LOS ANGELES In a perfect world, you would have tossed and turned all night. You would have had this searing pain in your stomach, a stabbing sadness in your heart. You would have woken up and immediately cursed Davey Johnson, immediately bad-mouthed Derek Jeter and David Wright and the rest of the fellows on Team USA.
Maybe you would’ve shaken an angry fist at the gods of fate while you were at it.
But you didn’t do that, did you? You saw the fact that Team USA got good and thumped by Team Japan, 9-4, in the semifinals of the World Baseball Classic and and what?
Did you shrug your shoulders? Did you shake your head? Did you even bother to do any of that before flipping over to see the college basketball scores?
And that’s the problem. The World Baseball Classic is doomed to remain a glorified exhibition for as long as that indifference lingers and lasts in the mindset of the United States. Sorry if that sounds parochial.
Apologies if that seems like the ugly ramblings of an ugly American. Sometimes, the truth ain’t pretty.
This is truth:
“I remember talking to Bobby Jones and a few of the other players through the years, and I wanted to tell them that if they felt bad, they weren’t alone; the whole country hurt, and for a lot of years.”
That was Mike Krzyzewski last summer, in Beijing, talking about the way the US basketball loss in the 1972 Olympics ignited a genuine national depression.
This is truth:
“I know people were angry at us, because we were angry at us. The guys who lived through it, we’ve spent four years knowing we have to answer for what we did and didn’t do. We know how much we let people down.”
That was Carmelo Anthony, also last summer, talking about the US collapse in the ’04 Games.
And this is truth, too: Last night, at Foley’s, pound-for-pound Manhattan’s best sports bar, there was a small contingent of Korean patrons and a smaller contingent of Japanese customers half-watching the WBC Finals and only after helpful Post reporter Brett Cyrgalis mentioned the game was on ESPN.
When asked if anyone watched the US lose to Japan at the saloon Sunday, Andy the bartender smiled and said, “Did they play Sunday?”
See, people cared about those basketball teams, cared about US supremacy in a game it invented, cared that the rest of the world caught up to us too quickly. Maybe we should feel the same primacy with baseball; we just don’t, not yet, maybe not ever.
But that’s the only way this is going to change. That’s the only way the WBC will ever survive. It was Pat Riley who once divided the world into two distinct chambers: winning and misery.
Winning and indifference simply doesn’t have the same ring, does it?