When Teammates Bump Into Teammates Overseas

Pavel Nedved and Gigi Buffon: Juve teammates, World Cup rivals

Anybody else watching the World Baseball Classic on the dawn patrol?

​It's hard to tell the players without a scorecard – and a genealogy printout.

National identities blur, and so do team and league ties.

Those two players who collided at home plate the other day? Why, they are teammates – Sal Butera of Italy crashing into Salvador Perez of Venezuela, both of them catchers for the Kansas City Royals.  
In real life, Perez is the star and Butera is the backup but for these few weeks they are playing for national teams, and playing it hard, and playing it right.

Butera was trying to score a run that Italy had to have, and Perez moved into his path, and took a hit. The word from Perez is that his knee may not be as badly injured as was feared, but time will tell.

There was nothing dirty about the collision. In fact, it was a common sight in international sport: people who spend an entire league season together suddenly represent other nations.

Butera, an American, has Italian background and is entitled to play for Italy. Many of the Venezuelan players live in the States for safety and comfort reasons, as James Wagner pointed out in the Times, but they proudly play for their homeland.

Sometimes international play can get nasty, the way it did at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona when the American Dream Team of basketball met soon-to-disband Yugoslavia.

Toni Kukoc was about to join the Chicago Bulls after receiving a huge contract that frosted a couple of Bulls named Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen who hounded and trapped and jostled Kukoc with a fervor that could only be labelled personal.

Welcome to our world, they said, with their elbows and hands and hips and knees and hard stares.
(Read all about it in a story by the late Alan Greenberg in the Hartford Courant.)

The World Cup of soccer mixes friendships and rivalries and guild-member respect. Men who spend the entire season together in the same jerseys try to beat their pals for 90 minutes – and then exchange jerseys and hugs.

One great example was the 2006 World Cup first-round match between Italy and the Czech Republic. Gigi Buffon, the Italian keeper, was sticking with Juventus, which had been downgraded to the second division because of a scandal involving team officials and referees and gambling.

His Juve teammate, Pavel Nedved, was also sticking with Juve while other mainstays were exercising their right to leave. On this afternoon in Hamburg in 2006, they were opponents – who happened to know each other’s moves.

Three times in that match, Nedved took a shot on his pal, but Buffon stopped him. At the end of the match, a 2-0 Italy victory, they embraced with obvious respect.

“Oh to be a fly on the wall of the Juventus dressing room when this pair report back for pre-season training,” said the play-by-play on the BBC web site.

Italy went on to win that World Cup (remember the Zidane head butt on Materazzi, an old tormentor from Serie A?) and Nedved retired from the Czech national team but helped Juve's comeback through 2009.

Today, Nedved is a youth coach with Juventus and Buffon is still the emotional keeper for Juve and the Azzurri. Recently Nedved told a Czech paper that he hopes Buffon will play until he is 50. Their World Cup match against each other is part of their bond.
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The subplots are also fascinating in this Baseball World Classic – including the tangled but verifiable ancestries of players, that produces an American named Ty Kelly (with a Jewish mother) playing third base for Israel. (Ken Belson’s stories in the Times have caught the mood perfectly.)

Israel won its first four before losing to the Netherlands in the Tokyo Dome on what I think was Monday evening. In their time zone in Israel, Hillel and Mendel, who often comment on this site, have been following Destiny’s Darlings.
 
Hillel Kuttler was interviewed about baseball madness in the Holy Land:
https://www.facebook.com/i24newsEN/videos/721330744702264/
 
While Israel was 4-0, Mendel Horowitz cited great runs by Cleveland and the Cubbies in the World Series, the rally by the Patriots in the Super Bowl, the comeback by Barcelona in the Champions League, and, yes, even the shocking election victory by the candidate-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken.

Israel was hammered, 12-2, on Monday but Horowitz still has his theme: “The Year of the Impossibles.”