Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

by Carlo Rotella

  Original publication: TriQuarterly 121, 2005.

  The Mouse Sled

  THE OTHER DAY ONE of my daughters, in a snit at having been sent upstairs for some infraction, knocked my Casio CQ-81 combination calculator-alarm clock off my bureau and broke it. A silver-gray triumph of late-’70s design, with its green LCD screen slanted upward at the same 45-degree angle as the racing stripe on an AMC Gremlin, it looks like a sled for mice. I picture two or three of them, reclining side by side in the angle, squeaking happily as the CQ-81 zooms across the same hilly snowscape that Santa traversed on his electric razor-cum-snowmobile in Norelco’s Christmas ads.

  The Mouse Sled sat undisturbed on my bureau for years before my daughter got to it, and before that, as I moved from here to there over the past three decades, it sat on other bureaus and desks, on shelves, in drawers and boxes—all the while dutifully telling the time but rarely consulted, almost never used as a calculator and only once in a long while as an alarm clock. It stopped working for a few years, then started again, perhaps because I finally changed the batteries. Now, thanks to my daughter, it doesn’t work at all. But its real value has always been as a totem, anyway.

  My parents gave me the Mouse Sled for Christmas when I was fifteen, the first of many presents intended to assist me in getting organized and making myself presentable: calculators, clocks, watches, belts, ties, dress shirts, sweaters, jackets. My parents still give me presents to help me look and act like a grown-up, only now they do it with my blessing. In fact, I tacitly rely on them to help keep me supplied with work clothes. But back when I was fifteen, I received the Mouse Sled as a dire portent.

  I didn’t want a caculator-alarm clock. For Christmas and my birthday I usually asked for war games. These were board-game simulations, with scores or hundreds of little square cardboard pieces representing military units that players maneuvered on a map marked off with hexagons. A new game, unboxed, smelled like concentrated essence of new book. I would punch out and separate the pieces, set them up on the board, and then set about mastering the dense rule book, which featured entries on the order of “5.87: Unlimbered artillery stacked with non-disorganized infantry in a Brigade grouping (see 4.46–49) can be moved at the rate of the slowest infantry unit in the Brigade over clear terrain, bridges, roads, and, at a penalty of two movement points, streams and brooks (see 3.4–7), except in Rainy Weather scenarios, when special conditions apply (see 8.21).”

  I didn’t try to find opponents. I played both sides, more than two when necessary. I would spread the board on my desk, which my father’s father built, and sit hunched over it deep into the night. My principal failing as a general was a tendency to draw out the opening phases in which the opposing armies jockeyed for position before committing to bloodshed. I shrank from the messiness of engagement, and I wanted to prolong the game. The most important thing about war games was that they took days to play. I wasn’t just killing the imaginary troops under my command; without consciously having decided to, I was killing time until I could go away to college, when, I vaguely expected, life would begin in earnest.

  Like a soccer team that needs only to lose by fewer than three goals to advance to the next round of the World Cup, I spent my high school years kicking the ball out of bounds, making a shabby pretense of hurrying to put it back in play, running time off the clock. I did my school work, I had friends, I didn’t curl up in the fetal position, but I committed as little of myself as I could to life, and I never took a risk—social, emotional, or intellectual—that I could safely defer. War games served my purpose, and their intimidating rule books and pieces bristling with numbers and symbols gave them an intellectual aura that fended off parental objections.

  Still, my parents picked up on my stalling tactics. I have a memory of my father, still in suit and tie after a long day at the office, pausing at the doorway of my room late one evening. I was at my desk, bent over a map of Borodino or Tobruk, moving pieces and plotting to outsmart myself. After a while I became aware of him and looked back over my shoulder. He said to no one in particular, “Always playing games. He’s always playing games.”

  Now, 30 years later, I can name the unnameable unease that filled me when I unwrapped the Mouse Sled on Christmas morning. As a gift, it was both a gentle smack on the back of the head—wake up!—and a firm handshake welcoming a probationary adult to a life ordered by work rather than play. My parents, immigrants who worked like sled dogs and instructed by example rather than preachment, were urging me to take the measure of time: It’s passing, don’t fritter it away; use it well by using up what’s inside you, harvesting the crop so that more can grow. Among the most important gifts they have given their sons is an awareness that life is short and work is good for you.

  Now I have the Mouse Sled on my desk in the office at home, where I write. One corner is dented and cracked. When I put in the batteries, a hissing noise comes out of the alarm clock’s tiny speaker, but nothing appears on the screen. The perp who broke it sneaks covert looks at it when she comes into the office. She can’t figure out why she’s not being punished. She’s only eight; in a few years, especially if she begins to show signs of thinking that she needs only to lose by fewer than three goals to advance to the next round of life, I’ll tell her the story of the Mouse Sled. It probably won’t ever tell time or multiply again, but it could still wake somebody up.

  * * *

  Original publication: Washington Post Magazine, November 22, 2009.

  A Game

  EARLY IN THE MORNING, geese forage in the strip of park along Memorial Drive on the Cambridge side of the river. The leaves are mostly down and it’s almost cold. A scattering of homeless men sleep on the grass, having spent the night wrapped in blankets, their possessions assembled around them. The Yale band, hauling cased instruments and carryout from Dunkin’ Donuts, straggles across the Larz Anderson bridge, which connects Harvard to its athletics complex, business school, and burgeoning real estate empire on the Boston side of the river. One musician, a dark-haired lass, says, “Okay, the party scene here sucks! I was in taxis all night, and we used up all our money.” Others commiserate, but they all seem to have found parties that lasted well into the morning. They cross the river, headed toward the high concrete bulk of Harvard Stadium.

  If you continue over the bridge to the stadium, circle around behind it, and cut through a parking lot in which the first alumni tailgaters are already setting up, you arrive at a muddy field where the Yale Women’s Rugby Football Club is playing its opposite number at Harvard, the Radcliffe Rugby Football Club. The players wear striped shirts and shorts. Their legs look cold, but they don’t care.

  The game kicks off at 8:04. At 8:10, a pile of struggling bodies surges across the try line and a blue-and-white arm touches the ball down on the ground: 5–0, Yale. A stumpy little Harvard bruiser has to leave the game, clutching her ribs and smiling apologetically. One of Yale’s coaches says, “We’re knocking them around pretty good.” Phillippa Thompson, Yale’s flyhalf, who wears one of those closefitting caps with ear guards that make rugby players look like medieval henchmen, crushes a Harvard ball carrier and then scoops up the ball, racing far downfield before being tackled. Soon it’s 10–0, Yale.

  Drums start up somewhere out of sight, a band warming up. The November sun comes out, bright but weak. Harvard mounts its best scoring chance in the game’s final minutes, pushing across the try line as time runs out, but the Yale defenders get their arms under the ball and prevent it from being touched down. The referee blows his whistle, ending the game in a shutout. This, it turns out, will be Yale’s athletic high point of the day.

  In the shadow of the stadium, a middle-aged supervisor in a red windbreaker lectures a group of young local jocks who will serve as ushers. They look like regular guys; buzz cuts and Irish faces predominate. The supervisor, who has a ripe Boston accent, is trying to prepare them for the shock of encountering Harvard and Yale types in extremis. He says, “You will see levels of int
oxication you’ve never seen before.” This can’t possibly be true, but he’s speaking for effect. “They’re handing out free beer across the street there,” he says. The young guys exchange glances: Free beer! Now that’s the place to go to college. “Another thing. The students run this place. Not the police, the students. This isn’t like anything you’ve seen before. Brown is bad, but this is worse than Brown. And every one of these people has a lawyer on speed dial, you know what I mean? So be polite, keep ’em moving, and if there’s trouble just back off and get a supervisor or a police officer.” The ushers appear to be wondering what they have gotten themselves into, but they also seem eager to get a look at the exotic animals they will soon be herding.

  At 10:20, Yale’s football team arrives on three Peter Pan buses and files to its locker room like a company about to go over the top in a decisive battle of the Great War—hushed, grimly intent, eyes fixed on the middle distance.

  Across North Harvard Street from the stadium, at Ohiri Field, which has been set aside for undergraduate tailgating, cops and security guards check tickets and IDs at the gate. You get your wrist tag here, you get your beer there; no money changes hands. Music cranks. Couches and tables have been hauled out onto the grass. Beer pong players hit the game’s signature loft shot with gestures of exaggerated care.

  Yale students congregate at the far end of the field. The party has built up more momentum here, young men and women already packing in close, talking loud, greeting new arrivals with shouts and hugs as if surprised to run into them so far from home. The visitors always get drunker than the home team’s fans. Their greater excitement derives from the root logic of a college road trip: We were there, now we’re all here . . . it’s amazing. A clever-looking fellow laughs and laughs, staggering, half-slain with mirth. He wears The Uniform—khaki pants, blue blazer, red tie—and holds a torpedo of St. Ides in one hand.

  Several Boston police officers and firefighters move through the crowd, impassive and largely ignored. One cop frog-marches a post-collegiate guy in shades and ball cap across the field toward an exit. Every time the cop says, “You jumped the fuckin’ fence,” the guy interrupts him, saying, “I did not jump a fence.” But most of the police and firefighters have nothing much to do. Nobody’s going to touch off a riot with a sucker punch or torch a car just to watch the son of a bitch burn.

  No matter how much talk there might be about going crazy at The Game, nobody’s going to do anything . . . crazy. Yes, a few thousand young adults liquor up well before noon, but it’s a ritual suspension of norms rather than a burst of spontaneous troublemaking—a carnival, not a mob scene. There are plenty of people, some of them college students, who regularly get drunk and mean before noon and go looking for trouble, but none of them appears to be on Ohiri Field this morning. And crowds, even crowds of college students, do go wild, but not this crowd. Everybody present, including those who have reasons to feel genuinely alienated from their own Ivy status, has too much to lose.

  Back on the stadium side of North Harvard Street, where the alumni have set up camp, the atmosphere is quieter, even serene. A swelling hubbub of genial talk, wafts of cooking-meat smells, and crisp November air combine to produce a distinctive tailgate synesthesia. The faces at this party are road maps of life after college, bearing the marks of marriage and divorce, houses, jobs, money management, sickness, success, disappointment, kids, grandchildren. Compared to them, the attractive and accomplished undergraduates across the street seem like the blank pod people from outer space in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; they have yet to take on features and become somebody.

  A hickory-carved septuagenarian in khakis, walking through the tailgate area with a friend, is seized by a coughing fit so violent that he gags and throws up. He tries to catch it with one gloved hand. Tendrils of vomity spit dangle from his fingers and chin. His companion asks if he’s okay. “Yuh,” he says with a curt shake of his head, wiping it off, ready for more.

  At 11:40, the Harvard team, in uniform, files from its locker room to the stadium, cleats clicking on the paved path. It’s almost game time.

  Up in the press box at the top of the stadium, reporters and functionaries occupy two rows of seats looking down on the field. There are also a couple of pro scouts. One of them, himself only a few years removed from college ball, says that while Ryan Fitzpatrick, Harvard’s fine quarterback, has attracted a lot of attention from the NFL, he has an eye on three Yale prospects: Rory Hennessey, the offensive left tackle; Ralph Plumb, a wide receiver; and Barton Simmons, the free safety. “Guys like this,” the scout says, “they got a chance to get to a training camp maybe as a late-round guy, or a free agent. They’ll get a look from some teams. They’re smart, and smart guys get better faster.” Playing on the road, the Yale prospects have a special opportunity to impress the pros today. “It’s easy to look good when they’re at home in front of five thousand people, but under pressure on the road in their big game, if they step it up and do well here, that tells me something.”

  On the field, Harvard’s seniors are being introduced one by one. Almost all of the seniors on both teams will end their football careers today, but a select few will go on to take a shot at the big time. Coming out of Division I-AA programs, seeking to prove themselves against Division I-A stars, those who do take that shot will be underdogs, an unfamiliar position for a graduate of Yale or Harvard. If they succeed, against the odds, in turning a schoolboy pastime into a profession, the consequences of playing or coaching football will deepen for them, the stakes going up as the years go by. You look up and suddenly you’re 30, or 40, and the roads you took mean other roads not taken. It gets harder to change your major in life, even if you went to Yale or Harvard.

  When the game begins, shortly after 12:30, two separate dramas get underway. In one of them, the familiar drama of Yale vs. Harvard, the players arrive at the climax of their seasons and, in many cases, their football careers. Yale can redeem its disappointing 5–4 record with an upset, spoiling Harvard’s chance at a 10–0 season. In Ivy League sports, silver linings abound and character formation trumps statistics. Yale can’t win the league title this year, but with a victory it can still win the Harvard-Yale-Princeton title, avert a four-year sweep of its Class of 2005 by Harvard, and deny Harvard perfection. Or, if Yale loses, its players can take solace in striving nobly in defeat and knowing that Yale is still fifteen wins up on Harvard in their long-running series. One way or another, no matter how bad the losers may feel at the moment the clock runs out, everybody wins. Nothing that happens in the game will prevent any of the players from running for the Senate in 30 years or so.

  In the day’s other drama, a handful of prospects show their wares to the scouts, antisentimentalists who do not hold office hours at which you can ask them to reconsider a grade. The dramas will occasionally intersect—when a prospect makes a game-changing play, for instance—but they are about different things. One is about college; one is about the world beyond it.

  On the third play of the game, Ralph Plumb catches a pass in the flat for a first down. The scout says “Plumb” and makes a notation on his game program. Plumb catches another ball for a first down before the offense stalls and Yale has to punt. “He moved the sticks,” says the scout, nodding. Asked about Rory Hennessey, who blocks with his usual Herculean aplomb, the scout says, “Won’t know about him until the third or fourth quarter.” Let’s see how consistent he can be in a big game, after the initial burst of adrenaline gives out.

  On defense, Barton Simmons plows like a bighorn sheep into guys wearing red and looks for a chance to make a big play. Late in the first quarter, Ryan Fitzpatrick hangs a pass up in the air too long and Simmons almost intercepts it, reaching the ball at the same time as the receiver, but they bump each other and it falls incomplete. Early in the second quarter, Fitzpatrick misses a receiver with a pass and Simmons gathers in the ball just before it hits the ground, but the referees rule it incomplete. Simmons gets up and gets back to work, ballh
awking, hitting, trying to read Fitzpatrick and make him pay for mistakes.

  Harvard scores three touchdowns in the first half—on a run, a punt return, and a disastrous error by Yale’s quarterback, Alvin Cowan, who, after guiding his team to the goal line, throws the ball directly to a Harvard defender who runs it back the other way 100 yards for a touchdown. Yale manages only a field goal in response. At halftime, it’s 21–3, Harvard.

  By halftime, the scout has written next to Plumb’s name the following laudatory notes: catch—turned for ball, catch over middle, catch in crowd over middle, and inside guy. There is also one demerit, a drop, which seems unfair, since the ball in question was thrown into the turf at Plumb’s feet. Next to Simmons’s name he has written an approving Big Hit. Next to Hennessey’s he has written Beaten off edge pressure, an instance of stern grading. Hennessey blocks well throughout the first half, but on just one play he allows a Harvard defender to fight past him and hit the quarterback after Cowan has thrown a complete pass to Plumb. Hennessey is Yale’s leading prospect: 6’4,” 300 pounds, and his coaches claim that he has not allowed a sack in his entire collegiate career. But he allows himself a single lapse in the first half, a lapse that doesn’t even hurt his team, and that’s all the scout’s notes have to say about him.

  From the press box, if you turn away from the stadium field and look into the distance through the rear windows, you can see the rugby pitch, where the games continue: Yale men vs. Harvard men, Harvard alumni vs. the current Harvard teams. There are no prospects on display. Most major cities have club teams, but there’s no professional American league to aspire to. Ivy League women and men play rugby for love of the game, for the exercise and camaraderie, for the bracing jolt of sporting collisions. If they continue to play after graduation, those same reasons will have to do, because there aren’t any others.