TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060589/06058900.049

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.0 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                SPORT, Page 87

The Global Cry: Play Ball!


U.S. leagues and foreign athletes are breaking down boundaries

By Tom Callahan


    Something is abroad in the games people play, or about to
go abroad, anyway. Suddenly the globe is ready to play ball,
with the Soviet Union leading off. In their hearts, the Soviets
probably still think they invented baseball, or lapta, an
innocent steppes-child that supposedly predates both British
rounders and Tommy John. But the bench jockeying has quieted
considerably since the Reds dropped an April game to the U.S.
Naval Academy, 21-1, and their coach was heard to mutter, "Throw
to second, not first. Second is the one in the middle."

    At the moment, Western sports pages are lousy with Soviets,
who are lousy only at baseball. Three more hockey players from
the vaunted Red Army team resigned their commissions last week.
By the grace of a fresh understanding between Moscow and the
National Hockey League, stars Vyacheslav Fetisov, Igor Larionov
and Sergei Makarov are now free to negotiate with the teams that
drafted them: the New Jersey Devils, Vancouver Canucks and
Calgary Flames (which already employs Sergei Priakin). Only one
Soviet applicant has felt the need to defect. Alexander Mogilny
saw Buffalo and just couldn't live anywhere else. Shrugging
everything off, Soviet authorities have invited the Flames and
the Washington Capitals to play a revolutionary series in Moscow
and Leningrad come September.

    In the tennis community too, freethinking Soviets are
multiplying. Olga Morozova, the pig-tailed pioneer who
occasionally popped into grand-slam finals during the '70s, now
coaches a raft of promising young countrymen and -women known
as the Glasnost Gang. The most precocious gangster is Natalia
Zvereva, 18, who is also the most perestroika-emboldened. She
has won $515,000 professionally, but since much of it has been
diverted into state coffers, she gripes, "I still don't have
enough money for a Mercedes." When last seen, Zvereva was
stomping back to the Kremlin to have it out with her agents. "If
you don't see me at the French Open," she giggled in parting,
"you'll know what happened."

    The Soviet Union is just a piece of a new picture. Cleared
to participate in the next Olympics, the National Basketball
Association plans to contribute one team to a Milan tournament
in October and assign two others to open next season in Tokyo.
Japan's association with American baseball, of course, goes back
to Babe Ruth. Just last November, on a typical All-Star tour,
the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser capped his nearly scoreless autumn
by yielding a Ruthian homer to Fujio Tamura of the Nippon Ham
Fighters ("I was told he couldn't hit a curve ball"). But Japan
is importing all sports now, and the Los Angeles Rams will
confront the San Francisco 49ers there in August.

    The most daring development, as usual, is coming from the
National Football League. Tex Schramm, the exiled general
manager of the Dallas Cowboys, has been forming an international
spring league that will announce its franchises any day now.
"And they'll be kicking off next April," Schramm says.

    Montreal and Mexico City will likely join four U.S. and
four to six European cities in a twelve-game season leading to
a summertime World Bowl. Towns tired of hoping for N.F.L.
expansion franchises (Jacksonville, Memphis, Oakland and
Baltimore) would seem the prime American candidates for the
auxiliary league. London, Dublin, Frankfurt and Milan are among
the European possibilities.

    Television inspired both the European players and the
American plotters. "The people saw delayed broadcasts and taped
highlights and liked them," says Schramm, who notes that live
N.F.L. telecasts are scheduled in London this season, along with
the latest Wembley exhibition (this year Philadelphia vs.
Cleveland). "Television stations in Europe are doubling and
tripling. With the complete common market in 1992, a great
melding of entertainment is about to take place."

    Comparing football with soccer, whose charms are mysterious
only to Americans, Schramm says, "Games where the players use
every part of their body, not just their feet, and where
there's generally a lot of scoring, have a good chance to win
the world over." But will the world be open to this militaristic
game of bombs and blitzes? Maybe so, if Richard Tardits is any
barometer.

    Tardits is a Frenchman from Biarritz who, through a series
of family coincidences, matriculated at the University of
Georgia four years ago. Apprised by his father that he would
need a scholarship to remain, Tardits donned his rugby shorts
and knee-high stockings and went out for the Bulldog football
team. The first day on defense, he ignored the ballcarrier and
tackled the blocker. But Tardits was quick, tall and weighed 200
lbs. Coach Vince Dooley was intrigued. For one thing, he had
never had a linebacker whose previous experience consisted of
running with the bulls in Pamplona.

    In situations where Tardits could do no harm, Dooley tossed
him into games for a play or two. He started to sack
quarterbacks with a move the other players dubbed the Tour de
France. During a spring practice in Tardits' sophomore year,
just as his father was about to summon him home to the
University of Toulouse, Dooley called for quiet. In the manner
of a battlefield commission or the awarding of the Croix de
Guerre, Tardits' scholarship was presented on the field. Last
month he was drafted fifth by the N.F.L.'s Phoenix Cardinals.

    Tardits has attempted to tell his French friends about the
amazing spectacle of "a stadium with 85,000 filled seats and
people still fighting to buy tickets." He tries to mix in "all
the colors and the vehicles and the screaming" and even tosses
out a "How 'bout them dogs?" Mais zut. "They can't realize what
it's like," he says in dismay, and concludes with a sigh, "Only
in America."