Rough Trade

it was still a million dollars. Instead I said, “Perhaps Stuart didn’t realize it because he’s relatively new to the firm, but Callahan Ross has a policy against attorneys investing in a client’s business. It’s a clear conflict of interest.” I didn’t even bother to keep the contempt out of my voice. I was having a hard enough time trying not to sound as if I’d just been slimed.
     
    When I got back to my office, I ripped open the bag of M&M’s and had Cheryl hook me up to the telephone headset I used when I had an impossibly long string of calls to return or was feeling too hyper to sit down. Whenever I used it, I felt like a cross between a Hollywood agent and an air traffic controller, but today was definitely one of those days when I knew I’d think better on my feet.
    First Milwaukee’s refusal to budge on the default deadline had put us on immediate combat footing. There were a million things that all needed to have been done yesterday. Not only that, but I couldn’t help but feel handicapped by my incomplete knowledge of Beau Rendell’s business dealings. I called Harald Feiss, hoping to get some answers and offer him the professional courtesy of letting him know that he’d be receiving a change-in-representation and transmittal-of-records letter from Jeff Rendell shortly, but his secretary said that he was unavailable to come to the phone. I suspected he’d instructed her to refuse my calls.
    I tried to call the Honorable Robert V. Deutsch, the mayor of Milwaukee, but was informed by an aide that hizzoner was attending an international conference of mayors in Beijing of all places. However, he was planning on cutting short his trip in order to return for Beau Rendell’s funeral. I explained that I was the new attorney for the Milwaukee Monarchs, and the aide agreed to set up a tentative meeting for me with the mayor the afternoon of the funeral. After I hung up with city hall, I put a call in to Jack McWhorter and left a message for him to get in touch with his people in L.A. It was time for them to come up with a proposed timetable for making a deal.
    As I worked, the irony of what I was doing did not escape me. While I was prepared to fight to the death to allow Jeff and Chrissy Rendell to hang on to their football team, the truth is, I don’t really much care for football.
    Talk of sports lubricates the world of men. It gives them a common language and sets them on common ground. In my office, at Super Bowl time, men who command $500 an hour joke and wager as equals with men who empty their wastebaskets for minimum wage. I can think of nothing else, not even religion, that is such a powerful leveler.
    I started reading the sports page when I first came to work at Callahan Ross. I did it for the same reason that a refugee makes the effort to master the language of his adopted country—to assimilate and survive. I have also, in the interests of entertaining clients, gone to see every kind of game that can be played with a ball. Over time I have even learned to appreciate the rough ballet of pro hoops, the indolent poetry played out by the boys of summer, but I have never really developed a taste for football.
    There is a reason for this. At its primitive heart football is a game about knocking people down. It is also monumentally boring. There was even a time when I was foolish enough to tell people this. Whenever I did, they would look at me sadly, start talking slower, and explain that I didn’t really understand the game. After seriously weighing the possibility, I have to say that they are wrong.
    Last year I handled a transaction involving four telecommunications companies from three different countries. My clients traveled to Chicago from Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Taipei because I’d figured out how to put $2 billion in their pockets in a way that had simply not occurred to anyone else. I refuse to believe that the game of football is beyond my understanding—especially when it is widely assumed that men with beer bellies the size of the moons of Jupiter are able to grasp every nuance of the game.
    But that doesn’t mean that I don’t understand what football means to people, how it lifts them up and binds them together. With Beau’s death, the Monarchs might now belong to Jeff and Chrissy Rendell, but they also belonged to the working people of Milwaukee who, year in and year out, put down their hard-earned dollars and went to the stadium to root for the team they’d grown