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

addressed to my wife; but since the results have too rarely been satisfactory to anyone, I now strive to remain uninvolved, although it is often not that simple with people possessing the stamina and single-mindedness of this soccer mom from the suburbs of northern New Jersey. Even though my wife or one of her colleagues did finally read and politely turn down what the woman herself had delivered to the office receptionist, and despite my own courteous avoidance of the opportunity she extended to me as her chosen ghostwriter or even the coauthor of her book, she nonethless continued to send me massive amounts of material about women’s soccer that she herself had collected while attending games and picking the brains of the cognoscenti along the sidelines or while she was at home communicating on the Internet with fans of women’s soccer around the world, including many soccer moms in China.
    A typical Chinese woman lacked the resources to buy a sport-utility vehicle, she informed me, acknowledging that she herself had two SUVs, one left behind by her former husband (it had a broken axle), and so in China the young girls who were escorted to practice by their mothers did so on the backs of bicycles. If any of these girls indicated signs of exceptional ability on a practice field, she continued, they were practically snatched from the backs of their mothers’ bicycles by one of the regime’s talent scouts, who would then enroll the girls as full-time students for years in a special academy, where they would receive an inadequate education in everything except the development of those physical skills that might qualify them finally as Olympic contestants in soccer, or gymnastics, or volleyball, or swimming, or whatever sport they were capable of performing on a world stage so well that their male coaches and the Party bureaucrats would have no fear of losing face.
    While five of the twenty-two Chinese women players on the 1999 national squad were married, none could have children if they wished toremain affiliated with the team. With their average incomes being about five thousand dollars a year, and with financing in China unavailable to help cover the high cost of such items as, for example, an automobile, only four members of the squad owned and operated cars (three of the women had working husbands who shared expenses; the other was the unmarried daughter of a successful family from Shanghai). The majority of their teammates did not even have a driver’s license and saw no point in taking lessons to obtain one. None of the women on the national team had a college education. The only one with classroom experience on a campus was the team captain, Sun Wen, who dropped out early in her first year. Drinking, smoking, and dancing in discos late at night—a not-unfamiliar routine with some male soccer players following practice sessions and games—would have caused a woman player’s dismissal had such behavior come to the attention of the national team’s ascetic male coach, Ma Yuanan, who considered himself permissive when he allowed one of his wedded sequestered soccer-playing sprites to accept a husbandly visit in her dormitory bedroom late on a Saturday night.
    The women of the United States team, on the other hand, were free to partake in nighttime interludes with husbands and/or admirers of either sex. Two of the five married players on the American squad had children (one had two), and when these women were on the road with the team, the organizational budget covered the travel costs and living expenses of the accompanying nannies. All the American players had college degrees or were in the process of getting them. All drove cars, and, with their team salaries and bonuses and their forthcoming game fees as participants in the newly formed National Soccer League, the women would soon join the lucrative six-figure ranks of professional athletes. With the exception of the goalkeeper, who was