The Opposite Field

基本介紹

• 中文名稱：The Opposite Field
• 定價：119.00元
• 作者：Katz Jesse
• 出版日期：2010-7
• ISBN：9780307407122

媒體推薦

“You need two things to make a fine, fine book: a story and a teller. The Opposite Field brings them together, like young love. It's a story about fathers and sons, and good love and failed love, and baseball. If that isn't by God a book I don't know what is. This story breaks your heart in places. But then it makes you glad you have one. In one chapter, after a bitter loss on the baseball field, Coach Jesse Katz throws open the lid on a cooler full of water balloons and a field of misery becomes a place of delight. If there's a metaphor here, for marriage and fatherhood and all of the rest, that may be it. But the best thing about this book is the teller. This guy can flat-out write.”

—Rick Bragg, author the New York Times bestseller All Over but the Shoutin’

“The Opposite Field is more than a beautifully-written memoir. It's more than a wonderful baseball story. It indisputably has the element of connectivity thatis in all great and powerful storytelling. Jesse Katz delivers the human experience in a way that speaks to all of us.”

—Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author of The Scarecrow and Blood Work

“Cast through the prism of one of America's oldest pastimes, Jesse Katz illuminates contemporary American life with wonderful detail and honesty.The Opposite Fieldbrings to life the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles, drawing them out of the shadows of Hollywood glitz and gangland portraits we typically read about, evoking the struggles and dreams of the children and parents in and around the hidden-away baseball field of La Loma. It's a heartfelt story, well-told.”

—Norman Ollestad, author of Crazy for the Storm

"A love letter from a father to his son, The Opposite Field is also a hymn to baseball, the new Los Angeles, the joy and pain of modern parenting as well as one man's journey into wisdom and clarity, and Jesse Katz shapes this material in such a way that he makes it as dramatic as a movie. I never would have thought a book about a Little League team could be this compelling, or that so much could be at stake, or that La Loma could become--and it does in Katz's buoyant prose--the stuff of legend."

—Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Lunar Park

“Acutely observed, deeply human, and very wise about the game, The Opposite Field is more than Jesse Katz’s memoir of small town baseball. There’s his wayward love for L.A., Latinas, and the promises of spring. And his realization that every ball diamond is the beginning of an American ballad.”

—D. J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

"Jesse Katz has captured the hybrid soul of California's Monterey Park, a community that, despite its sharing a border with the largest Mexican community in America, East L.A., is probably as suburban and middle class as any, particularly in the drama of its neighborhood sports leagues. Yet it is unique in ways that Katz deeply understands and eloquently evokes. And the poetry of his prose--Katz may be the next big writer dude of the LA style."

—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running

"A 'Little League Dad' book like no other. Jesse Katz¹s The Opposite Field is set not in the usual Waspy suburb but in a community on the edge of Los Angeles with a majority Asian and Hispanic population. In addition to evoking surprising cross-cultural discoveries and conflicts, Katz portrays everything from his legendary mother¹s flight from the Nazis to the shooting of his stepson -- and critiques not only his failings as a baseball manager but as a parent."

—Greg Mitchell, author of Joy in Mudville

"With his precise journalistic eye, [Jesse] Katz ultimately chronicles his lifelong quest to finally reach home plate. And it's a grand slam."

--from OregonLive.com

“The Opposite Field blends Katz’s both painful and comic struggles as a single dad to remain connected with his growing son through baseball. And with taut and vivid writing befitting a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Katz delivers trenchant observations about relationships, parenthood and his immersion in Latino culture in his love life, at work as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and at play in Max’s Little League.”

--from WWeek.com

From the Hardcover edition.

作者簡介

JESSE KATZ is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former staffer at the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine. He lives with his son, Max, in Monterey Park, California.

From the Hardcover edition.

文摘

PROLOGUE

My park is called La Loma. I have always liked the sound of that, the symmetry of those double-barrel Ls, the femininity of the final Spanish vowels, the spacey La-La Land echo, all an improvement on its stiff translation: the Hill. La Loma is prettier, softer and rounder, earthier–loamier. A park for losing yourself in. The park I went looking for myself in.

Max and I have spent nine springs and summers there, through squalls and droughts, heat waves and cold snaps, from his preschool years to the onslaught of adolescence. We have celebrated there and we have sulked there, twirling like fools across the dirt and chalk, drowning our broken hearts with fusillades of water balloons. We have made friends for life at La Loma and, I suspect, enemies for just as long. We have gone there to forget and to remember, to stop time and to grow up. The park is under our skin: season after season of bites, burns, stings, cuts, sprains, scars. Max has bled at La Loma. He has barfed there. He has wet himself. I have rinsed his wounds at La Loma, iced him, kneaded him, bandaged him, scooped him off the ground, his face streaked with sweat and clay and eye-black grease, and held him in my arms. Max has stood there, in jersey and cap, and hacked out “The Star-Spangled Banner” in front of a thousand people on his electric guitar. I have given myself to those same people, cheered and groaned alongside them, accepted their prayers and shared their beers, slipped to me in Styrofoam coffee cups. Whenever we have needed it, whenever I have felt burdened or alone, La Loma has been there. The park is always the park. Our refuge. My excuse.

It rises from the haze and glare of inland Los Angeles, far from Hollywood, beyond the margins of the tourist maps. In a city that skews west, toward the surf, La Loma is on the wrong side, east of the skyline, east of skid row, east of the rail yards, the slaughterhouses, the riverbed. By a shade, it is east of East Los Angeles, the original gangland, the cultural heartland of Mexican America. La Loma marks the spot roughly at which the barrio ends and the burbs begin, where inner-city Los Angeles meets bedroom-community Los Angeles. Knots of prickly pear give way to tidy rows of jacaranda, with flurries that dust the sidewalk purple, and Depression-era adobes fade into 1950s subdivisions, of a style known as California ranch, with gas fireplaces and attached garages and faux clapboard shutters.

La Loma falls within Monterey Park, one of those invisible municipalities you could spend a lifetime in L.A. and never visit, maybe even never hear of. The town is blandly provincial and yet stunningly foreign: forty thousand of its sixty-three thousand residents are of Asian descent, the highest concentration in any city in the continental United States. It was this fact that first drew me here, as a novice journalist, almost twenty-five years ago. I was new to L.A., new to adulthood, and the battles then raging between Chinese émigrés and Anglo nativists–over language, over customs, over the right to belong–were redefining what it means to be middle class and American. From the polite liberalism of Oregon, via a fancy college in Vermont, I had been transported to a furious social laboratory on thehaunches of Los Angeles. A new form of white flight was under way, not from a decaying urban core but from an ethnically convulsing suburb: Rather than embrace the new Monterey Park, twenty thousand white folks up and split. At the time, I could never have foreseen that this curious place would one day lure me back, not as a writer but as a father, that I would be returning, against the tide, to make Monterey Park my own. But that was long ago, before I married a barmaid from Nicaragua, before I inherited an extended family of aliens and castaways, before we had Max, our maple-skinned, almond-eyed chameleon of a son, whose childhood I was determined to mold and preserve.

Through eucalyptus, past weeping red bottlebrush, over bark mulch, La Loma hugs the hill, pausing and ascending and pausing again–a vertical park, winding to some unseen pinnacle, rather than the naked grid of a playground. Each level of La Loma is distinct, concealed by shrubs and connected by stairs, exactly forty of them from bottom to top. Climbing them all is like scaling a labyrinthine tree fort, part Dr. Seuss and part Swiss Family Robinson. La Loma twists and strays, a dense wall of ice plants here, a secluded meadow there, a nest of hornets, a shock of wildflowers, a connect-the-dots of gopher holes, another rise and a thicket and a clearing, the park revealing itself with each turn. For as long as we have been going to La Loma, Max has been carving his own path, as all the kids do, finding freedom in the bramble. He squeezes between the narrowest gaps, scampers up the trickiest banks, and slides down the steepest chutes on rafts made of twigs and cardboard. Their name for this caper is Mission Impossible, and I can almost hear them dun-dun-dern-dern-dun-dun-ing the theme as they traverse the slopes, imbuing the topography of La Loma with drama.

Up the steps, on the highest levels, La Loma grows flat. The terraces unfurl into broad fields, like the mesas of a Road Runner cartoon. It is there, between March and July, that we play baseball–hundreds of boys and girls, hundreds of games a year. Because of the grade and the foliage, it is difficult to see from the street that any of this is happening, difficult to imagine that the fortunes of an entire Little League could be contained within the undulations of this one hill. To discover La Loma, to cross its threshold, to rove its crooks, to emerge, breathless, at its summit, is to view Los Angeles from the inside out. Downtown is just seven miles away–the basin sprawls below us, the skies above sparkle with LAX-bound jets–yet from this perch, it is quite possible to think of La Loma as its own universe, a secret park, into which nobody ventures without meaning to be there.

At night, when the last games are over and the lights shut off, I often take a moment on the bleachers, to watch the moon and listen to the crickets, just me and Max. I have been coaching his teams at La Loma since he was in T-ball. He was six then, a guileless kindergartner, with no choice but to trust the decrees of his dad. Max is fourteen now and more complicated, a rocker and a skater, with a MySpace page and a life I will never again know everything about. On these diamonds I have witnessed him fail and triumph and fail again, his baby fat replaced by sinew and poise. Over the course of perhaps a thousand innings, he has known every possible outcome: the game-winning hit, the game-losing pitch, the acrobatic catch, the booted grounder, the daring steal, the fumbled tag, the beanballs both dispensed and received. I believe he has loved it as much as I have. Nine years of jerseys hang in his closet, nine years of trophies line his bookshelf, nine years of team photos–Max growing taller and shaggier, me grayer and thicker–stick to our refrigerator door. But with high school about to start, I can see just as well that we are at the end of something, that this park that has framed our relationship for two-thirds of his life is no longer the place by which he measures himself. He has one more year left, but he is done with La Loma. He is gifted enough, I think, to go out for his freshman team, but he is done with baseball. Max, if I understand him these days, is done with organized sports, with the uniformity and the corniness and the genuflections to authority. “I don’t know what happened, Dad,” he tells me. “I’m just not feelin’ it anymore.” Soon enough, I fear, he will be done being the boy who feels the need to offer any explanations at all.

Some of these changes are surely inevitable, a child’s natural course, but I am no less wistful about them. I did everything in my power to slow the process, to conserve La Loma for Max for as long as I could. When we started, it was all about the two of us, father and son tossing the ball, creating our own nostalgia in the grass. Four years later I was running the park. I had become the commissioner, Monterey Park’s guardian of baseball. It is a position I assumed with equal measures of duty and dread, hoping to salvage a season on the verge of collapse. The league was imploding. Families were bailing. Nobody claimed to be in charge. When Max’s team was my only concern, I had been able to tune out the warning signs, all the blustery dads who treated La Loma as turf, mining it for money and prestige. I was still Max’s coach, but now I had volunteered to sweep up their wreckage–to preside over a community that had never quite invited me in. It was a decent thing to do. It was also mulish and self-destructive. You could say that about a lot of my choices.

The cliché of Little League, of youth sports in America, is one of lost perspective: By taking it too seriously, adults have ruined a children’s game. I have begun to think that the opposite is true, that we do not take it seriously enough. Nothing in my forty-plus years has compared with the enormity, with the complexities or the sensitivities, of trying to keep La Loma afloat. Nothing has done as much to test my judgment. Nothing has made me feel so responsible for so much beyond my control. Being commissioner means being La Loma’s publicist, accountant, emcee, detective, psychologist, chef, graphic designer, janitor, landscaper, paramedic, choreographer, and justice of the peace, one whose standing is based largely on the absence of anyone else willing to assume the office. No matter how many hours I put into it–and for someone who putatively holds a “real job,” I have put in more than I should ever admit–there is always a parent to soothe or to scold, a protest to weigh, a schedule to juggl...