Nonetheless, the evening started auspiciously. Richard quickly caught two fish, and I caught one (a 10-pounder, which while not big for the Rio Grande, was big for me, since few of the trout I had caught in the past had ever gone above 2 pounds). Both of us were quite sure that our good fishing luck was also a harbinger of how the game might go.
So it was that we picked up and left one of the greatest trout streams in the world, the action clearly still hot, and driven by our guide Jorge Castro (gracious enough neither to say anything nor to show any obvious disbelief), raced for downtown Rio Grande. Never in my life had I left such good fishing so early with a promise of much more to come. But life is clearly full of sacrifices; besides there was still almost a full week of fishing ahead.
We got to the hotel with six minutes gone, the game scoreless, the Gigantes stumbling around on their own goal line, almost turning the ball over. As I pulled up a chair I was struck, not for the first time, by the contrast between the richness and privilege of my life and the particular era we live in, and that of my father, who was, like me, both a passionate fisherman and a committed football fan. (There was, I discovered years after his death, a note in his 1925 Tufts Medical School yearbook to the effect that getting Charley Halberstam to describe a football game was as good as going to the game itself.) He had loved to fish, but had largely been forced by finances, a lack of time, by service in two wars, and by lack of access to prime fishing water to spend his time casting to ghost fish in fished-out lakes in northwest Connecticut. His reward, one or two keeper bass a summer.
His ability to travel, after all, was prescribed in a different, much poorer age, when jet travel did not exist and those remarkable bonus miles which had enabled me to get to Buenos Aires had not been invented. His foreign travel had been confined to two trips, France and Germany in 1917, and France and Germany in 1944–45, both of them, at least, financed by his government. He died some 17 years before the first Super Bowl was played. The idea of athletes like these, so big and fast, playing before us on an immense television set, virtually an indoor movie theater, located so many thousands of miles from where the game was being held, would have been beyond his imagination.
The difficult journey to Argentine fishing spots is usually worth it. So even as I watched, I pondered the cumulative technological miracles of which I am the beneficiary, grateful for my good fortune, and wondering at the same time what it will be that my daughter will do and be part of in her lifetime which is beyond my own comprehension.
The game was on, live and in color and in Spanish. Clearly the Super Bowl was not that big a draw in Rio Grande. Steadman and I were the only people in the hotel den, other than a somewhat puzzled waiter, who seemed to have no special loyalty of his own, but who, in an engaging and warm manner, seemed to want our team to do well, and was quite willing to grimace whenever fortune smiled on the Cuervos. Nonetheless there was something absolutely charming about watching the ultimate football game from so great a distance in an environment in which no one else seemed to care.
There was, after all, a certain modesty to the setting that the game badly lacks almost everywhere else—it was almost as if we could think of it as being in normal numbers, rather than Roman ones. It was marvelous being spared the hype; I am, after all, one of those people who believes that the Super Bowl is more often than not a disappointment, in no small part because of the two-week layoff, so much of it devoted to the hype. (One of my cardinal rules as a journalist is that any event that attracts media people in regimental or division strength is almost sure to disappoint and is not worth attending.)
What I liked best, I must admit, was the absence of noisy commentators. The announcers were speaking in Spanish, and with all due respect to John Madden and Pat Summerall, it was a pleasant change. Actually, I can easily imagine that when Madden watches at home, he, too, turns down the sound at a game like this. He is one of my favorite commentators, and I savor the idea of Madden the fan turning down the sound of Madden the announcer. The lack of words helped to bring the game down to scale. In addition, the self-important hand of Madison Avenue was blessedly absent in the Spanish version, and I loved that.
For the normal show within a show—the Super Commercials at the Super Bowl—was gone: the great American beer and auto companies paying so much to unveil glimpses of their products, clips which are more often that not about the talent and inventiveness of their ad agencies than they are about the advantages of the product being showcased. Instead, there were ads in Spanish for the Spanish audience.
As for the game itself, it turned out to be hard going for the Gigantes, who seemed to get smaller throughout the evening. I had taken the Cuervos quite seriously—they clearly had advanced to the game through a more rigorous schedule, but in truth I had feared the Titanes of Tennessee more than the Cuervos, because they seemed to have more offensive weapons at hand. It was my hope, forlorn as it turned out, that while the Cuervos were stronger on defense, the Gigantes would have more weapons on offense.
Kerry Collins and the Gigantes were dominated by the Cuervos. I believed the Gigante secondary could cheat on the Cuervos and Trent Dilfer, as the Cuervos could not cheat on Kerry Collins. My game plan was for the Giants to imitate the Jets in their victory over the Colts some 30 years ago, and take what was given, short passes to the tight end and the backs coming out of the backfield, effectively using the pass as a run until the defense finally opened up deep.
I thought it could be done, and I was very wrong. Either the Gigantes had no comparable game plan, or the Cuervos linebackers were so quick that they took even the shortest pass away. Whatever happened, it was not our day. Be that as it may, Steadman and I accepted our fate and decided that the Cuervos had dramatically out-played our señors.
We also decided that it was a lot easier to accept the dismal outcome so many thousands of miles from home, not being part of a large group of New York fans clustered together, expecting victory but watching their hopes systematically evaporate in the second half. So, one season ended. One form of madness was over for the day, and in fact, for about eight months. So be it. Football is football, not life itself, unless of course you’re a professional football player.
For the rest of us life must go on: We survive as mortals, and as sports fans, and as fishermen based as much as anything else, not on truths which can often be barren, but on hope and faith, that life holds possibilities for tomorrow that are more expansive than the realities of today, that Kerry Collins will grow in confidence next season and throw less into double coverage, that our next cast will entice a fish larger than his predecessors.
And so the next day, I went back to the Rio Grande and in the middle of the evening a huge fish took my fly, made one grand jump, displaying itself in full glory—at least 30 pounds, said Castro—then stripped much of the line with a fierce run, jumped again and bent the hook completely out of the line, thus departing forever from my life. But on the day after that, I went out and hooked an immense trout. It put up a magnificent fight, lasting some 25 minutes, and this time neither I nor my equipment failed, and I finally landed the brown, 22 pounds, the largest freshwater fish I had ever caught.
ANATOMY OF A CHAMPION
From Vanity Fair, May 1996
The American fencers spent three days living the comparative high life in Madrid after competing in La Coruña, on the western coast of Spain. They practiced during the day at a Madrid fencing club, and they lodged in two rooms at the Hotel Lisboa, which cost them $20 each a night. On tour they sometimes stayed in one room—breaking down hotel beds to put their mattresses on the floor was a necessary skill for American fencers. But at the Hotel Lisboa they had their own bathrooms, as well as telephones and television sets, so it was a considerable bargain. With a World Cup event coming up in Venice, they had to decide whether to stay on in Madrid or go to Rome.
It was not an easy call. On the side of Madrid was the relative luxury of the Hotel Lisboa and the fact that Madrid was signific
antly cheaper than Rome. In Rome’s favor was the fact that Nick Bravin, at 24 the senior member of the team as well as its de facto travel agent, translator, and general mentor, spoke better Italian than Spanish. Also, Bravin believed that the younger members of the team, who did not know Rome well, would benefit by wandering through the streets of one of the great cities of the world.
Rome it would be. The next morning Bravin went to a local travel agency, where he found that it would cost them some $700 each to fly to Rome, but less than $200 each to get there by train (second class)—a grim, cramped, exhausting 23-hour trip. The airfare represented a good deal of money for the team; their dilemma was of the kind shared by many amateur athletes from America who, while representing one of the richest countries in the world, play sports that do not televise well or about which the American public cares little. Bravin was certainly used to these kinds of problems and was skillful at getting around them; he soon found just what he was looking for—a leg of a Thai Airways flight that would take them from Madrid to Rome for about $100 a person.
At the Rome airport Bravin consulted his tattered notebook containing a list of the cheapest hotels in the world’s capitals and started calling around. At the first seven places, he struck out, but at the eighth, the Hotel Contilia, he found one room still available, at $120, or $30 a head. On this trip there were only four of them, rather than the usual five, since teammate Peter Devine was sick with the flu and had gone ahead to Venice to rest for the World Cup event there. They played hearts to see who got the worst bed—the one they jokingly called “the crippler.”
Fencers are marvelous athletes, smart and surprisingly strong, with great footwork and great hand-to-eye coordination. The three events (and their weapons) in fencing are the foil, the épée, and the saber. Foil fencing, which uses a thin, rectangular-shaped blade, is athletically and intellectually demanding because it has the smallest target area—the torso, back, and groin. Bravin, in addition to being a world-class poor person’s travel agent, was also a star of the individual foil in America, a three-time N.C.A.A. champion as a Stanford student, and a three-time national champion. He had been the first American in years to show that he might be able to compete at fencing’s highest level—against the mighty Europeans, who dominate the sport and who subsidize it handsomely. According to Carl Borack, a former Olympic fencer who now serves as the captain of the American team, the annual American budget is roughly $400,000, while the Italian government gives its team more than $6 million.
Nevertheless, Nick Bravin had come to believe that adversity had its own rewards, that by dint of being forced to economize he knew not only Europe’s castles and museums but also its working-class bars. He had made friends as he might not have had he been protected by wealth and celebrity status. Best of all, he and the other American fencers had learned to make sacrifices and to take care of one another; they had learned to be teammates and good friends, even as they had to be fierce competitors.
This current group of Americans in the foil—Bravin, 24; Cliff Bayer, 18; Peter Devine, 19; Sean McClain, 20; and Zaddick Longenbach, 24—were surprisingly closely matched in skills and the most talented team this country had produced in years, thought Bravin’s old college coach, Zoran Tulum. Tulum, originally from Yugoslavia, had come to America 10 years before and developed a grudging admiration for the toughness of American fencers, whose rewards had to be completely internalized.
Among the teammates that Nick Bravin was steering to the Hotel Contilia was a young man named Cliff Bayer. As a high-school senior, he had burst onto the national scene to become the wunderkind of American fencing, stunning Bravin in particular by coming from behind in the 1995 national championship finals and beating him. When Bravin looked at Bayer he saw nothing less than the image of his younger self. “Cliff is extremely hungry—just like I used to be,” he said. “He has a lot of physical gifts, but above all he has the gift of attitude. He wants to beat you on every point, and he is afraid of no one, afraid of no reputation.”
Bravin himself had won the first of his three national championships in 1991 at age 20. In the words of Zoran Tulum, he was as hungry as a wolf then, as audacious as he was fearless, and he had taken particular pleasure in knocking off better-known fencers. By 1994 he had begun to beat some of the best fencers in the world, Elvis Gregory of Cuba and Dimitri Chevtchenko of Russia among them. There was talk that he might become one of the giants of the sport.
Then, to Tulum’s dismay, Bravin entered Columbia Law School and lavished the singular intensity he had previously given to fencing on his studies. By March of this Olympic year his ranking had fallen to No. 4, just behind Bayer, Devine, and McClain. Since only the top three will make the Olympic team, decided in June after the national championships, Bravin found himself in a tight spot. He was certain that technically he was a better fencer than ever, but he had begun to wonder whether he still had the hunger that Tulum talked about so often. The wolf, according to Tulum, was always the hunter. It sized up its prey and thought of nothing else. Hunting was a matter of life and death to the wolf; so should fencing be to the true champion. Bravin was still fast—Rápido, his Cuban competitors had nicknamed him—but fast was not enough. The antelope is fast, but you cannot fence if you are an antelope, Tulum would say. The wolf triumphs because it thinks of nothing else, it is always the hunter.
As a fencer, Bravin knew that Tulum was right, but at this point there were other things in his life. He found, as had other athletes before him, that the ascent was the easy part. On the way up you had no title to lose.
He had been drawn to the sport almost by chance while growing up in Los Angeles. His older brother, Jess, had tried fencing, and Nick, who was then about 12, tagged along. He immediately decided that he too wanted to take fencing lessons. Shawn Bravin, his mother, was skeptical. She knew her youngest child was bright and gifted at many things, but he was also easily bored. She had seen many of his fads, including Bravin piano and Bravin violin lessons, evaporate overnight. Yet eventually she gave in and bought him all the requisite gear.
At first he had not particularly liked fencing, but he stayed with it, in no small part, he decided later, to prove his mother wrong. He had always been quick, no matter what sport he played, and almost from the start his coaches saw great potential. Soon, with their encouragement, he began going more than once a week.
It was not the dashing, swashbuckling swordplay he imagined from the movies, the glorious pleasure of sticking his opponent with a sword. Rather, it was technical drudgery, footwork drills, using muscles in his arms and legs in ways he had rarely used them before. But after six months or so, his coaches finally let him compete, and he loved it.
He won his first four tournaments. At the start, perhaps, he loved competitions too much. He was brash and impatient, hotheaded and unwilling to listen to his coaches. He loved the individual nature of the competition, and he found out something about himself: he hated to lose. His coaches homed in on that instinct. “How many fencers in the final eight actually want to win a tournament?” Ed Richards, one of his first coaches, asked him. “All eight,” Bravin answered. “No,” said Richards, “four of them are happy just to be there, two want to do well, and two want to win. Remember that and be one of the two.”
Jess Bravin, who was six years older than Nick, went off to Harvard and fenced on the Harvard team. Coming home from college for a holiday break, he was stunned to find the change in his little brother. Not only had he become a superior fencer, but all his exceptional qualities, intellectual and physical, had been fused together through this demanding sport. It was also who Nick Bravin had become as a person—skillful, strong, confident, audacious.
He fenced at increasingly higher levels, while still playing football at Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles—he was one of the smallest men on the team. His schedule was brutal: up at six A.M., school starting at seven, football practice from two to five in the afternoon, fencing practice at six. His biggest de
cision in those days was whether to go home briefly for a bite to eat after football practice or go directly to fencing.
He was 16 years old, still growing, and perpetually exhausted. But his friend Al Carter would not let him sleep through his fencing lessons. They were about the same age and the two best fencers in the area. Carter would call up, listen to his friend’s complaints that he was tired and in pain, and then tell Bravin he would pick him up in 15 minutes. The two thought of little else but college and future Olympic glory; the vanity license plate on Carter’s car in those days read: 92 goald. They would attend the same college and lead it to a national championship. Many schools courted them and the University of Pennsylvania, a traditional fencing power, seemed likely to get them.
But Bravin visited Stanford and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the campus if not the quality of the fencing. Stanford was hardly known as a powerhouse in the sport. That meant the level of competition in daily practice was not nearly as good as it was at Penn or Columbia. Also, Tulum, the new coach, was unknown to Bravin, and in fencing the personal relationship of the coach to his fencers is considered critical. Tulum was wary of the ways of American college recruiting. When Bravin asked Tulum for a trial lesson, Tulum said no, he did not do auditions. What do you mean, no? thought Bravin. I’m twice as good as any fencer you have, and I may be the best fencer you ever get, and you’re saying no to me? “No,” Tulum repeated as Bravin stood there dumbstruck. “I’m not going to give you a practice lesson. You’re not going to try me out.” Zoran Tulum had his rules, and he had his suspicion that altogether too many middle-class American kids were spoiled. “We’d like to have you, but if you want to take your talent elsewhere, that’s fine with me.”
Everything They Had Page 29
