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| About three years ago I completed a whodunit-cum-thriller based on cricket.
Conceived in terms of the 'coarse' Sunday cricket I myself play (kind of the equivalent of social softball games) it had begun life as something of a "doodle". As part of this fun exercise I set myself the constraints of, as much as possible, confining the plot within the cricket context. Victim, villain, hero, McGuffin and solution all had to be related to the game and its processes. Somehow it got finished. When I hawked it around to the pitiful handful of remaining main Fair enough, though, I guess. The book had come at them out of left field and they had no option but to play hard ball. I had only myself to blame for ending up behind the eight ball. I'd always really known there weren't enough cricketing aficionados in the U.S. I'd struck out. Jabbed back on my heels I walked around for days feeling below par. Then in the bottom of the ninth I came through. I managed to get the book away with a fringe publisher. It came out of the blocks like Citation. Uniquely in my experience I got personal calls asking where copies could be obtained. Then - uniquely in my experience - the publisher went into receivership. They hadn't gone the distance. The great beginning had had a final inning. But by now my mind was busying itself with sports jargon - that quirky, flavorful nomenclature that, like the terminology of the old sailing days, say, is now deeply embedded in the language. An early reaction was to feel sore. After all, a U.S. written thriller based on baseball has no trouble being taken up in the U.K. Thanks to the century-plus saturation of Britain with American writing, films and culture (Kevin Coster's output alone would account for it!), expressions such as left field, relief pitcher,spitballing, or pinch hitter are largely understood over here. Indeed, imported from Australia where they swing both ways, so to speak, pinch hitter is now beginning to be routinely used in cricket. And even though hanging on the term 'first base', one of James Thurber's best cartoons that goes back to at least the thirties was no less telling in London than New York. The acceptance of such terms is due as well in part to the impact on the U.K. of American business. Arguably almost all male corporate executives are frustrated jocks. That's why they jog, play tennis and do all that yelling. Business, big or small, is competitive. It is in the nature of the corporate beast to use sporting metaphors -'we'd better play that one back to the baseline, gentlemen'- in the boardroom. Because of its misty, ancient origins (nobody knows quite how or when it started: but the distance between the two sets of wooden stumps is twenty-two yards, i.e. a 'chain' the mediaeval way of measuring out ploughland as today a dubious 'down' is checked) Cricket can doubtless claim the most esoteric terminology of all popular games. 'Maiden over' (a scoreless sequence of deliveries/pitches) is maybe just deducible but what of 'silly mod-off' or 'short square leg' or 'chinaman'? (Loosely 'silly' translates as suicidally close; 'square' as at right angles to the batsman/hitter and 'short' closer to him/her than 'deep' while a 'chinaman' is a lefthander/southpaw's 'googly'. Unless, that is, you come from Australia where a googly is a lefthander's natural leg break. O.K? Got that? Good. Ironically one very basic American sporting expression that is absolutely unrecognised in Britain is, yes,that's right, 'english'. The two cricket terms that are in common everyday English usage are 'on the back foot' and that 'googly'. The former - rather illogically in terms of the games' techniques - means colloquially to be in defensive mode. I have a suspicion that, its source unknown, the term may have migrated westwards. To be on the receiving end of a googly outside of a cricket game means to have been deceived by something containing more than immediately met the eye, to have been thrown a curve ball. I'm pretty certain that hasn't translated to Poughkeepsie. One term has always troubled me. If 'below par' comes from Augusta rather than Wall Street, surely it is wrongly applied. If we're functioning less well than normally, surely we're operating 'above par'. Wall Street it is, I guess. Sport is pervasive in Western culture. Personally I like the way in which it has lent its expressions to every day speech. They give the language salt and bite. In the mouths of politicians and executives, it is true, they can become wall-to-wall clichés and token substitutes for original thinking and precise expression - but we key players can always recognise such enforced errors. And after all, the occasional cliché is not unacceptable if it allows the speaker to come through in the homestretch. As for my thriller, I don't regret having given it the college try. The guys running interference at the very first publisher to reject it, Harper Collins, had earlier returned another punt from left field back to the baseline: something called "Harry Potter" - involving a sport called Quidditch. |
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stream U.K. publishers it received a universal reaction: "This is surprisingly well written," - gee, thanks - "but it's not the sort of thing we publish.” So much for seizing niche marketing opportunity. One publisher's reader, bribed by a drink, provided me with a realpolitik translation. "It's O.K. But all that cricket jargon - we haven't a prayer of getting it away in the States". My book, it seemed, was not a dandy Yankee doodle.
