The Big Green Gorilla Gets Spartak in the End

Spartak, Moscow's baseball team, has the week off. It needs it. Most of us have not recovered yet from our trip to Germany, which ended in spectacularly horrible fashion with an ugly loss to a Lithuanian team that beat us out of second place and gloated all the way home.


Playing well meant more to us, I think, than it did for the other teams. The other teams were living in hotels, spending their time away from the field murdering the German language in bars and restaurants all over Mainz and neighboring Wiesbaden.


Our situation was different. Spartak evenings were cold and bleak. After nightfall the players huddled on the asphalt outside the bus (the team was kicked out of the youth hostel after its first night -- another long story) and stabbed at tins of meat with camping forks while keeping a constant watch in case someone approached to arrest them for vagrancy.


The chilly nights, sometimes dipping below 4 degrees Celsius, were spent in the bus where it was normal for two or three players to sleep shivering under one blanket over suitcases and disassembled seat cushions. In the morning they washed their faces under the spigot near the field, then went back to the bus.


In these conditions, games assumed a desperate importance. It was the only time we could act like civilized people. On the field was our one chance to earn respect.


Yura, our team doctor, said it best: "Have you ever had that dream," he asked, "where you are in an alley running as fast as you can from a huge green gorilla that traps you in a corner. You pick up a big lead pipe and you are hitting the gorilla as hard as you can on the head but no matter how hard you swing the pipe it just keeps bouncing softly off his head and he keeps moving closer and closer? Have you had that dream?"


I shrugged and said, "Sure."


"That's what this trip is like," Yura said. "We keep trying to make it better, but it doesn't get better. And, we have a long way home."


In the games, we acted like we were trying to fight off the gorilla. For a while it paid off with a string of wins, as we beat Poland, England, and, before a crowd of 1,500, the German home team. But as sensational as the win over the Germans had been, Spartak spent the night afterward -- the eve of the Lithuanian game -- sunk in a tense and frightened mood. We knew Lithuania wanted to beat us badly, a loss that would mean Spartak placing third in the tournament.


The specter of failure was hanging over us. To win under the conditions we had been living in would have been a show of character, proof that our appearance was deceiving. But losing would have proven somehow that we were indeed the kind of people who you would expect to live in a bus and walk around in a disgusting and unshaven state all day long.


We showed up that last day looking scared and tentative. In warmups we were dropping balls all over while our opponents were loose, joking and throwing bullets.


The Lithuanians, for obvious reasons, wanted to decisively defeat Spartak, the Russian team. They had the reputation as the politest team in the tournament, speaking in careful English and shaking hands warmly after games no matter what the score. But we knew better. They were going to deal with us differently. For most of the game, I played first base next to the Lithuanian bench. In the early innings the Lithuanians were quiet, but when they got a lead I started to hear noise coming from their dugout.


Their dugout was a long, deep black hole in the ground. From where I stood, at first all I could see was a row of bearded faces staring out at us through the slit between the roof and the ground. Each time they got a hit the faces first smiled coolly and then started bombarding us with the foulest Russian vulgarities imaginable. They were intense. We all heard it and we were spooked.


There was no hope for a comeback and we lost 17-9. As Russian sportswriters say, "The chicken had fallen under the tractor."


We need this week off to get unsquashed.