I left France on Monday, August 28th, after two frustrating losses against PUC in Paris. I stayed with my friend Miklos at his apartment in the Marais, and caught a nonstop to Chicago at noon, getting in at 2:30pm Chicago time. The weeks since have been a maelstrom of orientation events and classes that leave […]
I left France on Monday, August 28th, after two frustrating losses against PUC in Paris. I stayed with my friend Miklos at his apartment in the Marais, and caught a nonstop to Chicago at noon, getting in at 2:30pm Chicago time.
The weeks since have been a maelstrom of orientation events and classes that leave me more than a little bit overwhelmed. It’s like the first weeks of college all over again. People are meeting their new roommates, making friends, joining campus groups, making poor decisions on who to sleep with, having too much to drink at the weekly happy hour cheekily called “Bar Review.” Everyone here is thrilled to be here, proud to have been admitted, eager to show what they’re capable of doing. The future, as they say, is wide open, and after a week of orientation events designed primarily, it appears, to tell us all the impressive things we’ll accomplish in the law, we began immersing ourselves in the standard first year courses. Contracts. Criminal Law. Civil Procedure. Property. Legal Writing.
And yet through it all, why can’t I concentrate? Why do I feel this sense of guilty reservation, of “Yes, but…” How could I even express this hesitation, this reserve to my classmates? This idea that sure, I’m very excited about it all, but really, there’s this matter of the Woodchucks?
How could I explain that rather than fully commit myself to this life-changing experience, my thoughts are still with a hard luck baseball team in a small suburb outside a small city in the corner of France?
In the end, I guess it’s just a subconscious recognition of the story nearing its end, the window closing. It was almost exactly a year ago this week that I quit my job as an investment banker, dropped out of society, and begain training full time to play professional baseball. But now, turning from my desk, I look out the window and see downtown Chicago and the law school, instead of a batting cage. My backpack is full of weighty red casebooks instead of track shoes and protein shakes, and all this serves as a reminder that at some point, the party has to end. The gravitational pull of “real life” sucks you back in, and you realize you can’t earn 300€ a month and drive around in the Woodsmobile for the rest of your life. At some point, you need to move on.
And frankly, that’s a damn shame.
Today is Friday, and as such I will be getting on a 6pm flight out of O’Hare to Paris. I know this because I did it last weekend, and I will do it every weekend for the next month, flying back on Mondays. The Woodchucks didn’t play last weekend, as the playoffs were delayed a week due to rainouts, but the way I had booked my tickets required me to fly to Paris on Friday so as not to miss the opening leg of a new itinerary coming back on Monday. (Allow me to spare you the trouble of pointing out that while flying to France for 48 hours just for two baseball games exhibits a questionable grip on reality, flying to France for two baseball games that don’t even happen is beyond preposterous.)
We got a tough draw in the first weekend, playing Rouen’s “second” team. I use the term loosely, because Rouen’s ravenous desire to poach all the good players from other teams in the region (they have a handful of players from last year’s Woodchucks squad) and stockpile them has led to them being triple-booked at every position. It’s an embarassment of riches when viewed from the perspective of a Bois-Guillaume team that struggles to field nine players every weekend. As such, for the playoffs, Rouen will certainly send players from the first team down to the second team, and we will be lucky to split the two games.
In fact, Rouen will likely try to pour it on, as there is a significant financial incentive to the Rouen club to seeing that Bois-Guillaume gets demoted. Both clubs are in the same region, which means that they share funding from the same governmental agency. Perhaps not surprisingly, Rouen wants all that funding for itself, and knows that if Bois-Guillaume descends to the second division, they will no longer qualify for some of that largesse.
So off I go. Before class, I’m headed to my first physical therapy appointment for my elbow. A doctor here at Northwestern confirmed my self-diagnosis of a strained UCL (ulnar collateral ligament, which if torn requires Tommy John surgery) and I’ll be working to rehab the forearm muscles for next season. It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to pitch during the playoffs.