Death Match - Diane Duane [26]
“Me? Sports? Not a chance,” Catie’s father said. “But the psychology of this particular situation…maybe.”
Catie thought about that. “I don’t know for sure,” she said. “It could just be the underdog thing, I guess. People enjoy seeing an unlikely winner taking on the ‘big guys.’”
Her father nodded, pulled out the turpentine rag again, and sat down on the poor beat-up, paint-spattered couch, where he started scrubbing once more at the back of his left hand, where it was still blue and green. “Maybe. I guess I’m not clear on how they managed it in the first place, though.”
“If I understand it right,” Catie said, leaning against the tube-and bottle-cluttered desk near the studio door, “somebody in the first organizing body of the sport actually had the brains to set themselves up as a licensing body as well, to make sure they kept control over it. I don’t understand most of the legal stuff, but I think Hal told me they had to do that in order to get permission to keep using cubic on the International Space Station for those first few tournaments. He said the first organizers wanted to make sure the sport didn’t lose the amateur feel, even when it started to get professionalized—they were smart enough to see that coming over the horizon, eventually—and when the league structure started to be set up, they wrote it specifically into the structure document that Spat International would not allow strictly professional leagues. They could call themselves something else if they went professional, but they couldn’t call it ‘spatball.’”
Her father nodded slowly. “You’re telling me they decided to license the brand, as much as the game itself.” He chucked the rag into the little self-sealing ceramic garbage can nearby where his flammable disposables went, and picked up his beer glass again. “Possibly a very smart move.”
“Seems that way,” Catie said. “Hal says the big teams have tried a couple different ways to break the license or weasel around it, and every time they try, they get blown out of the water in one jurisdiction or another. Apparently the player who drew up the structure document as part of the original license was also a lawyer with a specialty in international trademark and patent law, and he really knew what he was doing.”
“Huh,” her father said, having another drink of Duvel.
“But this is still kind of unusual, I take it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Catie said. “The structure of the yearly spat schedule usually seems to shake out all but the very best teams early on, and mostly the ones who’re left are the professional teams. Partly it’s because the professionals have lots of money to recruit the most talented players from the semipro and amateur teams. Seems like the semis and amateurs have been complaining about that for a long time. In the normal course of the competitions, most of the amateur teams usually fall by the wayside by the mid-season break. But not this one….”
Her father finished his beer, got up, and picked up the rag can, glancing one last time at the painting. “Well,” he said, “it’s going to be interesting to see how the rest of the season unfolds for South Florida. I would imagine the pressure on them is increasing to levels they wouldn’t normally experience as a purely amateur team.”
Catie nodded as they walked back toward the kitchen. “That’s sort of why I want to meet their team captain,” she said.
Her father raised his eyebrows at her as they went into the kitchen and he kept going, toward the door that led to the garage, the side of the house, and the sealed disposal for the flammable garbage. “So you’re telling me that it really doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that People described this guy as having ‘the best physical aspects