"Robert Grossbach - A Feel For the Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grossbach Robert)

A FEEL FOR THE GAME
By Robert Grossbach
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IT WAS A STRANGE COMbination, businessman and speculator, collector, lover
of baseball. Everyone at the convention had all the elements to some degree, but
Curran knew it was a question of which motivation was dominant. If he could find
that out, intuit it somehow, discern it, he might get an edge in the bidding.

He tried to keep his face impassive during the Lull, tried to stop the fingers on
his left hand from tapping the side of his chair, tried to suppress the sweating, the
throat clearing, the swallowing, the dozens of silent, autonomic betrayals of anxiety.
The competition had to believe he was in control, calm, cold-blooded, ruthlessly
relaxed enough to do whatever was necessary to get The Duke. Whatever was
necessary.

He hadn’t expected it, none of them had. Only twenty minutes earlier he’d
been walking through the aisles, his mood a mixture of condescension and nostalgia.
You found all kinds here, from the wide-eyed kid collectors offering individual packs
of Elston Darnell’s at five New Yen each, to hard core (and hard surface)
wheeler-dealers, looking for a quick score on a case of 21st century Ki Fu’s or a half
dozen “specially preserved” Dwight Gooden’s. A hobbyist’s tender compulsion
expanded (and perverted) to unfeeling commercial carnivore. Conventions of this
kind had spread across six terrestrial continents and three lunar colonies, and there
was even talk that, next year, there’d be one on Ceres. It seemed like any place you
had ten thousand people, regardless of whether there was any external atmosphere,
two hundred were in the business.

Of course, baseball was only one category. There were basketball players and
football players and actors and politicians. Hell, if you were intellectual, there were
even novelists and scientists — but somehow the sound of “I’ll trade you two
Norman Mailers for a Stephen Hawking,” just didn’t feel right to Curran. For him, as
for so many others, it was baseball that somehow remained special. Baseball, after
all, had been first, starting with the tributes two centuries earlier, silver emulsions on
cardboard, packaged with chewing gum and memorializing the ancient greats: Ty
Cobb and Dizzy Dean, Joe D., Willie, Oisk, Aaron, Clemente, Mickey —

And The Duke.

He couldn’t believe it when he heard it. He’d just paused at a station manned
by a thirtyish woman hawking “mint condition” Rip Repulski’s, when the
announcement came over the PA. “There will be an auction in the green room
beginning in ten minutes. Among the players available is the Brooklyn Dodgers’
Duke Snider, to be sold as a singleton.”

Curran had been lightheaded, the funk lasting even through the auction’s
opening rounds. He’d been searching for The Duke for years, and now, out of the
blue, here it was within his grasp. He’d emerged from his reverie only when the
bidding had hit 40 thousand New Yen and the number of bidders had dropped to
four. Quickly, Curran had upped the stakes, punching in 53 thousand New Yen and