stpierrecolumn March 4 to 10

BASEBALL NEEDS BROTHELS

TEACAPAN, SINALOA, MEXICO -- Into town come two backpackers from the wilds of Canada, David White and his wife Kristina Lindh of the North Adams River country, knowing not where to lay their head for the night but sure they will sleep well somewhere.

Within two days he is playing chess with local high school kids, she is exchanging recipes with Mexican housewives and the fishermen who dock in front of their little rented cottage are eager to bring the Canadienses free Sierras for breakfast. This community takes some gringos to its bosom and not others and never deigns to say why because comparisons are odious.

One reason for this couple's popularity is that Spanish is one of the five languages Kristina speaks. Another reason may be baseball. David once played professional baseball in this country. It was more than 30 years ago and since then he has lost almost all his hair and a lot of his illusions about the world but Mexican beisbole he knows fondly.

One day of memory is fresh and fragrant with a particular musky perfume. It came when, long ago, he was a pro who played outfield for the Minnesota Twins farm team. It didn't pay much, but it was a living. In winters, when there are no frozen baseballs being thrown in Minnesota, he and some other farm team players came down to Mexico and played for the Mexican Winter League. David joined the Santa Rosalio team and drove down here in an old beater to become their only non-Spanish speaking member, DAVID BLANCO.

He recalls the day he learned that Mexicans are happier playing baseball than other people.

"We had a double header coming up in the afternoon so the coach called us out early in the morning for a workout. I guessed it was going to be a long, hard workout but, being short on both language and general understanding, I was wrong."

First the whole team went down into Santa Rosalio. The French, who ran mines there in those years, had imported handsome woodframe houses, things rare in this land of brick and stone. On the narrow streets, the overhanging balconies of these houses almost met in the centre of the street and dripped bougainvillea, Burstof Flame flowers and hibiscus on the people below.

"We went into one of those splendid old houses and that was when I discovered that to the Santa Rosalio team a workout meant a few hours in a whorehouse.

"We got to the game on time but, if you are a person who believes that hungry dogs hunt best, you won't be surprised to learn that we lost both games. But we had had a wonderful day of baseball. Splendid. Glorious. The kind of day the Almighty surely intended us to have on this earth."

This engages David in one of his favorite subjects, the superiority of Mexican baseball.

This country's favorite sport is soccer, but baseball comes a close second. (Bullfighting doesn't rank at all because, as the Mexicans keep telling us and we never listen, fighting a bull is a ritual, not a sport. In sport, the winner is unknown. At a corrida the bull is going to die, the test is how properly this will come about.)

Beisbol is different.

"They're baseball crazy down here but what the gringo doesn't get the hang of is that winning and losing is not the be all and end all. Small aspects of the game become big. Supermen become smaller. Style matters.

"Up north we have given over our games to the grand slam batters who can drive them over the fence. Down here the fans are looking for stolen bases, bunts and pitchers who do curve balls and balls that wander back and forth as they come at you. Mexican baseball is more exciting. Mexican baseball is the kind of baseball we had up north in the fifties and sixties."

David is long gone from the game, having never made it to the majors on account of, as he explains it, not being good enough, which is a pretty reasonable reason to offer.

An American, he deserted the army during the Viet Nam war and came to Canada where he became a tree planter, a logger, a chess player, a Canadian, a naturalist and, by the usual definition, an intellectual.

He and Kristina live on moosemeat and huckleberries in one of the loneliest sections of B.C. They have no phone, no hydro, hardly any neighbors and it's a 120 km round trip to their post office box, when the road over the pass into the North Thomson Valley isn't snowbound.

They are like the Mexicans. They are happy people. This inconsequential little place, this pimple on the ass of time, will remember these Canadienzes.

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