A Writer's Life by Gay Talese Read Free Book Online

shoulder, took his position, ready to swing. Rivera glared at him from the mound. Rivera then took a deep breath, went into his pitching motion, and hurled one of his signature fastballs that was supposed to look like an aspirin as it streaked past the hitter for a called strike. But Franco saw it clearly and hit it perfectly, whacking it out to right field beyond the Yankee outfielder’s reach, andsuddenly Henderson and Alfonzo had raced home to score two runs, and now the Mets were the winners, 9-8. As the Mets’ fans leaped and screamed in celebration, and as Franco was embraced by his teammates, Mariano Rivera walked slowly with his head lowered toward the Yankee dugout.
    I sought my relief by walking into the kitchen for a can of beer. For me this afternoon so far had been a total loss—no tennis, no Yankee pitching, nothing to do until dinner (if my wife ever came down from her reading room) except to click back to the soccer women. I did not know how many minutes had been played, but there was still no score, and
still
the banner-waving and noisy fans continued to give the impression that they were excited by what they were seeing on the field. This game that my foreign-born father used to refer to as “a waste of time” seemed to be wasting what was left of my afternoon, and yet I continued to watch and wait for something to happen that I would find satisfying or conclusive. That this women’s contest had attracted so many spectators, and was featured on American network television, was definitely a point of interest. Soccer might well be the world’s most popular sport, played in the past by such renowned millionaires as Pelé and Maradona, and at times personified by rabbles of passionate fans who started riots in the stands and ran berserk through the towns in which their beloved teams were matched against loathed rivals; but the many millions of foreigners who had come to the United States and assimilated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not seen this sport assimilate with them into the American mainstream. They had left the game behind in the Old Country, as my father had, leaving it to male relatives whom he somehow suggested to me were village laggards and POW candidates.
    And yet here in the Rose Bowl, this manly foreign game was being profitably promoted to Americans through network television by young women—foreigners in the sense that Chinese players were involved, and foreign in the sense that the American women were, in style and manner, foreign to many men of my generation and certainly to the immigrants of my father’s time.
    Since I am about to sound somewhat knowing about these women and this sport about which I have heretofore proclaimed so little knowledge or interest, I must explain that, in addition to the newspaper and newsmagazine articles I had been reading recently about the World Cup competition, I had also been receiving abundant information about soccer via E-mail and the postal service from a soccer mom in her late thirties who the previous spring had attended a writing seminar that I had been invited to conduct on a campus not far from my home. This woman wasaspiring to complete a book entitled
Confessions of a Soccer Mom
, and, while her literary skills at this point in her life were not much developed beyond the singing talents of the late Patrick Shields, she was consumed with confidence and recommended that I give her work in progress to my wife.
    Among the drawbacks that I associate with my participation in seminars and with the part-time teaching that I sometimes do at universities within their graduate and undergraduate writing programs is meeting students and other people who have book ideas and manuscripts for my wife and who regard me as part of a courier service that will transport their efforts expeditiously and personally into her office. I have actually done this, carried away from a classroom a thick envelope or package