[ WP ] The pain of second place

When my final came, all I could think was that the bright light of the Chicago Stadium reminded me of home. In Senegal in the afternoons, the sun would bake the dirt so hot it would hurt your feet, and when we wanted to play handball we would burn. We convinced our mothers that it was better to eat dinner at five in the afternoon. We told them that in school they had taught us that was the Western way. All of us would grin knowing how we deceived them with such a simple lie. 
 
 After dinner my father would come out with us sometimes, if he was not too tired. It had been he who had originally brought American handball to our area, more than three decades ago. He was a very smart man and had gone to study medecine in Dakar in the seventies, where the young daughter of a retired French governor had introduced him to the sport. He told me that they would often sneak away to play handball until dark, when they would collapse to the ground and watch the sea lights turn on in the tankers waiting off Cap-Vert. When the daughter left him for bigger and better things, first among them being University in Paris, he was so despondent that he turned to handball of all things, and would immerse himself in the game for hours on end. He knew that her father would not let her marry a black man, he would tell me, but that simple truth had been little consolation. For better or worse he played and played. He grew so talented that several times he traveled to America for competitions. In 1980 he became the only West African to win an international handball competition. 
 
 And so when he came back to the village where he had grown up, he resided as something of a celebrity in our little community. The boys of our village, none more enthusiastically than I, would painstakingly recreate what we had heard about his finals match, how he had lost his first two sets, how he had taken off his headband and handed it to his coach, saying, Ca, ca, ca c ’ est la probleme, and how he had drawn even with his Canadian opponent, and how in the third to last point of the game made such a diving save that the newspaper writers dubbed it the Belly Flop That Won the Gold. Many times I returned home at night to a disapproving mother with bloody knees from attempting the Belly Flop That Won the Gold. 
 
 It must have been the lights at the Chicago stadium that reminded me so much of home. Not the fact that I was there as the first West African since my father, four thousand miles from Senegal, and missed the sun-caked dirt and the houses my community had built from that dirt and the people that had built those houses. I was remembering my father because the lights were bright. Trouve le ballon, he would say. Le jeu est rien que le ballon. 
 
 And so when the final started, I knew that the words echoing in my head would not distract me and that the floor was cool under my feet. It is in my blood to come here, I thought to myself. It is in my heart and my body to come here and to do everything I can for my father ’ s name and for my name. Even as I shook hands with the twenty-year-old from Santa Monica I knew that I would not let him choose who won and lost the match. I would choose who won and lost the match. 
 
 And in those infinite moments after the end of the last set, I went over and over what had happened. When had I decided that I would not win? I asked myself. I could not find the moment. I thought about my father ’ s headband and how he had taken it off and made up his mind that he was going to win. I thought about how the Belly Flop That Won the Gold had been inevitable, because my father had such resolve that losing had been impossible. But I, his son, had found a way. This I did not understand. 

