Art & Culture
Not quite a foreign correspondent
> BY GEORGE VECSEY
Copyright © 2002 by The Earth Times. All rights reserved

This was in November of 1989, when the United States defeated the joint team from Trinidad and Tobago, one to zero, to qualify for the World Cup, the greatest sports tournament in the world. If the game had ended in a tie, the tiny amalgamated team would have qualified to play in Italy the following year.

It was a stunning and sad moment for fans in the modest stadium in Port of Spain. When the game ended, a couple of dozen journalists from the US did not applaud, because rooting for your country or your home team is essentially forbidden in American press boxes--contrary to world custom.

As we filed through the deflated crowd, en route to interview players, the fans made room for us, patting us on the back and saying "Congratulations." It is safe to say this is not how crowds would behave in some countries when dreams were dashed so abruptly. "We did nothing," we said. "It would have been a better story if your team were going to Italy. Your players did very well. We've had a great time here. Thank you so much."

I always think about those kind people in Port of Spain when I go overseas to cover a sporting event. It has taken me a full career to appreciate the immensity of the responsibility, but when American journalists go overseas we are representing the United States. It is not enough to be a casually-dressed, irreverent lout, the common American image of sports journalists. Oscar Madison, the sloppy roommate in the "The Odd Couple," would not play well overseas. As we are discovering in much more important realms, people around the world already have a low opinion of Americans and resent our impact on their lives. The last thing needed is a reinforcement of that image by wandering bands of demanding American sports journalists. (This may come off as stuffy, but I avoid the word "sportswriter" because of its essentially boorish connotation.)

Of course, every American journalist soon becomes a representative of the home country. I learned that when I was a news reporter in 1979, covering the first overseas trip by the new Pope, John Paul II. Wherever I went in Mexico, activist priests and radical poets and skeptical journalists and youthful Sandinista bodyguards with weapons in their belts would ask us: "CIA?"

Nobody has asked me that since I moved into sports in 1980. But people overseas do assume Americans have an agenda and they judge us by how we behave.

In our own way, we have signed on to the diplomatic corps. We used to say that most people overseas never read what we wrote, but given the near universality of the English language and the access to the Internet, millions of people do indeed read us. More to the point, people ask us questions and they watch how we react. If we had broken out in a raucous cheer at the winning goal in Trinidad in 1989, I am sure we would have infuriated the home fans. Nobody wants to see Goliath celebrating. And a lot of people are happy to see Goliath snubbed.

It is curious to cover world soccer because the United States is regarded essentially as a developing nation in that sport, after finishing dead last in 1998. The world soccer organization, known as FIFA, makes it difficult for the New York Times to gain a precious pass to the inadequate interview area, even though I have covered the last five World Cups. It is not often that Times reporters have to beg and wheedle for access. Maybe this is good for our humility, but it is most emphatically not good for our reporting.

Another aspect of the laminated, personal-photograph, high-security press pass hanging around our necks is that for a few days or a few weeks I get to be a faint copy of the foreign correspondent I once thought I wanted to be.

I admit I love the travel, love dabbling in the languages, love the food, love the museums, love the city streets, love getting away from the arena. (I don't have time to rave about the shrimp risotto I enjoyed in Genoa while interviewing Ruud Gullit in 1993.) When I was made a sports columnist in 1982, I received my mandate from great editors at the Times--to present sport in its global setting. Some of my American international colleagues feel the same way. However, we are wise enough to know we are not foreign correspondents. Foreign correspondents get shot in places like the Balkans or Afghanistan. I have listened with awe as friends like Alan Riding and Marlise Simons of the New York Times and the late Bill Montalbano of the Los Angeles Times described how they worked in tense places. I learned years ago that I was not a good candidate for this line of work, but international sport opens a huge window on the rest of the world. We can, in fact, have it both ways.

Traveling sports journalists are a separate breed--Olympic writers who proudly call themselves Ring Heads because of the five interlocking Olympic rings, peripatetic tennis writers who meet every year in Melbourne, Paris, Wimbledon and New York, soccer writers who mingle in all corners of the world. The travel is addictive, but it also fills a deep journalistic desire to experience other countries. I can speak for many of my American colleagues that we try to funnel other cultures through the narrow prism of sports stories.

In 1986, the eccentric American visionary Ted Turner arranged a strange event called The Goodwill Games with "my pinko Commie friends" in Moscow. Losing copious amounts of his television network's funds, Turner matched world-level American and Soviet athletes. On one level, he was providing programming for his network, but his real mission was to get the two superpowers to cooperate.

Turner ranted about the nuclear dangers, the damage to the ecology, the money wasted on military bluster. Sometimes he acted like a holy fool telling a bizarre truth, throwing bear hugs on Soviet officials but, as far as I could see, he was the loudest and most passionate person in the world screaming about peace.

As a journalist, I lived in Moscow for three weeks, reporting on this hybrid sports event but also roaming the streets to watch the Soviet empire teetering into a new stage under Mikhail Gorbachev. I wrote about scrappy babushkas, grandmothers, refusing to tolerate abuse from police officers. I wrote about the three lines needed to buy one loaf of bread. I wrote about the tears in Russians' eyes when they talked about their losses in World War Two. I could feel the Soviet Union straining under the weight of its bureaucracy.

I could see this eccentric American television entrepreneur goading the two countries to stop the madness. Sport took me to the cutting edge of history. That nation no longer exists. I am glad I was there to report on a few of its final days.

Sport takes us many places. At the Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, in February of 1998, many Ring Heads discovered that a monk at the famous Buddhist temple of Zenkoji had spent years in Michigan and spoke passable English. Taka Fukushima graciously poured tea for us and spoke of his mixed feelings about the high cost of the games in his native city. And while we visited the narrow lanes of Zenkoji, we sampled the soba noodles, practiced our manners, observed the impact of the lumbering Olympics on life in a small regional Japanese city, and we also wrote about the gold medals.

Another role for a traveling sports journalist--at least from the Times--is giving interviews at events I am covering. In 2000, the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs opened their league season in the Tokyo Dome, the first time official games had ever been played outside North America. Japanese journalists, speaking very good English, often asked me what I thought of Japanese baseball.

Fortunately, I had also been groomed by Bobby Valentine, the astute manager of the Mets, who once managed in Chiba, just outside Tokyo. I was able to speak glowingly of Japanese baseball but also suggested it might be diluted once the best Japanese players began signing lucrative contracts in North America--another example of the impact of American money on other nations. This turned out to be true a year later, when Ichiro Suzuki became a star with the Seattle Mariners.

After assignments like these, I do not mind admitting that it is no longer enough to merely cover American sports--yet another Disneyfied Super Bowl extravaganza. I want to report back to America about what I discover about sport in other parts of the world. I also want people overseas to see that an American can be curious and reserved and respectful of other cultures. Sports journalists have an impact not only with our articles but also with our comments and our behavior. I accept that as part of a job I love.

George Vecsey has been a sports columnist at the New York Times since 1982. He was previously a religion reporter and national correspondent for the Times.