To Paris, With Glove

The best way—really, the only way—to escape being a pariah was to prove oneself on the athletic field. Softball was the ultimate test, for in that game incompetence could not be concealed in the line or the backcourt. The softball player stood alone, taking his cuts at the plate, catching balls hit to him, or, horror of horrors, flubbing them. New kids were always assigned to rightfield, where the fewest balls were hit, but when one played there, one had best be prepared to make the most of it. A single dropped fly ball could mean Coventry. My first game in each of these new schools might as well have been the final game of the World Series, so excruciating was the pressure heaped on me in the lonely wasteland of rightfield. I shudder yet at the memory of long-ago misjudged line drives and swinging third strikes. There was the game against Garfield Junior High School when I.... Aaargh!

In time, of course, I became the brilliant fielder you see today, and sometimes my pop-ups would drop untouched for cheap base hits. It was never my intention in those days to become a star, only to win acceptance. I did not want to show anyone up; I just wanted, glasses and all, to be one of the guys. My entire athletic career, if such it may be called, was characterized by a fervent striving to make the team—and therefore be accepted—quickly followed by a degree of complacency and a perceptible slackening of effort. My high school football coach could never understand why I played so ferociously in the early practices and so lackadaisically thereafter. He could not have known that I had already gotten what I wanted when he issued me the varsity uniform. I can see now that these early experiences have obviously scarred me for life. Oh, well.

Anyway, to this day every Softball game I play in, be it the Square vs. Cookie's or at a Father's Day picnic, is pretty much a matter of life or death. If I don't play well, they won't like me. Simple as that. So I am still out there dreading the first ball hit to me and hoping against hope the pop-ups will fall safely. Paris '79 would be no different from Fairfax Grammar School '39.

It seems clear now that in their concern with recruitment and transportation, Moose and Spurrier neglected one significant detail in the game plan—the playing field. Paris, for all of its infinite variety, is not fabled for her Softball facilities. There are some vestigial diamonds in the Bois de Boulogne ( Paris' Central Park), relics perhaps of the Liberation, but the infields are lumpy and overgrown, and on the day of our game, even these were occupied by soccer players and, to our amazement, Japanese baseball players. We did not give the matter a thought, though, as we warmed up on the street outside the grand entrance to the Royal Monceau before astonished passersby and a uniformed doorman who registered his disapproval by staring resolutely over our heads. We must have been a rare sight for Parisians taking their constitutionals—middle-aged men in stenciled T shirts and outsized gloves, tossing a strange white ball back and forth, rending the Sunday morning air with exhortations.

We never did find a proper field, and this oversight, in the judgment of the infielders involved—particularly this one—determined the rather bizarre nature of the game. We finally settled on a corner of a soccer field, principally because its chalked white boundaries could serve as our foul lines. There was no backstop, only a distant clump of trees and some parked Renaults to arrest the progress of misdirected throws. A deep trench ran parallel to the third-base line, an accident of topography that imperiled the limbs of those in pursuit of foul flies in that vicinity. Portions of the so-called outfield had been worn bare by soccer players, and the footing was tricky. The infield was plainly a disaster area. High grass concealed corrugated terrain the consistency of the battlefield at Verdun after the last bombardment. Ground balls approached infielders like pinballs bouncing off bumpers. But, as the pros say, it was equally bad for both sides. And the setting was serene—the modern towers of the new Paris on one side of the green woods, the magnificent boulevards and stirring monuments of the old on the other.

Les Lapins and our supporters assembled along the first-base line, Le Moulin and its supporters on the third. Moose had proposed in the preliminary negotiations that women be permitted to play, but Spurrier had experienced enough difficulty recruiting able-bodied men, and the Frenchwomen in his employ did not know a softball from a pomegranate, so the game unavoidably took a male chauvinist turn. In actual fact, none of our women wanted to play, anyway, declaring themselves perfectly content to sit on the sidelines and enjoy the fine Kronenbourg beer provided by Le Moulin and the Piper Heidsieck champagne donated by Andy MacElhone, the generous owner of that Paris institution, Harry's New York Bar. Our players were still mildly afflicted with jet lag and suffering from the aftereffects of an extended evening listening to Aaron Bridgers, an old Ellington hand, play piano at Le Club House, near Le Moulin. I was also hobbled by a knee injury incurred the week before while playing racquetball and dangerously restricted by new Levi's so snug I could not lean forward without grunting in discomfort. I told Moose I could play with pain. George Yee was our only major casualty. Stricken with a galactic hangover, he lay on the grass alongside first base, guiltily mumbling, "I've let my teammates down." When Linda Sesnon, a political publicist, asked what position George played, Ruth Nomura, the gallery manager, replied, "Prone." Yee, in fact, rallied and finished out the game at second base, playing as expertly as any of the rest of us. Glenn Dorenbush, our public-relations director, announced that he would prefer heckling on the sidelines to being heckled while playing.

We were disturbed at first by the apparent youth and muscularity of our adversaries. When they took the field, our women cheered them on looks alone. Of our own appearance, Marty Brennan, one of our real-estate ladies, remarked, "The only thing that could keep anybody off this team would be a cane." Still, we could see during the Moulin batting practice that these comparatively sinewy youths lacked our professional know-how. We were especially encouraged immediately before the game when their rightfielder, a lefthanded Englishman, borrowed a glove from our lefthanded catcher, Dan Brunner, and blithely slipped it on his left hand.

The game started promisingly for us when our leadoff hitter, Herb Allen, the Wall Streeter who patronizes the Square on his trips West, stroked a long fly ball that fell between their left and centerfielders and rolled halfway to Versailles for a home run. We scored six times in the inning. In my time at bat, I hit a pop foul which their catcher, Spurrier, caught. It was, I was later informed, the first softball Spurrier had ever caught.

When it came our turn to take the field, I, at third base, felt more than the usual chill of apprehension, because of the unevenness of the field, the abyss at my immediate right and the disconcerting crowd of champagne-crazed Americans and puzzled Europeans. I sought solace in the knowledge that the game was, after all, something of a lark, but for all the comfort it gave me I could as well have been on the infield at Yankee Stadium last October. And Moose, on the mound, was scowling with concentration. The old fears of childhood were upon me again. "Please," I whispered, "don't hit it to me." On Moose's first pitch, their leadoff man hit a lazy bouncer directly at me, or as directly as the field would allow. The ball ran up my arm and over my left shoulder and trickled into the outfield. The runner stopped at second.

The gleeful hoots this miscue provoked were trebled when the next ground ball, instead of bouncing abruptly upward as its predecessor had, clung to the irregular surface as if on tracks and skidded untouched beneath my trembling glove. The terrifying thought passed through me then that every ball in the game would be hit to me and, therefore, the side would never be retired and everyone in all of France would know that I was the worst third baseman on two continents. The nightmares of my childhood would be realized here in the Bois de Boulogne, far, far from the schoolyards where they were conceived.