In Brooklyn, You Can Feel the World Cup Heating Up

5/15/2014

In the background, Bedford Avenue, where Duke Snider home runs used to land.

I spent a lovely day in Brooklyn on Wednesday. As soon as Mike From Whitestone turned downhill, I felt the surging image of Duke Snider slugging the ball over the screen and into Bedford Ave.

Mike parked near McKeever Pl. and I could feel my head swiveling like a compass needle to the apartment buildings where Ebbets Field used to be.

But I was the only person talking about the Brooklyn Dodgers, about ancient history.

The occasion was a career expo at Medgar Evers College, where several hundred very qualified students were seeking leads on jobs, on futures. I heard about the expo through Monica and Miguel Mancebo of Selective Corporate Internship Program (SCIP), which does such a fine job of preparing young people for the job market.

The students saw my soccer book on the table and wanted to talk about their sport. One young woman from Trinidad plays defender for the Medgar Evers team; another young woman roots for VfB Stuttgart, from her home town; a volunteer told me she roots for Barça and her husband roots for Real Madrid. And Michael Flanigan, the director of development and major gifts officer at Medgar Evers, told me how he referees soccer matches in his spare time.

I marveled at the résumés of the Medgar Evers students, their life stories, their work experience. Many of them have worked in kitchens, in day-care centers, in nursing homes. They see it as paying their bills. I told them to be proud of their work; they were learning the process, the system. Many of them want to be doctors and teachers, accountants and, good grief, journalists. I wanted to hire them all.

I hope by now somebody has.

Medgar Evers Students and Bank Recruiter/Courtesy M&M Mancebo.

Some of the people who made it work

Andrew Tansey

5/16/2014 02:54:07 pm

I puffed about the link between jogo bonito and the Valley Stream Jogo Bonito in "It Must Be Nice to Be Brazil" from 5/8, and now I wonder . . . will my copy of "Eight World Cups" be one of the first to arrive in Brazil tomorrow night?

Speaking with my kid the courier on the Flushing Line today en route from Grand Central to Citi Field's convenient commuter lot (why else would I go there?), we admitted to a moral dilemma about FIFA, which seems unconcerned about the Qatar workers. I had put my foot down by refusing to set it again in the new Stadium (in the Bronx) when I could not afford to take my father to a game before they closed the old and then saw the prices for the new. Do I have the character to boycott the beautiful game in my small way because of FIFA's blindness, at a minimum, or worse? I know I will watch and in indirect ways support the infra- and superstructure of the global game, and I am not too proud of it right now. I remember our first team meeting when I welcomed the players and parents to travel soccer, under the auspices of the Long Island Jr. Soccer League and, in turn, Eastern New York Youth Soccer and, in turn, USSF and, in turn FIFA. By degrees of separation, players, coaches and referees are all part of the system.

I customarily thank you for stimulating ideas in my head. Those I struggle with now are not so pleasant. What can we do about it? A bit of a ludite, I thought maybe an attempt at an articulate letter to Geneva. Maybe the second last page of the Times' A Section.

We are lucky to live in New York. I am pleased to hear of the promising futures of the young folks near where Mom used to watch PeeWee Reese and (her throb) Pete Reiser and, during the War, lug scrap metal to Ebbets Field for free admission. At least her labors were voluntary.

George Vecsey

5/17/2014 01:07:39 am

Andrew, the game is the game.
I'm going to write something about Blatter (again).
Have we discussed WWII before? As soon as my man Mike From Whitestone turned south on Bedford, I remember that hill -- 1944! -- my dad taking me to a war bond rally in EF. I was 5.
A tank rolling on the field! Fat Freddy Fitzsimmons hawking bonds.
No game, of course.
Flatbush. The Mother Ship.
You have to do what you have to do about the Yankees. It is a sterile theme park.
I'm at peace with the Yankee team because of the past generation -- Bernie (he kind of got pushed sideways in Memory Lane) and Jeter and Rivera and straw-boss Jorge. And Torre. They were real.
Yankee Stadium and FIFA are also real.
What we call a dilemma.

GV

mike from whitestone

5/16/2014 02:54:11 pm

Thanks from the 'wheelman' GV. I enjoyed it from driving down memory lane talking about dem' guys from Flatbush to the career fair and meeting the wonderfully diverse group of students with the opportunity to hear their experiences while sharing some of mine. I got another free lesson in my soccer education too. Great day for a great group.
It was a great day for a career fair, lets play two.

George Vecsey

5/17/2014 01:10:35 am

Mike: thanks for getting me there. I am proud to once in a while join the team from the NYT plant. You get me to great places.
GV

Camille McIntosh

5/18/2014 05:24:52 am

I enjoyed the day for sure. This was the best career fair I've been to at Medgar Evers College. Next year will be even bigger and better.

George Vecsey

5/18/2014 11:38:40 am

Thanks for noticing my site. I am still glowing from meeting so many nice people. GV

Alan Rubin link

5/18/2014 08:42:42 am

Nice to see the NYT involved in such meaningful activities.

I mentor high school and junior college students, many from under privileged families. It is very satisfying to see them grow, develop confidence and move on to productive careers.

It is unfortunate that a privileged segment of our society prefers to pump millions to move their agenda rather than provide the programs that would prepare better citizens. I do not believe that they even have a clue to the potential of those they refer to as "takers". A cost/benefit of the return of the investment in these youngsters would would send a strong message, but the "haves" are tone deaf.

George Vecsey

5/18/2014 11:42:19 am

Alan, you kept your store going on the Upper West Side for a long time...good for you.
The impetus for my trip is from the NYT plant in Queens. They do a lot of outreach to high schools, one a satellite school from my old neighborhood in Jamaica. I love getting home.
GV

John McDermott

5/20/2014 02:49:22 pm

And a very, very good book it is!

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

In Brooklyn, You Can Feel the World Cup Heating Up

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