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Out to score
By Udi Sharabani
Tags: israel news, maccabiah

I saw happy people at the 18th Maccabiah Games. The Hadar Yosef tennis courts were hosting a tournament of the masters (a euphemism for veterans who are past their prime). These are people wearing white, who are already "beyond" - beyond their potential and beyond their choice of a direction in life - who play tennis. Once every four years these Games offer an escape from routine for the imaginary persona that still accompanies them: the sportsman.

The athletes return here time and again, sometimes with their families, sometimes alone, trying to restore their past vitality. They come to the tennis courts at Hadar Yosef for doubles games that don't go anywhere. There is no audience, there are no referees on the courts, they keep score by themselves and then, two by two, they seek out the Games official at some table, to tell him who won. Hell, everyone here is Jewish and everything is based on trust. In Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Blowup," the final scene is of a tennis game being played without a ball. Here it is a game without a referee. The saddest thing there is.

Claudio and Marcello, competing masters from Argentina, sprawl on the grass after a game. They eat food provided to them by their hotel. Butter and jam in plastic containers with cling-wrapped rolls, on a lawn in Hadar Yosef. Both men are married, but even if they were divorced, and even if supermodel Bar Refaeli herself were to walk by, they would keep concentrating on the roll. I ask them about girls, but I get the message very quickly: They love strawberry jam. And this is no metaphor.
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The restaurant inside the Hadar Yosef compound is hosting a family event, and everything is jumbled together: an Israeli foreskin removal with Jewish tennis games. Green balls spray over the netting onto the shoes of aunties with thick ankles who eat herring, while around them people check the charts to see who they're playing against in the next round.

Walking around is a nice guy named Kent Friedman, 49, from New York, who has just won his tennis game and is wearing a shirt with the slogan: "Still Jewish, not looking, not single." He has come with his wife and children. A friend had the shirt made for Friedman to please his wife.

I wander into the office of Maurice the referee, and ask whether there's any monkey business concerning the reporting of scores - after all, it's the doubles partners themselves who come to tell him who won. He laughs, but when someone comes to speak to him, he makes sure - jokingly - that I understand that Israelis still have something to learn. And he himself, incidentally, is an Israeli, but with a foreign accent. On that afternoon, everyone had a foreign accent.

I go up to the gym. Gymnasts are people with tremendous leg muscles. If the Shin Bet security service were smart, it would take several of these folks from the Maccabiah and persuade them to immigrate to Israel for a single purpose: to apply strangleholds on prisoners - with their legs.

In the corridor a group of girls from the United States are hugging each other before entering the hall. I go up to two of them. In the future they will be called Ms. Rosenzweig and Ms. Deutsch, but for now they're just Arla and Anna, typical American gymnasts, with tight ponytails and all the usual attributes. I ask them whether their friends at home - non-Jewish girls - are different from them, but they do not divulge anything. Then I ask if it were possible, if an Israeli guy would put the moves on them while they're here, for them to fall in love with him and as a result end up immigrating to Israel. One of them says she has a boyfriend; the other doesn't rule out the possibility. Hell, even though they are kids, they believe in love.

The last question I ask is which athletes attract them most. They reply "baseball players" - in an American accent, of course. They are, after all, Americans.

For the sport

Tel Aviv's Gordon Beach is the place to go for beach volleyball. Mexico versus Israel, Australia against France. Everyone is tan, everyone is having a good time. A group of Indians - cricket players, of course - have come to have a look around, on their day off. Even though everyone is watching the game, these guys still steal most of the attention. They are wearing their cricket shirts, after all; they are not on their home ground. The sea is not familiar to them, they don't have shorts on and their skin does not undergo that ruddy tanning stage. And they are here solely for the sport.

I get them together for a photo op while, in the background, some foreign TV producer urges them to raise their arms to make "a happy picture." It's never going to end - the white man peering at the Indians. This man gestures with such arrogance that had I possessed a cricket ball, I would have made use of it. And this is no metaphor.

Daniel Mishan, from the Mexican beach-volleyball team, is a shrewd guy. He has just finished playing and knows how to work a crowd. He goes around shaking hands, checking to see who has watched the game. I go up to him and ask how the social life is at the Maccabiah, whether it is like a live dating site. He tells me it's exactly what I think it is - all about long-term relationships and a Jewish wedding - winks. There isn't really a dating scene or one-night stands here. What there is, mainly, is talk about this phenomenon in the local media.

Before I move on to the Kfar Hamaccabiah village, I meet Danny and Arthur, two Australians who save the day, just like in the cliche. One of them waxes enthusiastic about Israeli girls with curly hair; the other says he met his beloved, from Texas, at the last Maccabiah. Now, if that isn't the aim of the Games, what is?

At dusk that day, even the sun had a foreign accent.

I drive to Kfar Hamaccabia h. They say the lawn there is like a replica of the lawn of the kibbutz in days of yore, with female volunteers from abroad. This place, too, is about meeting people, but not Israelis. I enter the lobby and find two rugby players from South Africa, Jay and Grant, who on their day off went to the Azrieli Mall in Tel Aviv and there, on the spot, fell in love with two dark-skinned girl soldiers. They describe Israeli women as the most beautiful in the world - and I feel like the lowliest sort of sports reporter. In another minute I will ask them about the hummus here and they will say, "Amazing."

I have no doubts about Israeli girls and certainly not about the hummus, but I am beginning to suspect that someone in the world is pulling a "Truman Show" on us, the Israelis. Maybe our country is a metaphoric world at the end of which is a horizon made of cardboard. We get stuck in it again and again, and can't get out.

In the lobby, a huge clump of rugby players from Great Britain are all dressed up and perfumed, ready to go out to the Clara Club. Masses of muscular British Jews who soon will drink themselves into a stupor. Not one of them has heard about the Kobi Peretz affair [Peretz is a popular Mizrahi singer, who was barred by a guard from entering a club frequented by an Ashkenazi audience that comes to hear Mizrahi songs]. Not one of them even knows who Kobi Peretz is. Not one of them will be able to identify the Ashkenazi yuppies who clap their hands too enthusiastically, with fingers spread too wide, when they hear Mizrahi music (for the hell of it), but don't let Kobi Peretz in. I ask these guys what they say when they start up with girls, and one says his opening line is: "You have narrow ankles." Hell, that's funny. Ultimately, it is another version of the so-very-Israeli quip: "What a flower you are. What gardener raised you?"

That evening, the narrow ankle was the flavor of the month.

I drive back to Hadar Yosef, this time to the athletics stadium, hoping for a few good interviews for the record. It is the end of the third day of competitions. In the background the Israeli four-man relay loses to the Americans in a photo finish. It was close, the way it is supposed to be in that sort of sport. A race just isn't worthwhile if someone's way ahead or if a record isn't broken - if it's just people running. I go to talk to the winning foursome and they have one thing to say: The bar is open now! Only one has a girlfriend, and all the rest will have fun tonight. But you can see that they are just talking. They really have come for the sport.

And, really, everyone here at this Maccabiah has come for the sport. The runners, the rugby players, the beach-volleyball players and all the rest. You suddenly realize that the Israeli mind has been warped - because of the Israeli mind. At first you think that the Maccabiah is one big dating site; you are skeptical about it. You think it's like the wave of immigration from Russia, on which non-Jews hitched a ride for a better life, and that here, people who aren't really into sports have come along only to find a mate. Then you realize that there really are Zionists in this world, there are good Jews. There is naive, natural thinking that has long since became warped and skeptical here.

And thus we arrive at the Maccabiah Catch-22. If they immigrate to this country, they will become warped. And if they remain in the Diaspora? There will be no immigration. Who says that it's one big walking JDate here? The Israeli mind. Because for it, there is "a tall female pole-vaulter seeking an Israeli man to ground her," "a featherweight wrestler seeking a heavy Israeli woman who doesn't leave the house," "a female long-jumper seeking a short-term relationship" and "an archer seeking a girl who is studying Eastern philosophy." All the rest are real Jews who come for the competitions and maybe, just maybe, to develop long-term friendships.
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