A Writer's Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

playing like the world champions they had been the year before, when the team had won 114 games and swept the San Diego Padres in the World Series. On this particular Saturday, with the Yanks leading the Mets 6-4 going into the bottom of the seventh inning, a Yankee relief pitcher named Ramiro Mendoza gave up a double to the Mets’ Rickey Henderson and then, following a walk to John Olerud, Mets catcher Mike Piazza whacked a 2-1 pitch over Shea Stadium’s left-field wall and suddenly the Yankees were behind, 7-6. While I shook my head, the television set resounded with the cheering of Mets fans and there on the screen was the picture of the burly Piazza rounding the bases with his fists clenched.
    My telephone was also ringing. Hoping that my wife, who was upstairs, would interrupt her reading to answer it, I let it ring. Finally I picked it up. It was my tennis partner, who was supposed to be coming by in a taxi that would take us to our doubles game in Central Park, but now he was saying that it had been canceled. He had injured his right ankle earlier in the afternoon in a fall on Lexington Avenue while on an errand with his wife, he said, adding that he had called two or three times to tell me this but my phone had constantly been busy. (I later learned that my wife had been communicating enthusiastically and at length on the bedroom extension with a literary agent in Connecticut who represented the author whose manuscript the two of us had slept with the night before.)
    I was unhappy about not playing tennis, for I had been looking forward to getting a workout and practicing my service toss at a higher elevation. The slow-moving slugfest between the Yankees and Mets had already dragged on for nearly four hours, with no relief in sight from either team’s bullpen. All three of the Mets relievers who had worked in the eighth and ninth innings had put men on base, while the Yankees had added two runs to retake the lead, 8-7—which remained the score as the Mets cameto bat in the bottom of the ninth. One of the announcers said that the Yankees’ fourth pitcher of the afternoon would be Mariano Rivera. He was perhaps the best reliever in baseball, and I was confident that he would soon be blinding the Mets’ batters with his speed and would surely secure the victory.
    As Rivera made his way to the mound to begin his warm-up pitches, and as the television channel began to inundate its audience with commercials, I impatiently switched to another channel to see what the Chinese and American soccer women were up to in the Rose Bowl, and how the United States’ comely star, Mia Hamm, was doing in her quest to live up to the current media hype, which virtually equated her athleticism with that of Michael Jordan. While up to now, as I already suggested, I had no more passion for women’s soccer than tiddlywinks, I had recently read a few sports page articles about Hamm and her teammates; on television, in an often-repeated Gatorade commercial, she was shown getting the better of Michael Jordan in various indoor and outdoor sports activities, all of them accompanied by the musical refrain “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
    In addition, this China-USA World Cup finale was being staged subliminally not only as the international Super Bowl of women’s soccer but as a face-off between the daughters of two contentious nations presently at odds over a number of governmental grievances. It is often the case that athletes become unwittingly conscripted to the military and political interests of their nations, being called upon to transform a sports arena atmospherically into a battlefield and to help propagandize a cause by winning a game—and this was particularly so this summer with regard to the young women of the Chinese national soccer team.
    In early May an American war plane had bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade while participating in the NATO anti-Serbian offensive in