"Grossbach-FeelForTheGame" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grossbach Robert)

ROBERT GROSSBACH

A FEEL FOR THE GAME

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, auto-nomic
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,