OPPOSITE FIELD, THE(ISBN=) 英文原版

　　Amazon Exclusive: Rick Bragg Reviews The Opposite Field
　　Rick Bragg is the author of the bestselling All Over but the
Shoutin’, a New York Times notable book of the year, as well as The
Prince of Frogtown and Ava’s Man, both memoirs. A Pulitzer
Prize-winning national correspondent for the New York Times, Bragg
is also the author of Somebody Told Me, a critically acclaimed
collection of his newspaper stories. Read his exclusive Amazon
guest review of The Opposite Field:
　　In one shimmering paragraph in the memoir Opposite Field, you
almost begin to believe that award-winning writer Jesse Katz might
be the luckiest man on earth.
　　In it, he stands looking across a little league baseball complex
in Monterey Park, a million gray parking lots from Hollywood, from
the Pacific. But these fields are his oasis. Even the name is
lovely: La Loma. Here, he will coach his own son, his prodigy, year
after year.
　　”It was a natural stadium, geologically perfect… the homerun
fence curling through a wall of green. The effect was at once lush
and windswept.. you could stand here and watch… five-year-olds
lost in clover at this corner, ten-year-olds spitting seeds at the
other, fifteen-year-olds brandishing metal spikes… I would guide
Max through that circuit… in this one extraordinary park, I would
see him grow into a young man.”
　　And that is where the perfection ends. Life, love, fatherhood,
and baseball, come flying at him spikes high and gouge him straight
through the heart–and sometimes the groin.
　　He tells it all in a rich story that is in places warm and in
others raw, where a stepson almost dies from a gunshot to his face,
and the special man in a beloved’s life is somebody else. The
baseball is almost an antidote to life here, where, after one
spirit-numbing loss, the coach raises the lid on a cooler filled
with water balloons.
　　And if you love the game you will love it displayed here, a
sweet, sad, poignant and sometimes hysterical drama in the dirt, a
world where coaches plot, scheme and go on meth binges, outfielders
with medical conditions twitch from the sparse grass, and
monogrammed Louisville Sluggers splinter on the first pitch.
　　But it is also an unflinching story written by a great writer
about failed marriage, and not some small amount of hanky panky. It
is a wrenching story of a son who watches a strong mother battle
cancer to a stand-still. And, through it all, it is a story of a
father who watches his son shift and change in delightful and
heart-searing ways, hoping that his decisions do more good than
harm, hoping that at the end of the day his son will know… what?
That his father loves him above all things.
　　This is not a pat story, not a neat one. People are not that
way.
　　It is much better than that.
　　Here, you learn that not getting the girl is not so cruel, that
growing older with disappointment and doubt and fear is not so
bad–as long as your boy hits .620, and throws a curve ball that
drops off the edge of the world.–Rick Bragg
　　
　　

　　Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly
original memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and
finding of self, of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of
language, of death and failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and
Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the shifting sands of place
and meaning that can make up a culture, or a community, or a
home.
　　Faced with the collapse of his son’s Little League
program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the largely Asian
suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds himself thrust
into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park. Under its
lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant community
are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and
night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of
his capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his
home.
　　While Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down
delinquent coaches and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to
bruises, he forms unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors,
and receives the gift of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less
drama in Jesse’s complicated personal life as he grapples with a
stepson who seems destined for trouble, comforts his mother (a
legendary Oregon politician) when she’s stricken with cancer, and
receives hard lessons in finding–and holding on to–the love of a
good woman.
　　Through it all, Jesse’s emotional mainstay is his beloved son,
Max, who quietly bests his father’s brightest hopes. Over nine
springs and summers with Max at La Loma, Jesse learns nothing less
than what it takes to be a father, a son, a husband, a coach, and,
ultimately, a man.
　　This is an epic book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously
evocative and achingly poignant book. Above all it is true, in that
it happened, but also in a way that transcends mere facts and cuts
to the quick of what it means to be alive.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　JESSE KATZ is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former
staffer at the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles
magazine. He lives with his son, Max, in Monterey Park,
California.
　　From the Hardcover edition.

　　“You need two things to make a fine, fine book: a story and a
teller. The Opposite Field brings them together, like young love.
It’s a story about fathers and sons, and good love and failed love,
and baseball. If that isn’t by God a book I don’t know what is.
This story breaks your heart in places. But then it makes you glad
you have one. In one chapter, after a bitter loss on the baseball
field, Coach Jesse Katz throws open the lid on a cooler full of
water balloons and a field of misery becomes a place of delight. If
there’s a metaphor here, for marriage and fatherhood and all of the
rest, that may be it. But the best thing about this book is the
teller. This guy can flat-out write.”
　　—Rick Bragg, author the New York Times bestseller All Over but
the Shoutin’
　　“The Opposite Field is more than a beautifully-written memoir.
It’s more than a wonderful baseball story. It indisputably has the
element of connectivity that is in all great and powerful
storytelling. Jesse Katz delivers the human experience in a way
that speaks to all of us.”
　　—Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author of The
Scarecrow and Blood Work
　　“Cast through the prism of one of America’s oldest pastimes,
Jesse Katz illuminates contemporary American life with wonderful
detail and honesty. The Opposite Field brings to life the eastern
suburbs of Los Angeles, drawing them out of the shadows of 
Hollywood glitz and gangland portraits we typically read about,
evoking the struggles and dreams of the children and parents in and
around the hidden-away baseball field of La Loma. It’s a heartfelt
story, well-told.”
　　—Norman Ollestad, author of Crazy for the Storm
　　”A love letter from a father to his son, The Opposite Field is
also a hymn to baseball, the new Los Angeles, the joy and pain of
modern parenting as well as one man’s journey into wisdom and
clarity, and Jesse Katz shapes this material in such a way that he
makes it as dramatic as a movie. I never would have thought a book
about a Little League team could be this compelling, or that so
much could be at stake, or that La Loma could become–and it does
in Katz’s buoyant prose–the stuff of legend.”
　　—Bret Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and
Lunar Park
　　“Acutely observed, deeply human, and very wise about the game,
The Opposite Field is more than Jesse Katz’s memoir of small town
baseball. There’s his wayward love for L.A., Latinas, and the
promises of spring. And his realization that every ball diamond is
the beginning of an American ballad.”
　　—D. J. Waldie, author of Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir
　　”Jesse Katz has captured the hybrid soul of California’s Monterey
Park, a community that, despite its sharing a border with the
largest Mexican community in America, East L.A., is probably as
suburban and middle class as any, particularly in the drama of its
neighborhood sports leagues.  Yet it is unique in ways that
Katz deeply understands and eloquently evokes. And the poetry of
his prose–Katz may be the next big writer dude of the LA
style.”
　　—Luis J. Rodriguez, author of Always Running
　　”A ‘Little League Dad’ book like no other. Jesse Katz¹s
The Opposite Field is set not in the usual Waspy suburb but in a
community on the edge of Los Angeles with a majority Asian and
Hispanic population. In addition to evoking surprising
cross-cultural discoveries and conflicts, Katz portrays everything
from his legendary mother¹s flight from the Nazis to the
shooting of his stepson — and critiques not only his failings as a
baseball manager but as a parent.”
　　—Greg Mitchell, author of Joy in Mudville
　　”With his precise journalistic eye, [Jesse] Katz ultimately
chronicles his lifelong quest to finally reach home plate. And it’s
a grand slam.”
　　–from OregonLive.com 
　　“The Opposite Field blends Katz’s both painful and comic
struggles as a single dad to remain connected with his growing son
through baseball. And with taut and vivid writing befitting a
two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Katz delivers trenchant
observations about relationships, parenthood and his immersion in
Latino culture in his love life, at work as a reporter for the Los
Angeles Times and at play in Max’s Little League.”
　　–from WWeek.com
　　From the Hardcover edition.
　　

　　PROLOGUE
　　My park is called La Loma. I have always liked the sound of that,
the symmetry of those double-barrel Ls, the femininity of the final
Spanish vowels, the spacey La-La Land echo, all an improvement on
its stiff translation: the Hill. La Loma is prettier, softer and
rounder, earthier–loamier. A park for losing yourself in. The park
I went looking for myself in.
　　Max and I have spent nine springs and summers there, through
squalls and droughts, heat waves and cold snaps, from his preschool
years to the onslaught of adolescence. We have celebrated there and
we have sulked there, twirling like fools across the dirt and
chalk, drowning our broken hearts with fusillades of water
balloons. We have made friends for life at La Loma and, I suspect,
enemies for just as long. We have gone there to forget and to
remember, to stop time and to grow up. The park is under our skin:
season after season of bites, burns, stings, cuts, sprains, scars.
Max has bled at La Loma. He has barfed there. He has wet himself. I
have rinsed his wounds at La Loma, iced him, kneaded him, bandaged
him, scooped him off the ground, his face streaked with sweat and
clay and eye-black grease, and held him in my arms. Max has stood
there, in jersey and cap, and hacked out “The Star-Spangled Banner”
in front of a thousand people on his electric guitar. I have given
myself to those same people, cheered and groaned alongside them,
accepted their prayers and shared their beers, slipped to me in
Styrofoam coffee cups. Whenever we have needed it, whenever I have
felt burdened or alone, La Loma has been there. The park is always
the park. Our refuge. My excuse.
　　It rises from the haze and glare of inland Los Angeles, far from
Hollywood, beyond the margins of the tourist maps. In a city that
skews west, toward the surf, La Loma is on the wrong side, east of
the skyline, east of skid row, east of the rail yards, the
slaughterhouses, the riverbed. By a shade, it is east of East Los
Angeles, the original gangland, the cultural heartland of Mexican
America. La Loma marks the spot roughly at which the barrio ends
and the burbs begin, where inner-city Los Angeles meets
bedroom-community Los Angeles. Knots of prickly pear give way to
tidy rows of jacaranda, with flurries that dust the sidewalk
purple, and Depression-era adobes fade into 1950s subdivisions, of
a style known as California ranch, with gas fireplaces and attached
garages and faux clapboard shutters.
　　La Loma falls within Monterey Park, one of those invisible
municipalities you could spend a lifetime in L.A. and never visit,
maybe even never hear of. The town is blandly provincial and yet
stunningly foreign: forty thousand of its sixty-three thousand
residents are of Asian descent, the highest concentration in any
city in the continental United States. It was this fact that first
drew me here, as a novice journalist, almost twenty-five years ago.
I was new to L.A., new to adulthood, and the battles then raging
between Chinese émigrés and Anglo nativists–over language, over
customs, over the right to belong–were redefining what it means to
be middle class and American. From the polite liberalism of Oregon,
via a fancy college in Vermont, I had been transported to a furious
social laboratory on the haunches of Los Angeles. A new form of
white flight was under way, not from a decaying urban core but from
an ethnically convulsing suburb: Rather than embrace the new
Monterey Park, twenty thousand white folks up and split. At the
time, I could never have foreseen that this curious place would one
day lure me back, not as a writer but as a father, that I would be
returning, against the tide, to make Monterey Park my own. But that
was long ago, before I married a barmaid from Nicaragua, before I
inherited an extended family of aliens and castaways, before we had
Max, our maple-skinned, almond-eyed chameleon of a son, whose
childhood I was determined to mold and preserve.
　　Through eucalyptus, past weeping red bottlebrush, over bark
mulch, La Loma hugs the hill, pausing and ascending and pausing
again–a vertical park, winding to some unseen pinnacle, rather than
the naked grid of a playground. Each level of La Loma is distinct,
concealed by shrubs and connected by stairs, exactly forty of them
from bottom to top. Climbing them all is like scaling a
labyrinthine tree fort, part Dr. Seuss and part Swiss Family
Robinson. La Loma twists and strays, a dense wall of ice plants
here, a secluded meadow there, a nest of hornets, a shock of
wildflowers, a connect-the-dots of gopher holes, another rise and a
thicket and a clearing, the park revealing itself with each turn.
For as long as we have been going to La Loma, Max has been carving
his own path, as all the kids do, finding freedom in the bramble.
He squeezes between the narrowest gaps, scampers up the trickiest
banks, and slides down the steepest chutes on rafts made of twigs
and cardboard. Their name for this caper is Mission Impossible, and
I can almost hear them dun-dun-dern-dern-dun-dun-ing the theme as
they traverse the slopes, imbuing the topography of La Loma with
drama.
　　Up the steps, on the highest levels, La Loma grows flat. The
terraces unfurl into broad fields, like the mesas of a Road Runner
cartoon. It is there, between March and July, that we play
baseball–hundreds of boys and girls, hundreds of games a year.
Because of the grade and the foliage, it is difficult to see from
the street that any of this is happening, difficult to imagine that
the fortunes of an entire Little League could be contained within
the undulations of this one hill. To discover La Loma, to cross its
threshold, to rove its crooks, to emerge, breathless, at its
summit, is to view Los Angeles from the inside out. Downtown is
just seven miles away–the basin sprawls below us, the skies above
sparkle with LAX-bound jets–yet from this perch, it is quite
possible to think of La Loma as its own universe, a secret park,
into which nobody ventures without meaning to be there.
　　At night, when the last games are over and the lights shut off, I
often take a moment on the bleachers, to watch the moon and listen
to the crickets, just me and Max. I have been coaching his teams at
La Loma since he was in T-ball. He was six then, a guileless
kindergartner, with no choice but to trust the decrees of his dad.
Max is fourteen now and more complicated, a rocker and a skater,
with a MySpace page and a life I will never again know everything
about. On these diamonds I have witnessed him fail and triumph and
fail again, his baby fat replaced by sinew and poise. Over the
course of perhaps a thousand innings, he has known every possible
outcome: the game-winning hit, the game-losing pitch, the acrobatic
catch, the booted grounder, the daring steal, the fumbled tag, the
beanballs both dispensed and received. I believe he has loved it as
much as I have. Nine years of jerseys hang in his closet, nine
years of trophies line his bookshelf, nine years of team photos–Max
growing taller and shaggier, me grayer and thicker–stick to our
refrigerator door. But with high school about to start, I can see
just as well that we are at the end of something, that this park
that has framed our relationship for two-thirds of his life is no
longer the place by which he measures himself. He has one more year
left, but he is done with La Loma. He is gifted enough, I think, to
go out for his freshman team, but he is done with baseball. Max, if
I understand him these days, is done with organized sports, with
the uniformity and the corniness and the genuflections to
authority. “I don’t know what happened, Dad,” he tells me. “I’m
just not feelin’ it anymore.” Soon enough, I fear, he will be done
being the boy who feels the need to offer any explanations at
all.
　　Some of these changes are surely inevitable, a child’s natural
course, but I am no less wistful about them. I did everything in my
power to slow the process, to conserve La Loma for Max for as long
as I could. When we started, it was all about the two of us, father
and son tossing the ball, creating our own nostalgia in the grass.
Four years later I was running the park. I had become the
commissioner, Monterey Park’s guardian of baseball. It is a
position I assumed with equal measures of duty and dread, hoping to
salvage a season on the verge of collapse. The league was
imploding. Families were bailing. Nobody claimed to be in charge.
When Max’s team was my only concern, I had been able to tune out
the warning signs, all the blustery dads who treated La Loma as
turf, mining it for money and prestige. I was still Max’s coach,
but now I had volunteered to sweep up their wreckage–to preside
over a community that had never quite invited me in. It was a
decent thing to do. It was also mulish and self-destructive. You
could say that about a lot of my choices.
　　The cliché of Little League, of youth sports in America, is one
of lost perspective: By taking it too seriously, adults have ruined
a children’s game. I have begun to think that the opposite is true,
that we do not take it seriously enough. Nothing in my forty-plus
years has compared with the enormity, with the complexities or the
sensitivities, of trying to keep La Loma afloat. Nothing has done
as much to test my judgment. Nothing has made me feel so
responsible for so much beyond my control. Being commissioner means
being La Loma’s publicist, accountant, emcee, detective,
psychologist, chef, graphic designer, janitor, landscaper,
paramedic, choreographer, and justice of the peace, one whose
standing is based largely on the absence of anyone else willing to
assume the office. No matter how many hours I put into it–and for
someone who putatively holds a “real job,” I have put in more than
I should ever admit–there is always a parent to soothe or to scold,
a protest to weigh, a schedule to juggl…