'The Only Real Game' explores baseball's long history in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur.
Baseball Dreams, LLC
Jeff Brueggemann has had an interesting baseball
career. He started off pitching for the Minnesota Twins AAA team in the
late 1970s, but after tearing up his arm in an offseason job at an olive
cannery, he began coaching, first for the Twins in the minors and later
for Major League Baseball International in China. “Then they asked if I
would be interested in going to India, and I said, ‘Not really.’”
But
the people of Manipur—a benighted little corner of India’s northeast
region—loved baseball, and a New York–based charity called First Pitch
had enlisted MLB to send emissaries (as well as balls and gloves
courtesy of Spalding) to instruct coaches there in the finer points of
the game.
Persuaded by money as much as anything,
Brueggemann arrived in 2006 without having learned a thing about his
destination. “I went out to get a haircut at the hotel and freaked out
everybody,” he recalls. “I came back and the secret police were there,
thinking that I had been kidnapped. I said, ‘You need to tell me what’s
going on.’ They said, ‘There have been 145 assassinations the last year,
35 in the last month.’ They never told us that kind of stuff. But I’m
always up for an adventure.”
The terrorism described by
police after Brueggemann’s trip to the barbershop is a residue of
Manipur’s violent history. Once a separate kingdom, with as much in
common with Burma and Tibet as present-day India, mountainous Manipur
was conquered by the British in 1891: The colonialist army destroyed the
palaces and executed the leaders. Then in the course of India’s gaining
independence from Great Britain in 1949, Manipur was forcibly annexed
to the new Indian Union. For the past 60 plus years, Manipur has been
under martial law, with the Indian army and police doing daily battle
with over 30 armed militia groups.
Baseball came to Manipur via the U.S. Army Air
Corps. In 1943, as part of the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater of World
War II, Army pilots “were flying unarmed cargo planes over the
Himalayas, often being shot at by the Japanese,” says Mirra Bank,
director of The Only Real Game, a documentary about baseball in
Manipur. As part of the war effort, U.S. planes were bringing
munitions, medicine and supplies to the allies and often hauling out
wounded men and prisoners. The Japanese had already destroyed the Burma
Road and bombed Manipur in preparation for a planned invasion of India.
“Flying
the hump,” as the CBI pilots called crossing the Himalayas, was a
dangerous undertaking—“hours of monotony punctuated by seconds of
terror,” as one of the pilots recalls in Bank’s film. To relax, they
played baseball on landing strips they had carved out of the landscape,
using a rock for home plate and mats for bases. The young Manipuris who
were watching them became fans and ultimately players themselves.
Somehow it stuck. “We were all ball boys for our uncles,” says one young Manipur man in The Only Real Game. “So it’s like a feeling in our hearts, running in our veins.”
It wasn’t just for boys, either. When Brueggemann
and his fellow MLB coach Dave Palese landed, they were surprised to see
how many of their students were women. “We thought, and this may sound
sexist, Oh, you gotta be kidding me! And then within a day or two we
were like—whoah! These girls are serious about it. They’re running,
sliding on the ground, getting up and no girliness at all. They were
right there with the men, and for that the men respected them.”
Many
of the women coaches were also mothers, and for them baseball can be a
matter of life and death. Unemployment is 25 percent in Manipur, and
intravenous drug use, as well as HIV/AIDS, is as great a threat as the
daily shootings between police and insurgents. “If kids play sports with
a coach, they stay away from the dangers,” one of the moms says
optimistically. And some of the women have just learned to love the
game. “It means more to me than having a husband,” one girl player says.
Bank, who directed Last Dance and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute,
came to this story via Muriel “Mike” Peters, a former diplomat’s wife
with deep ties to Indian film and culture. (She’s also an avid Mets
fan.) On a visit to Manipur, she found a “very hardscrabble baseball
community,” according to Bank, but one lacking in basic equipment, not
to mention a dedicated baseball field. (Cows are seen wandering into the
outfield.) “They came to her and said, ‘We would be so grateful if you
could help us.’” Out of that plea was born First Pitch: The U.S. Manipur
Baseball Project, a 501(c)(3) charity. Bank’s husband, Richard
Brockman, is also on the group’s board.
In the land of cricket, why has an interest in baseball persisted? In the current Disney film Million Dollar Arm,
an American sports agent (Jon Hamm) tries to turn Indian cricket
players into baseball pitchers—not an easy transition. Bank believes it
is India’s obsession with cricket that has kept baseball alive in
Manipur. “In their own way, I think Manipuris are always trying to
distinguish themselves and assert their uniqueness within Indian
society,” she says.
But don’t look for any major league
prospects coming out of Manipur soon. “As far as having quality players,
they are so far behind,” says Brueggemann. “That’s a long ways down the
road. But there’s no other place in the world that has so much love for
the game.”
The Only Real Game (in limited
release) does not have a Disney ending. Two of the players promised a
trip to Yankee Stadium were denied visas by the U.S., and the dedicated
baseball park that First Pitch tried to fund (and the Manipur government
said it would support) has not been built. But it’s a feel-good movie
of another sort. Brueggemann and Palese are unlikely ambassadors for the
game; each seems to have arrived with some reluctance, and they are
appalled by the conditions there for different reasons. Palese, a short
and stout Mutt to Brueggemann’s tall and lanky Jeff, is jonesing for
Budweiser and Kit Kats, but in one of the film’s most moving scenes, he
brings government soldiers, who have been warily watching them school
the Manipuri players, onto the field to join the game.
And despite
the conflict, Brueggemann says, “I never slept better in my life. I
loved being there with those people. They made you feel like you were
there on Earth for a reason. You saw how little they had and how much
they were counting on the game of baseball to help their plight.”
Source: newsweek
