Paint Me One Picture
Broadcast rights. An auction for them.
These days the Italian league was the finest in the world. But later—once the 2020s arrived—England would grow into the richest league of all. The reason was simple. Sell the rights for a staggering price, then divide the money among the clubs, and a side had only to remain in the first division to rake in an astronomical profit. Keep buying expensive players with that money, and the EPL would become nothing short of a nursery for stars.
But that was a story for a long time from now.
At present England was in the middle of a long, ugly slump. And this man had looked at a few sheets of paper and gone straight to the right answer?
He must have read my face. Yang Eokgwan opened his mouth, careful.
"American sports all make their money that way."
"You mean the American model of revenue will apply in Europe as well?"
"That is so."
"But I've heard the atmosphere in Europe and America is quite different."
I had tossed it out like a probe. Yang Eokgwan set his answer down, calm and precise.
"You are quite right. Europe has a culture of its own. I have heard, often enough, that they take a dim view of earning money from sport as an industry. Even so..."
"...?"
"Football is, in the end, a sport that sorts winners from losers. If they lose again and again in European competition and come to be called a second-rate league, British thinking will change a great deal."
"No sale survives a defeat?"
"Precisely. Adopt an American model of revenue and it is plain they would go from strength to strength. What reason would they have to go on enduring the name of a second-rate league?"
"So public opinion forms on its own."
Ticket prices had a ceiling. Players' prices did not. To break a limit like that, you had to do business with the whole world. That, surely, was what broadcast rights were for.
"I like the idea. But there's a problem. Will the British, with their noses so high, really hand the rights over to Asian capital?"
"There is no need to break that pride."
"Then?"
"Money enough to set their shoulders back. Capital so overwhelming it lifts their self-regard—to think they would rate the English league so highly! That alone will settle the matter."
"What do you expect it to cost?"
"A hundred billion won a season. It does look like a mad price, but at that figure..."
"Can you earn that money?"
"Pardon?"
He must have thought I had said something completely out of nowhere. He was advising me to spend a hundred billion, and here I was asking whether he could earn it. The question had not yet cleared from Yang Eokgwan's eyes.
"I told you. I'm going abroad to study."
"...?"
I had put him in place to run things while I was away. If a hundred billion was required, then he was the one who had to earn it. Honestly, this man.
He must have felt the air turn strange.
"Hmm. A hobby is most beautiful when it remains a hobby. Yes. Once you drag what you love all the way into the realm of work..."
"My hobby is making money."
"..."
"You can enjoy that hobby in my place, can't you?"
He must have sensed there was no way back. Yang Eokgwan only blinked, and said nothing at all.
Two days later, Martin stepped into my office with a gaunt face. From what I heard, he had come running the moment he landed.
"I understand you met John Carmack."
"How did you..."
John Carmack had not yet made his name. A reaction like that was only natural. So there was nothing for it but a decent dodge.
"You seemed interested, so I looked into him a little myself."
"Ah."
"They say he's mad for programming?"
"That's the precise word. He really was mad, in the fullest sense."
"Must have been wonderful."
"Of course. I'd been wanting to meet a developer like that..."
The excitement of that day seemed to come alive in him again. A grin kept rising to his face. But the smile and the color of him were two different things.
"You look exhausted."
"I was up through the night, more or less every night. I did sleep a little on the plane."
"Then you ought to go straight home. Why..."
"I have to adjust to the time difference."
So he meant to take his sleep at night. Hmm. More likely he was itching to try, as soon as he could, whatever he had learned from John Carmack.
In any case, it was time for the point.
"I came because there's something I wanted to ask."
"...?"
"You did your doctorate at Oxford, didn't you?"
I asked whether he knew anything about the London Royal School. He gave me a very simple answer.
"It's a sort of social gathering for old boys of the Royal School. There are several of those, but one club is especially famous. Women can't join, and apparently a new member requires the permission of the alumni..."
They did love their airs. Even so, the results looked solid enough.
"Every prime minister to come out of the Royal School belonged to that club, they say. So of course the pride is enormous. A kind of aristocratic circle. But why would you..."
Before I could answer, quick-eyed Martin spoke first.
"Are you thinking of going on to the Royal School?"
"Why so surprised?"
"Ah, well, it's..."
"Don't I suit it?"
"That isn't what I meant..."
Martin could not quite go on. The dismay in his eyes was easy enough to read, and I didn't press him. I waited, calm, for whatever he meant to say.
How long we sat like that, I couldn't have said.
"Aristocrats may enter the Royal School directly. Everyone else, I was told, must interview."
"And why does that matter?"
"The problem is that one of the interviewers..."
"...?"
"...is my doctoral supervisor."
Wait.
Martin's supervisor. The highest authority on the authentication of da Vinci—until the introduction of scientific methods, after which his standing had collapsed.
"You mean the professor who opposed us to the very end, back then?"
"Yes."
Aigoo. So the man who would take me for a mortal enemy was sitting squarely on my interview panel?
And right then, Grandfather's voice began to boom in my ear.
A month later, Yang Eokgwan came in to the Hannam-dong office every single day. In the morning alone he took three reports: at seven, the North American distribution network; at eleven, the whole of the football business. From those reports he issued each set of instructions in writing, and he kept it up for a full month without a single day off.
Which meant the staff who had lived soft and blessed beside Park Jihoon were now grinding their souls into the work. But what could they do? The boss arrived first and left last. There was even a rumor he had set a camp cot in the office and slept there, so not one of them had a path by which to voice a complaint.
And the reason for working like a madman?
A hundred billion won. Every year.
At first he had wondered whether he ought ever to have mentioned the broadcast rights. And then, of all things, the moment a goal that looked impossible was set before him, his blood began to boil. For as long as he worked with his eyes shot through with red, he felt it through his whole body.
I'm alive.
The joy of being alive, down to the bone. So the more the results came in, the tighter, and tighter, and tighter he ran.
The mood of the company had turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and CEO Park Jihoon interfered in not a single thing. A man with an uncanny gift for investment. There must have been no end of things that fell short of his standard, and still he guaranteed authority over the management down to the last inch. At times he left everything to discretion, to a degree that was almost a burden.
You're the CEO, so set your own incentive however you see fit.
That he had gone so far as to say a thing like that told you everything.
Why trust me this far?
Simply because Chairman Dazai had recommended him? Or because the handling of the work had pleased him? Whatever the reason, one fact did not change in the slightest: he was receiving more trust than he deserved.
Damn it. Shoved forward this openly, how was he supposed to betray that faith?
Kindness is repaid in profit.
And so Yang Eokgwan the squirrel, shut inside a prison of trust (?), went pattering over every slope of the mountain, hauling back an acorn (?) each day.
Who's cursing my name.
My ear itched for no good reason. And right then—
"Are you listening?"
Jo Sudeok's voice came through the receiver. I had been taking a report on the recent doings of a professor in Oxford's Department of Art History.
"Sorry. Another thought came over me for a moment."
"Ah, yes. May I go on?"
"Please."
"These days he's resting from his lectures. A gentleman once counted among the foremost specialists on da Vinci, and he made a fatal misjudgment in his own field, so..."
"And that means he stops teaching as well?"
"Well, you see. They say he overplayed his hand rather badly."
"...?"
"He insisted to the end that he could stake his professorship, and all the research of his career, on his own claim. Then, once the results came in, he went so far as to maintain that the whole thing had been fabricated..."
"And he gave up the professorship over it?"
"Fortunately he kept the post. Mandatory retirement is right in front of him. He reduced his lectures little by little, and lately he's resting on the excuse of his health. He hasn't the face to meet his students, I should think."
Hmm. At this point it would be no wonder if he nursed a grudge against me. And I was supposed to sit an interview in front of that professor?
As if that would ever work.
Nor did I have an alternative. I looked through the book of regulations, and there the clause sat, plain as anything.
Admission shall be granted only when every interviewer is of one mind.
"..."
At this rate, the science-high-school ending. Ugh.
"Is there no case where an interviewer is replaced?"
"There has been no such case as yet. And even if some exception were to arise, the interviewers are so very thick with one another..."
"So even if one of them steps out, his influence still holds?"
"I should think so."
I let out a breath. There had to be some way. No—if there wasn't, I would have to make one.
I knew it was useless, and still I kept reading the admissions regulations. And right then, one ordinary-looking line caught my eye.
A letter of recommendation must be attached to the interview documents.
A clause I had known all along. And in that moment it came at me like a rope thrown to a drowning man.
A recommendation had to be attached. Which meant the interviewers, too, would have to read it.
Right. So that's how it is.
The feeling of finding a hairline crack in a wall I had thought sealed shut. Still murky, even so.
Better than no hope at all. What am I moping for?
Perhaps because I had seen a possibility, my head began at last to turn, hard and fast.
How long passed, I couldn't have said.
"Professor, are you still there?"
"Yes. I'm listening."
I shifted my grip on the receiver.