game. Though you wouldn’t think that CNNSI believed it. Or any of the other news services that’ve been camped out around my apartment lately, or the Miami area in general…especially the sports news services. They seem to think it’s bizarre beyond belief that I do my own shopping. Like, now that we’re in the championships, suddenly a personal shopper should descend from the heavens and start taking care of me.” He laughed, but it had a slightly despairing sound to it. “I caught the guy from AB/CBS going through my garbage the other day. For
“This is what everybody thinks they want a piece of,” said Hal, a little somberly. “Fame…”
“It’s overrated,” George said. “It means you can’t go to a convenience store and let someone see you buy a six-pack of beer. If you do, they either declare you a closet alcoholic, or else the next morning some guy from the beer company turns up on your doorstep asking you to appear in commercials.”
“Or both,” Mike said.
George looked wry. “Don’t laugh. I could be rich about six times over, just now, just out of what I’ve been offered for endorsements. But I don’t want to do that! We’re an amateur organization, for one thing. Spat for me is about getting together with my friends, having a good workout, playing together skillfully, and being social afterward…. But the problem’s a lot worse than that. If I ever get stinking rich, I want it to be from something
He let out a long breath and had some more iced tea. Catie looked at the glass, and looked at the window, wondering whether George’s choice of beverage had anything to do with a possible fear of distant cameras, trained on him, just waiting to see him do something that someone somewhere might consider inappropriate.
“But enough of my troubles,” George said at last, and put the glass down. “How about the game?”
“It was super,” her brother said. And that was about the last chance Catie would have had to get a word in edgewise for the better part of three quarters of an hour, for the ensuing torrent of spatball jargon took nearly that long to die out, as play after play was taken apart, turned inside out and upside down, analyzed, criticized, and dropped for the consideration of the next one. Mike was an eager participant in this, and Hal gave him a run for his money, while Catie listened with somewhat pained interest to terminology that kept getting tangled up in chords and lunes and great circles and geodesic slams and incidence relations. She sighed at those, for Catie had finished the usual run-in with solid geometry in school last year, and had come away from it successfully, but only just. Afterward, for her, the phrase “Through point A draw a line B” would normally have made a good start for a horrorcast.
But the game itself had been won against an opponent that had widely been expected to dump South Florida unceremoniously out of the tournament. That was the main thing. Now the publicity was heating up, and Hal and Mike amused themselves briefly with reciting some of the more specious and empty-headed rationalizations they had heard in the media for the Banana Slugs’ win, everything from plain dumb luck to sunspots. George mostly kept quiet during this, attempting to do something about the second half of his sandwich. Catie had already decided to take hers home in a doggie bag and have another run at it around dinnertime. And possibly a third attempt at breakfast tomorrow…
“Your team’s been attracting a whole lot more attention than you ever thought you would, I bet,” Catie said.
“Yes,” George said, putting the sandwich down again with a sigh. “We have. Not all of it friendly.”
There was something about the way he said this that made her look at him closely. George was looking out the window again, and his expression was very much that of a man who was sure that someone was watching him.
He glanced back at her. “We’re absolutely not supposed to be here, you know,” George said after a moment. “It’s surprising how easily people get upset when somehow a long-established status quo shifts. Not that publicity won’t do the team good in the long run. No matter what happens in these play-offs, our organizational life will be a little easier in the long run. You know — a few less cake sales, a little more time to actually play. But the hostility and confusion surrounding us at the moment are a little sad to see. There are plainly people who genuinely see us as a disruptive influence to the sport, or an embarrassing accident that the sport is going to have to recover from, or a way to make the rest of the sport look bad while we still get a whole lot of money and hold the ‘moral high ground’…wherever that is for spatball.” George let out a long breath that bespoke a fair amount of frustration and anger, all shut down to its lowest possible level for the moment. “It’s like they can’t understand our right to do what our group formed itself to do: play spat competitively, but never lose sight of the basic pleasures of it just for the sake of the win, or what comes with the win. Flight…” Fora moment there was a spark of delight in his eyes, and everything was all just that simple. “We’re every kid who ever jumped off the couch with a towel tied around his neck, pretending to be a superhero, or boinged along the ground pretending to be Neil Armstrong, or John Glenn, mostly free of gravity, but still free to be human, and to play.” He grinned, just briefly. “To play hard, but play fair, too, and be friends again afterward…”
Catie nodded quietly for a moment. That kind of feeling was the reason she played soccer, and why she had stayed with the same team of kids from Bradford Academy and the general D.C. area, even when she had opportunity to move to a better team. Sportsmanship, and companionship, expressed through the sport itself and the aftermath, mattered. She raised her eyebrows, then. “Somehow,” Catie said, “I don’t think that aspect of it is something you’ve said a whole lot about to the media lately.”
“I tried once or twice,” said George. “One guy asked me who wrote my speech. Another of the interviewers wanted to know, was I thinking about running for office?” The flicker in George’s eyes this time was not a happy one. “I don’t talk that way to reporters anymore. Competitiveness, ruthless competitiveness, that they understand. But
Catie made a wry face. “Trying to teach a pig to read,” she said, “wastes your time, and only annoys the pig.”
George burst out laughing, and Mike and Hal both looked at him.
“What was that punch line again?” Mike said. “I missed it.”
“Nothing,” George and Catie said, more or less in unison.
Catie was immensely relieved when Wendy arrived to ask who wanted dessert. Hal, as always, was game. Catie often wondered where he put all the calories he ingested in a day, and how he always failed to show any sign of them afterward. For herself, she passed, content to finish her soda, and George and Mike asked for coffee.
“What time’s the press conference?” said Mike, making the writing-on-a-notepad gesture to Wendy when she came with their coffees.
“Two-thirty,” George said. “We’ll all stand around in the lobby of their headquarters, trying to look like we really want to be there. They’ll have ‘real’ jerseys there for us to wear, to illustrate what the virtual ones are going to look like.” He gave Catie an amused look. “Whether they’ll fit anything like as well as the virtual ones is another question. And then there’ll be another grilling from the media people, under those hot lights…and then we’ll have to go virtual and do it again. A couple of hours’ worth of interviews, at least, when we should all be in the cubic, practicing. And then back on the plane and home again….”
“But can’t you just play the game from up here?” Hal said, surprised. “The sponsor must have Net facilities you can use!”
“They probably have a lot better ones than anything the team has,” George said, nabbing the bill from the newly returned Wendy before anyone else had a chance at it, “but I don’t care about that, and neither does the team. When we’re playing, we all prefer our own Net setups at home. It takes valuable time to get used to someone else’s rig, and you never feel quite comfortable…and what happens if something goes wrong with it in mid-game? If your own Net machine malfunctions, that’s one thing, and maybe you’ll know what to do about it. Get up and kick it, or jiggle the phone cable, or whatever. But play a tournament-level game in a strange building, using a strange new machine? No, thanks. I’ll admit the extra travel time is a nuisance, but if it gets us home before midnight, that’s going to be good enough for me and the rest of the team. We’ll manage.”
Catie thought she could see his point. George fished around in his pockets and came up with an ElectroWallet
