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“Withoutel aguanteno amount of skill will take you through to the top.”
Damn. I knew it was too good to be true. Now he’s going to say I lack skill. Shit. Shitshitshit.
“I will tell you a story of two players. I will name no names, so don’t ask me to.” He gives the photographer a pointed stare. Oh, so this is for the article. I get it. I’m a kind of prop. I’m cool with that. I’ll be Mariano Arias’ anything-at-all as long as I’m his one-and-only. “This player. Let us call him Antonio…”
Like everyone else, I’m desperate to know who he’s talking about.
“Antonio was, I think you call it, the Golden Boy. He loved the camera and the camera loved him. There was never a time when he didn’t grace the sports pages. He had style, he had grace, he had skill. He flowed over the field; he smiled like an angel. These were the things they said about him.”
Julius Markum? He was always vain about his appearance. Kris Johns? Pretty boy extraordinaire, camera hog, attention whore? It can’t be one of theGolden Horseshoes. Mariano would never make insinuations about one of hiscompadres. But, come to think of it, Alex Yanez fits the bill—he’s always pimping himself out for the paparazzi.
“We were playing in…” he pauses and looks away for a second. “Doesn’t matter where. The big, prestigious match. Many in attendance. It was what you’d callan event.”
He’s talking about the Queen’s Cup—dammit, I guess it’s the King’s Cup, now—which is held at Windsor. Has to be. It’s one oftheevents of the social season. I’m wracking my brain to try to remember some scandal.
“We did not win.”
That narrows it down. Dates race through my brain. I know all theGolden Horseshoestats. I can nail this one.
“There was an accident.”
Narrows it down.
“A player was injured. Not fatally and not enough to take them out of the game permanently, but enough that they missed a season.”
Narrows it down. I’m almost certain I know who he’s talking about, but what’s the point? What’s the comparison? I don’t get it.
“This player was named, not as one solely responsible, you understand, but as one whose play contributed to the accident.”
Okay, well, that can only be one of three or four people.
“He played through a foul, which was how they got tangled.”
Ah. Jonnie Paiper. I remember. But that was a long, long time ago. I haven’t thought of him for years.
“That one mistake ended his career. Not because of the game. Or the rules. Or what happened on the field. It was because he was no longergoldenin the eyes of the public.”
The whole crowd is hanging on his every word. I’m glued to his hand, which is still on my back.
“He was just as skilled as ever, just as adept. He could have made the apology and been every bit as welcome as he ever was. But he could not bearnot being the golden one. You understand?”
Kind of?
“He had more natural ability than me. More speed. Better rotation. A surer seat. But when the eyes of the people did not look at himin that way, as if he could do no wrong,he quit and never came back.”
Yikes.
“Grit. You must have grit for this game. Skill, yes. Passion, yes. A willingness to fall off your horse, of course. But you must also have the will to beseento fall and get back up again. You understand? The falling down is inevitable, but the getting up is the choice. With your team, everything is possible. They will rally around you as you stand, but it is you who must stand.”
“A bit like Humpty Dumpty!” Pippa laughs at her own joke and the tension is broken, allowing everyone to relax into the end of the story.
What Mariano said isn’t a bit like Humpty Dumpty, but he glides over Pippa’s braying with a nod and a smile. “Lolly has this. She has grit. If she falls—though we pray to God it never happens—she will always get up again.Siempre.She also has a lower leg that is—how do you say? goals?—and soft hands on the reins, and a natural feel for the mallet.”
Though I’m giddy with the delight of it all, I catch him out of the corner of my eye. Did he just make asex joke? He takes my fingers and rotates them slightly over the flat of the mallet handle. “For the backhand, you only move the knuckle like so. Can you see?” He steps up to me, so we’re one person rather than two, and straightens his arm down the length of mine, and together we swing the mallet through arch over arch, the cameras clicking away as we do.
“Lolly and I will demonstrate this in action.”
My head is spinning and my guts are on fire, and if he thinks I can get on a horse and hit a ball with a stick after this kind of foreplay, he’s got another thing coming.
