Paris To The Moon

by Adam Gopnik

  ***

  After about a year of telling the Rookie story, I went to New York to give a talk, and I turned the trip into a literary mission, a sort of Rookie collecting expedition. I wanted to bring home tangible evidence of something that, as a matter of fact, had never taken place there. I bought a baseball encyclopedia and a box of books on the Cobb era and borrowed a Ken Burns video. A vintage Giants cap, child size, which I thought would be the hardest thing to find, turned out to be absurdly easy; the past is so neatly packaged now that I just walked into a memorabilia store on Lexington Avenue and found a replica cap, no problem.

  When I got home, I put on the video, from the PBS Baseball series, which I had never seen, and we watched all those flickering, overfrantic little ghost figures racing around. One by one the faces and bodies and actions that you couldn't see in the photo above Luke's bed were being filled in. There was Ty Cobb, looking appropriately evil; there was John J. McGraw. There was pitching and batting (I realized, from Luke's comments, that he had them the wrong way around). There was baserunning.

  There was Christy Mathewson, and then a picture of Matty, handsome and assured as ever, slowly dissolving into a picture of a small, serious boy with blond bangs, wearing a baseball cap and a perfectly sober expression, going into a pitching windup. I still have no idea who he actually was (it's not Christy Mathewson's kid; I've found a picture of him, and he had darker hair), but of course Luke knew, perfectly well.

  "There he is," he said. "Rewind it." We watched Matty and the Rookie appear again, and then he told me to turn it off. He was uncharacteristically silent for the rest of the afternoon, but before dinner I heard him talking to his mother in the bath. "He had his hands up like this," he was saying chattily. "I don't know why."

  Sometime that month I began to think that it was time to round off the Rookie story, give it a suitably grand ending, turn the legend into a myth; I would find another story. I was having a hard time thinking of new plots, and anyway, it had been two years.

  It was, at last, the seventh game of the 1908 World Series.

  The Rookie had started three for the Giants, Matty the others. (Of course we had made the Giants, not the Cubs, grab the gonfalon on the final day.) It was the bottom of the ninth, the score tied one to one on homers by the Chief and Sam Crawford. Cobb was up. He dragged a bunt and headed for first, and this time he didn't just spike the Rookie; he actually slid into first base, razor-clad feet up. Hit hard, the Rookie held on to the ball. But the umpire ruled that the ball had rolled foul down the first-base line. The Rookie was bleeding, fed up, homesick, crowded by a ringer like Gizmo McGee, a Tiger midget pretending to be a four-year-old, and he had endured a full season (in two years) of cruel torment at the hands of this terrible man. So he did an awful thing: He loaded up and threw his best fastball right at Ty Cobb's head, threw so hard that Cobb's head came right off, popped up high, before settling back down, with a surprised look, on his shoulders.

  Umpire Bill Klem checked out Cobb—he was OK; the Rookie knew what he was doing—and then looked at the Rookie. "You're outta here, Rookie," he said, giving him the longest, slowest, saddest thumbing heave-ho that the major leagues have ever seen. "There's just no throwing at people in baseball." The crowd sat silent, disbelieving. The Rookie, head bowed, walked off the field.

  And (I said) he kept walking. The Chief and Matty and Mr. McGraw were waiting for him in the dugout, but he walked away from them, didn't even stop to take off his uniform in the center field clubhouse, just kept walking, right out of the Polo Grounds, day after day, week after week, until he was back in Anywhere, U.S.A., still in his uniform. His mother didn't ask any questions. She hugged him, helped him out of his uniform (she hung it in the closet), and asked him if he wanted something to eat, and the next day he went back to school. His legend grew, but he never picked up a ball again.

  Luke sat up. "He did not go home to his mother," he said clearly. I felt horrible, as evil as Ty Cobb. I saw in his eyes what seemed to me not anger, exactly, but something more like doubt, religious doubt as it is described in nineteenth-century novels. What if the Rookie hadn't risen again? What if the story had been only a story? What if someone was obviously manipulating it for a moral purpose? He had the relics and the photos, but like a true believer, he knew that it was all just talk if the Rookie didn't rise again.

  "He did not go home to his mother," he said again, and as quickly as I could, in a panic, I turned it around. Of course not, I said. He went home for that day, to relax. The next day a delegation from both leagues was in his front yard, insisting that he come back to the Giants. "Baseball can't survive without you, kid," said Ban Johnson, president of the American League. Even Cobb himself, bandaged and sheepish, was there. Finally the Rookie agreed to come back—"But no more dirty tricks," he said—and they played an eighth game (as they'd done once before), which he won.

  "You told the story wrong," he said finally. (And the next day he said to his mother, "Daddy told the Rookie story wrong.") So the story goes on, only now it is much more under the child's control. The Rookie soon entered a Gothic phase, as the little boy began to demand scary Rookie stories ("With a real witch. Not Ty Cobb dressed up like a witch. Not the Chief dressed up like a witch. A real witch") and, more recently, a decadent phase. The current story, for instance, involves Sherlock Holmes, the genie from Aladdin, a T. rex, and the Pirate King from Pirates of Penzance. Having been, if only momentarily, betrayed by the story, he was doing what the literary critics would call "contesting the narrative." The story belongs to him now.

  My Rookie never really played ball again, no matter how many stories I tell, any more than Sherlock Holmes really came back alive from the Reichenbach Falls, no matter how many stories Conan Doyle wrote about him afterward. I think the Rookie just went home to Anywhere, U.S.A., and back to school like all the other kids.

  Luke and I tried playing a little catch this spring in the Luxembourg Gardens but gave up after about five minutes. For a present, around that time, he asked us to make him his own carte d'identite, marked with a metier de journaliste—a press pass from the government—so that he could pretend to cut through red tape. We made him an impressive-looking fake government document, with a black-and-white photo and lots of cryptic, official-looking stamps. At bedtime now before the Rookie story starts, he likes to act out a French bureaucratic drama: I play a functionary guarding an entrance to something or other who scowls at him until he haughtily flashes his carte, and then I let him pass with many apologetic, ah-monsieur-I-did-not-recognize grimaces and shrugs, while his mother acts out the role of irate bystander, fuming in line as the privileged functionary serenely passes by. I suppose it is about time we took him home.

  I don't think about the Rookie as much as I used to, but when the bombs began to fall in Serbia I began thinking about that other Serbian conflagration, in 1914, and everything it had led to, and I realized with a start that by making the Rookie three years old in 1908, I was leaving him, unprotected, to the century's horrors. Then I did a quick calculation and realized that he would have been far too young for the First War, and just too old for the Second. The Rookie was lucky that way, I think.

  THE MACHINE TO DRAW THE WORLD

  The World Cup, and After

  The World Cup soccer tournament got off to a strange, promising start with a pageant that closed down Paris—a seventeenth-century-style allegorical masque, with music and dance and speech, which featured four sixty-five-foot-high inflatable giants that walked across the city from four Parisian monuments (the Opera, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the pont Neuf) to the place de la Concorde. The giants were steel-framed latex-covered figures—dolls, really—with fork-lift trucks for feet, and hydraulic hinged arms and hips and shoulders, and even moving eyelids. They turned their heads, and shifted their gaze, and raised their arms in wonder as they slowly shuffled along the Paris streets. Each one was a different color and represented a racial type. There was Romeo, the European; Pab
lo, the Amerindian; Ho, the Asian; and Moussa, the African (he had purple skin). It took four hours for them to get from their starting points to the place, where they bowed to one another, and the whole spectacle was broadcast live on television, while Juliette Binoche breathed over the loudspeakers on the streets and to the audience at home. ("The giants confront each other, but do they see a stranger or themselves?" etc.) The theme of the masque seemed to be the Self and the Other; the giants, never having seen one another before—or anything else, apparently— wake in the middle of Paris, to find their Selfness in the Others. Apart from that, the commentators on French television were hard put to find something to say as the big guys inched their way along the boulevards toward this revelation and at one point were reduced to noting that the technology that had produced the hydraulic giants had military applications, leaving you with the comforting knowledge that if NATO is ever in need of a crack synchronized team of huge, slow-moving inflatable dolls, the French will be the ones to call. (One sees them cornering a particularly sluggish war criminal in a Montenegrin mountain hideaway with a very large door.)

  The vague internationalist symbolism—not to speak of the snail-like pace—seemed the right allegory for the tournament. The Coupe du Monde, which includes thirty-two nations, began on Wednesday, June 10, and continues through Sunday, July 12. I set myself the task of watching it all, wanting to figure out what exactly it is that the world loves in a game that so many American sports fans will sit through only under compulsion.

  I understand why people play it. When I was a teenager, I lived in London for a while, and I spent most of my time playing soccer, or at least the middle-class Kensington Gardens version of it. I even learned how to talk the game. It was the opposite of trash talking—tidy talking, I suppose you'd have to call it. If you did something good, it was brilliant; something less than brilliant was useless; if all of you were useless together, you were rubbish;

  and if a person did something brilliant that nonetheless became useless, everyone cried, "Oh, unlucky!" By the end of my time in London, I wasn't brilliant at the game, but I wasn't useless either. I suppose this was all faithful to the game's English-school-playing-field origins. "Thoughtful ball," a commentator on the BBC would say about a good pass. In the papers you'll read things like "The signs of decline in the still-clever but jaded Teddy Sheringham sadly became too patent to ignore." "For all his apparent world-weariness, Beckham is still young." "[Anderton] has been stubborn to the point almost of self-destruction, however, and it cannot happen again this week." This isn't sportswriting. It's end-of-term reports.

  As I began watching the cup games, though, I had a hard time making a case for soccer as spectacle. I found myself torn between a cosmopolitan desire to love a game the world loves and an American suspicion that they wouldn't love it if they had a choice. The trouble wasn't the low scores, although the ribbon of late sports news often sounded like one of those condensed, hopeless, rising-and-falling monologues about marriage in Beckett: "Nil-nil. One-one. Two-one. One-one. One-nil. Nil-nil." The trouble was what the scores represent. The game has achieved a kind of tactical stasis. Things start off briskly and then fritter away into desultory shin kicking, like a Wall Street Journal editorial. In soccer the defense has too big an edge to keep the contest interesting, like basketball before the coming of the twenty-four-second clock or the western front before the invention of the tank.

  All sports take turns being dominated by their defense or their offense, and fully evolved defensive tactics will in the end beat offensive ones, because it is always easier to break a sequence than to build one up. Eventually the defensive edge will be so enormous that to stay in business as a spectacle, a sport has to change its rules, openly or surreptitiously. The big recent change in basketball, for instance, which took place somewhere between the Julius Erving and Michael Jordan eras, was a silent modification of the rule against traveling, so that now, it seems, a player can take about as many steps as he needs—a fact that only Rabbit Angstrom has officially noted. American football changes its rules every few years to allow quarterbacks to survive and prosper. Even baseball has tinkered with the mound and the depth of the fences. Soccer players, though, have come to accept the scarcity economy—all those nil-nil draws—and just live with it, like Eskimos. The defense has such an advantage that the national sides don't need their offensive stars. In this cup two of the most inspired forwards in Europe—David Ginola, of France and Tottenham Hotspur, and Paul Gascoigne, of England and whatever pub is open—didn't even make their national teams.

  Since a defensive system keeps players from getting a decent chance to score, the idea is to get an indecent one: to draw a foul so that the referee awards a penalty, which is essentially a free goal. This creates an enormous disproportion between the foul and the reward. In the first game that Italy played, against Chile, for instance, the great Roberto Baggio saved the Italians' pancetta by smoking the ball onto the hand of a surprised Chilean defender, who couldn't pull back in time. "Hand ball" was ruled, which, near the goal, meant an automatic penalty and a nearly automatic goal. The other, more customary method of getting a penalty is to walk into the "area" with the ball, get breathed on hard, and then immediately collapse, like a man shot by a sniper, arms and legs splayed out, while you twist in agony and beg for morphine, and your teammates smite their foreheads at the tragic waste of a young life. The referee buys this more often than you might think. Afterward the postgame did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed argument can go on for hours.

  European defenders of the game tend to put on haughty, half-amused looks when the sport is criticized and assume that the problem lies with the American doing the criticizing, who is assumed to love action for its own sake. When you point out that ice hockey, the greatest of all games, shares with soccer the basic idea of putting something into a net behind a goalkeeper and has the added bonus of actually doing it, they giggle: "Oh, dear. In ice hockey you can't see the ball, or whatever you call it. You can't follow it. Besides, they fight all the time." It does no good when you try to explain that you can always see the puck, and anyway, better to fight like heroes than to spend all your time on the sidelines bickering about who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds, the way soccer players do, even though—as a Tom Stoppard character once pointed out—there is absolutely no doubt on the part of those two players about who touched the ball last.

  European soccer apologists tend to overanalyze the triumphs of their heroes. In Brazil's game against Scotland, Ronaldo, the Brazilians' star, took the ball, faked right, and then spun around to his left, leaving a defender fooled while he rushed forward into the gap. Then he let go a weak shot, and it was over. A nice move—but exactly the same move that Emmitt Smith makes three times a game with three steroid-enraged three-hundred-pound linemen draped on his back (and then Emmitt goes in to score) or that Mario Lemieux made three or four times a period after receiving radiation therapy for Hodgkins lymphoma and having three Saskatchewan farm boys whacking at his ankles with huge clubs (and then Mario would go in to score). In the papers, though, that moment became a golden event. Rob Hughes, the estimable soccer writer for the International Herald Tribune, treated the three seconds of actual activity as though it were the whole of the Peloponnesian War, or a seduction by Casanova. "Receiving the ball from Cafu on the right, Ronaldo lured Colin Hendry, Scotland's biggest and most worldly defender, to him. 'Come closer, Big Colin, come to me,' the Brazilian seemed to say. And Hendry bought the invitation. Tighter and tighter he came until, suddenly, Ronaldo swiveled 180 degrees. . . ."

  Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics; anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius. In the old days, at the Kitchen, it was the rule that three recognizable notes sung in succession by Laurie Anderson heralded a new, generous lyricism. Ronaldo's magic was like a performance artists lyricism: It existed but was apparent only against a background of numbing boredom.

  In the first t
en days I watched, by my count, sixteen games, including odd, hallucinatory matchups out of some fractured game of Risk: Denmark against Saudi Arabia (1—0); Croatia against Japan (1-0); Nigeria against Bulgaria (1-0). There were a few players who stood out from the general run of bowlegged men in shorts. There were Englishmen (I root for England, from residual Kensington Gardens chauvinism): the pained, gifted O. J. Simpson look-alike Paul Ince; a speedy, tiny boy with a shining morning face named Michael Owen, only eighteen and just off the Liverpool bench. The French players were dogged, unelectric, powerful, and, as many people pointed out, mostly not ethnically French, with lots of "exotic" names: Zidane, Djorkaeff, Karembeu. Though their countrymen long for the dash and elan of David Ginola and the vanished Eric Cantona, they see the functionary logic of this harder-working, intelligent side. There were the Argentines and the Germans, who never seem quite as glamorous as, say, the Brazilians and the Dutch, but who have a brutal purposefulness. Between them they have won four of the last six cups. And there were moments of wonder, when a previously unknown—and probably soon to be unknown again—ballplayer would shock himself and his teammates with a single stunning moment. A young Cameroonian named Pierre Njanka, with no major-league experience, made his way through the entire Austrian team, his eyes wide as he ducked and swerved, stumbling forward, out of control, hardly believing what he was accomplishing, and then scored. He may spend the rest of his life defined by that run.