The Global Cry: Play Ball!

By Tom Callahan

Something is abroad in the games people play, or about to go abroad, anyway. Suddenly the globe is ready to play ball, with the Soviet Union leading off. In their hearts, the Soviets probably still think they invented baseball, or lapta, an innocent steppes-child that supposedly predates both British rounders and Tommy John. But the bench jockeying has quieted considerably since the Reds dropped an April game to the U.S. Naval Academy, 21-1, and their coach was heard to mutter, "Throw to second, not first. Second is the one in the middle."

At the moment, Western sports pages are lousy with Soviets, who are lousy only at baseball. Three more hockey players from the vaunted Red Army team resigned their commissions last week. By the grace of a fresh understanding between Moscow and the National Hockey League, stars Vyacheslav Fetisov, Igor Larionov and Sergei Makarov are now free to negotiate with the teams that drafted them: the New Jersey Devils, Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames (which already employs Sergei Priakin). Only one Soviet applicant has felt the need to defect. Alexander Mogilny saw Buffalo and just couldn't live anywhere else. Shrugging everything off, Soviet authorities have invited the Flames and the Washington Capitals to play a revolutionary series in Moscow and Leningrad come September.

In the tennis community too, freethinking Soviets are multiplying. Olga Morozova, the pig-tailed pioneer who occasionally popped into grand-slam finals during the '70s, now coaches a raft of promising young countrymen and -women known as the Glasnost Gang. The most precocious gangster is Natalia Zvereva, 18, who is also the most perestroika-emboldened. She has won $515,000 professionally, but since much of it has been diverted into state coffers, she gripes, "I still don't have enough money for a Mercedes." When last seen, Zvereva was stomping back to the Kremlin to have it out with her agents. "If you don't see me at the French Open," she giggled in parting, "you'll know what happened."

The Soviet Union is just a piece of a new picture. Cleared to participate in the next Olympics, the National Basketball Association plans to contribute one team to a Milan tournament in October and assign two others to open next season in Tokyo. Japan's association with American baseball, of course, goes back to Babe Ruth. Just last November, on a typical All-Star tour, the Dodgers' Orel Hershiser capped his nearly scoreless autumn by yielding a Ruthian homer to Fujio Tamura of the Nippon Ham Fighters ("I was told he couldn't hit a curve ball"). But Japan is importing all sports now, and the Los Angeles Rams will confront the San Francisco 49ers there in August.

The most daring development, as usual, is coming from the National Football League. Tex Schramm, the exiled general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, has been forming an international spring league that will announce its franchises any day now. "And they'll be kicking off next April," Schramm says.

Montreal and Mexico City will likely join four U.S. and four to six European cities in a twelve-game season leading to a summertime World Bowl. Towns tired of hoping for N.F.L. expansion franchises (Jacksonville, Memphis, Oakland and Baltimore) would seem the prime American candidates for the auxiliary league. London, Dublin, Frankfurt and Milan are among the European possibilities.

Television inspired both the European players and the American plotters. "The people saw delayed broadcasts and taped highlights and liked them," says Schramm, who notes that live N.F.L. telecasts are scheduled in London this season, along with the latest Wembley exhibition (this year Philadelphia vs. Cleveland). "Television stations in Europe are doubling and tripling. With the complete common market in 1992, a great melding of entertainment is about to take place."

Comparing football with soccer, whose charms are mysterious only to Americans, Schramm says, "Games where the players use every part of their body, not just their feet, and where there's generally a lot of scoring, have a good chance to win the world over." But will the world be open to this militaristic game of bombs and blitzes? Maybe so, if Richard Tardits is any barometer.

Tardits is a Frenchman from Biarritz who, through a series of family coincidences, matriculated at the University of Georgia four years ago. Apprised by his father that he would need a scholarship to remain, Tardits donned his rugby shorts and knee-high stockings and went out for the Bulldog football team. The first day on defense, he ignored the ballcarrier and tackled the blocker. But Tardits was quick, tall and weighed 200 lbs. Coach Vince Dooley was intrigued. For one thing, he had never had a linebacker whose previous experience consisted of running with the bulls in Pamplona.

In situations where Tardits could do no harm, Dooley tossed him into games for a play or two. He started to sack quarterbacks with a move the other players dubbed the Tour de France. During a spring practice in Tardits' sophomore year, just as his father was about to summon him home to the University of Toulouse, Dooley called for quiet. In the manner of a battlefield commission or the awarding of the Croix de Guerre, Tardits' scholarship was presented on the field. Last month he was drafted fifth by the N.F.L.'s Phoenix Cardinals.

Tardits has attempted to tell his French friends about the amazing spectacle of "a stadium with 85,000 filled seats and people still fighting to buy tickets." He tries to mix in "all the colors and the vehicles and the screaming" and even tosses out a "How 'bout them dogs?" Mais zut. "They can't realize what it's like," he says in dismay, and concludes with a sigh, "Only in America."