Death Match - Diane Duane [32]
Catie blinked and came back to the moment as their drinks arrived. Whoa, she thought, not like you to phase out just because of a pretty face, kid. Sharpen up!
“Wasn’t there going to be someone else here with you?” Hal was saying.
“Oh, yeah, my team cocaptain, Rick Menendez. But he’s off seeing his sister in Rockville. She had a baby last week, her first, and it’s his first chance to see his nephew in the flesh, instead of in a virtmail. Hilarious…the grimmest guy you ever saw, most of the time. He’s gone all gooey.” George grinned, and the flash of it made Catie smile, too, just at the sight of it. “But the whole team is up here at the moment…those who’re going to be playing tomorrow, anyway. We’re short a couple of bodies. Two nights ago we lost one of our second-string players to an invigilation call-up, would you believe? And another one has a dual qualification as an umpire, and has to go umpire a Western Division game at the same time we’ll be playing Chicago and Moscow Spartak tomorrow—there’s a shortage of officials right now.” He shrugged. “Bad luck, I guess, but we’ll cope.”
“I don’t think you must be very happy about having to travel the day before a game,” Catie said. “Especially one this important for the team.”
“Yes, well,” George said, making a slightly sour face, “this is also the time at which we’re running ‘hottest’ in terms of publicity…and therefore this is the time to go strike the sponsorship deal we’ve been waiting for. We have to go up to AirDyne’s corporate headquarters in Bethesda this afternoon and do a big press conference performance…. It’ll be all over the evening news. This kind of thing makes the ISF happy, even if it isn’t our favorite thing. It’ll push the ‘gate’ up for the game tomorrow. But we’re going to be up late practicing tonight….”
“I thought you didn’t want a sponsorship deal,” Hal said. “You’ve been turning them all down.”
“Well,” George said, “we do actually start to need sponsorship, to play at this level. The team is pretty much agreed on this. But we’ve also agreed that we don’t want any sponsorship agreement to be exclusive…at least, not by the sponsor’s choice. At our level, it probably will be, because we don’t need that much sponsorship. One big company is plenty. And besides, there are teams that really go overboard in that regard. They get the idea that if a little money is a good idea, then more is better…and as a result, some of their team jerseys are so cluttered with logos you can hardly make out a color underneath them.” George took a pull on his iced tea. “But more to the point, none of us on the team likes the implication—the companies don’t come right out and say it, of course, though it’s there—that the sponsor starts to own you, somehow, that it’s okay for them to start dictating to you about tactics and play, once you’ve signed on the dotted line.”
George sighed then. “So finally we found a sponsor that wouldn’t insist on exclusivity, and which agreed to stay out of our way on managerial issues, which was terrific. It’s not like the team can’t use the money. Our yearly contribution to the ISF isn’t peanuts, by any means. But the Federation has to keep the Net servers where we play our games up and running somehow, and that takes hardware hosting and software maintenance and a hundred other things that all cost money. The only alternative, play in reality, is beyond any of us at the moment, even the biggest and best funded of the professional teams. Real cubic in space is just too limited and too expensive right now. It’s kind of sad. It would be nice if there was at least someplace where the sport could be played as it was originally conceived, in genuine microgravity. But without that