy’s in 2007.
“I was pursuing someone romantically,” Rizzuto said. “She worked there and I thought the best way to woo her was to stand next to her and scoop ice cream. That turned out to not be the case, but now I own a business, and … I’m not sure what she is doing with herself. As far as I know, it’s not owning a business.”
While scooping ice cream might not be as exciting as high school sports, it has provided Rizzuto with some memorable moments. Most notable for him was when he served ice cream at a charity function with Kevin Garnett, then a power forward with the Boston Celtics.
“I haven’t gotten very far, but I’ve done a lot in this town,” Rizzuto said.
Both encouraging and discouraging results from First Amendment survey
Gene Policinski, inside the First Amendment
Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. He can be reached at gpolicinski@newseum.org.
Follow him on Twitter:
@genefac
This year’s State of the First Amendment national survey (SOFA), conducted in partnership with USA TODAY, does more than just sample our attitudes about those five core freedoms – it also might show just how those freedoms can work.
Overall, the survey’s specific findings tilt to the positive on the First Amendment. But there also are a few signs that we and our fellow citizens can do a better job of supporting freedom, or even knowing its components.
A whopping 86 percent reject the notion that free speech ought to give way to protecting people from things that might offend them. When it comes to college campuses – where the impact of negative speech on social media really hits home – support even for speech that offends still stands at 57 percent. Only when it comes to high school students does free speech come up short of a majority: Just 35 percent say it’s OK for those students to offend others.
The survey, conducted by the Newseum Institute’s First Amendment Center since 1997, still finds strong support for a free press as a “watchdog on government,” though 74 percent doubt that the “news media attempt to report the news without bias.” But perhaps the latter is not as much of an indictment in a time when some liberal and conservative news operations tout their points of view.
Eight of 10 are concerned about individual privacy in the Digital Age, but more than six of 10 would permit the government “to be able to force companies to unlock the data saved on the smartphones of customers who are accused of terrorist acts.”
So let’s turn to an interesting change in attitudes after the tragic mass shooting in Orlando June 12. The horrifying attack, in which 49 people were killed by an assailant, was followed by a burst of anti-Islamic rhetoric after the killer’s declaration of allegiance to ISIS.
In turn, all of that was followed by social and political pushback in the other direction. Muslim leaders decried the use of their faith to justify hatred of the United States or homophobic terrorism. Opposition was vocal to calls to increase surveillance of Muslims in America, or presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s continued suggestion of a ban for an indeterminate period on Muslims entering the United States.
The First Amendment Center went into the field in late May with its annual, national survey of adults – days before the deaths in Orlando. But given the intense national debate involving religious liberty after the attack, a second round of sampling was commissioned and completed June 27.
The second survey found support for First Amendment protection for what respondents might consider fringe or extreme faiths actually increased, despite anti-Muslim rhetoric and reports of an ISIS connection that followed the worst mass shooting in U.S history: The number of people who said such protection does not extend to such faiths dropped from 29 percent to 22 percent.
In both surveys, a little more than 1,000 adults were sampled by telephone, and the margin of error in the surveys was plus/minus 3.2 percent.
The First Amendment is predicated on the notion that citizens able to freely debate – without government censorship or direction – will exchange views, sometimes strongly and on controversial subjects, and find common ground.
In this case, that exchange of views seemingly produced increased support for protecting views many people would find offensive, even in the face of violence. In at least this survey’s findings, the nation spoke – in favor of freedom.
There’s one more result from this year’s State of the First Amendment that’s worth noting – nearly four in 10 of those questioned could not name a single freedom in the First Amendment unaided. For the record, they are religion, speech, press, assembly and petition.
Perhaps not identifying any one of the five as part of the First Amendment is not the same as not knowing you have those core freedoms. But neither does it build confidence that as a nation, we have a deep understanding of the core elements of what distinguishes our nation among others, or is so fundamental to the unique American experience of self-governance.
So in the spirit of the recent July 4th holiday and of the First Amendment year-round: Join in the fireworks – the ones you watch or the ones around important issues. And repeat after me: religion, speech, press, assembly and petition.