|
I loved newspapers. For a decade, I had lived for the thrill and torture of daily deadline, the buzz of breaking news—so much that it had taken me more than a month to decide to go from The Miami Herald to Sports Illustrated in 1994. So here was my chance to go back. Here, too, was leverage, and a chance to ... what exactly? Two nights before I was set to fly to New York to meet with McDonell, it hit me: He's going to ask what it will take to keep me. Someone positioned to grant the answer was about to ask life's central question: What do you want? I was forty. There was another baby due in a month. There was a house in Washington, D.C., that, after three years and an interminable round of construction, had started to feel like home. What did I want? I wanted to tear it all up. I wanted to tear it all down. I was forty, sinking slowly into the American routine, and I knew: Thick-waisted, midwestern, Cubbies-loving Chicago would only take me deeper. I wanted what I'd always wanted, but now had the power to get: away. I wanted to go where no one talked like me, where nothing was easy again, where SI was just another way of saying yes. I wanted to see beer ordered at breakfast, cigarette smoke at every meal, uncomprehending glances, cheating customs officials, three-hour lunch breaks, bricks hurled in a soccer riot. I wanted bad teeth, tunnel-scraping trains scaling Swiss alps, funny blue currency, men who dress like adults, tortured efforts at conjugation. I wanted to be a walking argument, the American loosed in a hostile world. "Give me Europe," I said.  Scott Price has been a Senior Writer at Sports Illustrated since 1994. Once in a lifetime, maybe, it's that easy. "Let me take a year," I said. "To cover sports there." And McDonell didn't laugh. The Summer Olympics were returning to Athens in 2004, the U.S. was at war in Iraq and widely despised, and now the magazine could range about, taking the temperature country to country before the biggest, most controversial sporting event of the new century. "You're the artist," McDonell said, officially uttering the first foreign word I would hear in my new assignment. In my ten years writing for newspapers in Chapel Hill, Memphis, Sacramento, and Miami, in my years writing for SI, I had been called many things—but never that. Yet he kept going, and I resisted the urge to giggle, to look over my shoulder to see if he was speaking to someone who had walked in behind me. "The gig is what you make it," he said. "Don't let the editors here grind you up." We had our choice: anywhere on the continent. We picked the South of France because my wife, Fran, speaks the language, but there was also the thrill of saying, "Yes, we're moving to the hills of Provence," so casually, so coolly, as if this was just another link in our charmed chain of adventures, as if we were just like people who had money. And the fact was, we had been tapped in some way for so long; we had lived in San Francisco, Miami, and, now, Washington, D.C.—each a city with undeniable mystique, each beautiful and odd. Not only that, but as a sportswriter I had stumbled into these places with eerily impeccable timing—to San Francisco in the late '80s with Bill Walsh's 49ers dynasty and the World Series Giants and Oakland A's, to Miami in the '90s with its premier college football team and new pro baseball and hockey franchises, to Washington in 2000 just before superstars Michael Jordan, Steve Spurrier, and Jaromir Jagr ran aground there and Maryland basketball won its first national championship. I'm capable of delusion. I would be sure that some greater power was at work, that I'd been chosen somehow, if not for the disasters. I didn't think it strange the first time, when I was in L.A. with the Giants in 1987 and the earthquake threw me out of bed, nor even when I sat in the upper deck of Candlestick Park in 1989 and felt the stadium jump when the worst quake to hit the Bay Area in eighty-three years shook the World Series. But after Hurricane Andrew—the worst storm to hit Miami in six decades—rolled over Dade County in 1992, I began to wonder. In the summer of 2001, two weeks before September 11, I actually congratulated myself for moving my family to D.C., where, at the time, 2 inches of snow was considered calamitous. Then the plane shot into the Pentagon. Then our post office closed and neighbors wore rubber gloves for fear of letters laced with anthrax. Then a pair of snipers roamed the area gunning down women and children. I'm no fool; I know none of these events were about me. Still, each spasm of fear felt like payment, some kind of cosmic counter to a lifetime of good fortune. When, in the summer of 2003, I went to Manhattan for two days to work on a story and the city suffered its worst blackout in over thirty years, it seemed only right. "It really does happen wherever you go, doesn't it?" said a friend.
|
Newswire 
