Baseball strikes out in France
Mayor's desolate field of dreams
MONTIGNY-LE-BRETONNEUX, France - He built it. But the truth is, they never really came.
What he built was a baseball field with minor league pretensions but major league dimensions, with lockers, lights, and artificial turf, and a concession stand that sells hot dogs that are tasty even if they come smeared with mayonnaise and stuffed into hollowed-out baguettes.
The home team, the Montigny Cougars, is one of the better teams in France - not that it has a lot of competition. And though the field would be the envy of almost any town in America, it stands more as a monument to the enthusiasm of a rural mayor who went on to become a senator than to any love for the boys of summer.
Thirty years ago, Montigny-le-Bretonneux was a village 20 miles southwest of Paris, and Nicolas About was its only doctor. Over two decades, the village welcomed 2,000 new residents a year, mostly couples with small children.
"It gave a lot of work to the doctor I was and the mayor I became," says About (pronounced A-boo), now a prominent lawmaker. At first, the only sports and culture the village had were soccer, boules, and beer. The people wanted more. So About gave them more soccer and facilities for boules, a national sport akin to lawn bowling but done with small steel balls on sandy surfaces. He also introduced new activities such as judo.
Then one day he had the idea to start something altogether new. Why not baseball?
It was the late 1980s, and America's pastime was newly in vogue in France. Teens favored the American jerseys and caps even if the rules of the game were arcane. About raised the idea of building a field in his budding suburb, and immediately a few pioneers started a club.
But there was no cry of "Vive le baseball!"
"They said no one wanted it, no one was asking for it," says About, 60, a tall, heavyset man with smiling eyes. Although he is not sporty himself, he is canny about what a community and children need to grow.
And so he persisted with baseball not because he knew anything about the game or had even seen it played across the Atlantic. He just knew it was distinctive. But baseball, which was introduced in France in 1889 has never really caught on. It's still not a game children play. As is regularly noted, if you hand a French child a baseball, he'll immediately drop it and try to kick it.
Montigny's mayor knew instinctively that to build interest in the sport he needed a field. Determined to keep the local youths active, he persuaded a quasi-governmental agency charged with building green spaces in new suburbs not to bother sprinkling his town with lots of little patches of grass but to "gather them all in one place and make them a baseball field, and not to make it grass but artificial turf."
Baseball remains a marginal sport in Montigny. Last year the town's gymnastics club was the most popular. The Montigny baseball club may be one of the largest in France, but it's still smaller than fishing and badminton.
