The Principals by Bill James

Author:Bill James [James, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2016-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

1987

But Tane’s mother didn’t hate all sports. Although she despised that kind of walking style required in racing, and abominated, too, televised tennis with its scuttling, servile ballboys and girls, she adored soccer and especially goalkeepers, ‘solitary between sticks, like an unmelted sugar cube in tongs,’ as she thought of them. It was because of her fervent regard for goalkeepers that one of them came to have what Victor considered quite a notable influence on the Sedge-Charter Mill situation. This wasn’t – couldn’t be – instant. It evolved over several years, thanks to Mrs Tane.

She’d written a poem about these ‘custodians’ – heartfelt and full of unbridled praise; none of that towering irritability plain in Two Views. It began, ‘Oh, goalkeeper, my goalkeeper,’ and, as Tane remembered it, this note of excited, all-out reverence was maintained to the end. Several times she’d told Victor that Albert Camus, the great French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner used to be a goalie in a local Algerian team, ‘before he started all his seminal stuff about the Absurd.’ Mrs Tane believed that goalkeeping helped put him on to this kind of philosophy because there was something comically farcical – absurd, in fact – about the sight of a goalkeeper powerfully, unsparingly, flinging himself to one side when trying to block a penalty, but, as it turned out, the absolutely wrong side. Didn’t this glaringly demonstrate that human effort was pointless in a cruelly malevolent world? Oh goalkeeper, my goalkeeper, how noble you might be at times, and how mercilessly exposed.

‘Good goalkeepers have courage, agility and undaunted free-spirited self-hood,’ his mother insisted, ‘this last above all.’ Any evidence of serfdom in sport or in life generally always nauseated her – the mad rules, as she regarded them, imposed on contestants in a walking race; the bent-double fetch-and-carry ballboys and girls forced to make themselves more or less invisible, crouched low against the net post between rallies, like dogs waiting to be let off the leash; Victor Tane’s sickening subservience to the rigidities of Greek and Latin grammar. Music of all types disgusted her because at the composition stage it was ‘just blob notes clinging pathetically to stave lines, resembling hopeless messages stuck by prisoners on the barbed wire, perimeter fence of a concentration camp.’

Tane’s father had been a couple of decades older than Amy, Tane’s mother, but in his early fifties had persuaded an amateur club near where they lived to let him play in goal for their Thirds so as to please his wife and get at least some of her esteem. Although he bought goalkeeper-type mittens he was useless, but brave. In his first and final game, when he’d already let in four goals, he rushed out, attempting to scoop the ball away from the feet of the opposing centre forward, to prevent his hat-trick, got badly kicked in the head and went into a coma from which he never recovered. Amy had the words, ‘In a league of his own’ inscribed on the gravestone.

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