GG al-Hashimi

Karim al-Hashimi has covered Iraqi football for a Baghdad daily for twenty-five years, filed from stadiums with no electricity, and once dictated a match report down a borrowed phone while the floodlights failed. He calls the result. Out loud, in headline form, usually around the fifth or sixth move, and he is wrong often enough that opponents have started keeping their own record of it. He plays at lightning speed, doubles for the theatre of it, and maintains that a reckless cube that comes off is front-page material while a cautious one never sold a paper. At the cash tables he calls the whole room, not only his own game: who is in the box by midnight, who goes home first, all filed before the sixth move. The crew keeps that record and he has stopped asking to see it.