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.