The Week Before: The Nike Ad and All These Broken Bodies

The first time I watched the Nike ad I liked it well enough. I mean: how fun! Ronal-doh! But afterwords I was left with a lingering feeling of nothing, and then a growing level of disturbance. This is hardly just an ad after all: it’s the single biggest artistic statement about the World Cup- about soccer in general-that will be distributed in the US. Obviously they constructed it so it could be experienced on different levels, depending on your level of knowledge. But it was just wrong. About everything. For everyone. 


Ok. So. It’s poking fun at the personas soccer players take on. So far, so good. We can all understand that. But it’s the laziest poking possible: it’s all just so obvious. This is a multimillion dollar soccer commercial that doesn’t give any indication of knowing a thing about any existing soccer subtexts. The only piece that touches on more than canned aspiration is Rooney’s; at least it gets at the odd tragedy of his class striving and makes a nod to his mysterious tendency to signify as a Bear. But that’s about it. Sure, I suppose I’m use to a high-level of football satire, but the ladies at Kickette could have written a more interesting script in their most champagne-soaked sleep. 

Here is Where I Will Lay Down The Rules

The ones I learned along the way. Before this whole World Cup thing gets going. Not life rules. Just football rules. Life of Football Rules. Trouble is I didn't tell them to you before this whole World Cup thing got going, and you can't tell someone the rules after the games are already finished. But my heart is so heavy with constructed guidelines and hidden codes of conduct that only I know the architecture of. Listen to me tell them to you and nod. Imagine I'm your grandma. The grandma at the pub.

Match Report: Friendly Currents (England vs. Mexico Friendly, 5.24.10)

A friendly is like an electrical grid. Parallel currents at different voltages headed to different destinations. Directions and objectives opposed but still getting and giving energy to a bigger network. It’s bodies and it’s running but it’s not a game exactly; it’s more and less than a game. Everyone on the pitch is playing their own game of candidacy, but they’re also just an x on a chalkboard in motion. Speeds become personal: while some players are just going through the motions, jogging in place, others fight for their lives. On the surface a friendly can seem boring, exclusively theoretical, but if you look more closely there's terror and panic. You never know when you'll hit a live wire; an unanticipated connection; a shock to the system.

Match Report Part 2: The Power of A Head Bandage (England vs. Mexico Friendly, 5.24.10)

At some point during the first half of the friendly against Mexico, Steven Gerrard took a knock on the head. He returned to the pitch with a bandage on his head and a new outlook on life. During the Chelsea v. Liverpool game a couple of weeks ago, I compared him to a mental patient; with roughly-wrapped gauze around his forehead he certainly looked like one. But a liberated one. Gerrard looked like a mental patient who had escaped from the asylum of his season at Liverpool through a very small bathroom window and thrown his sedatives into the artificial pond as he roared out of the compound. At least until the mania hit, intoxication was guaranteed: with his freedom, with everyday life, with breathing. Alternatively, you might say he looked like a little kid who fell out of bed after a season-long nap. Watch out mummy, he’s mad and he’s ready to play! Take your pick. He was a man resurrected. 

Match Report: Sanatorium FC (LIverpool v. Chelsea, 5.4.10)

If Nicole Diver and Hans Castorp pulled their friends at the sanatorium out of their beds to play a match, this is what the match would look like. Televised Ambien. At first it makes sense: after all it’s 8am on Sunday, I’m hungover, wrapped up in blankets on the couch and I could care less about either Liverpool or Chelsea. I’m watching solely to will Liverpool to win so Chelsea doesn’t take the title. A defensive viewing like this is never passionate or pretty. But slowly it dawns on me that the players are not hungover on the couch wrapped in blankets watching teams they don’t care about. So how come they look like they are?

Here a New Life Will Be Told in a Season

There are notes. Many notes. Charts, game plans, stats. Occasionally there is also something about football. 

Here, Wedged in Here, Is The Story of The In-Between

Here Is Not An Ending

It's just a football game disguised as one. 

This is Where I Will Tell You a Story

About The Year of The Fleet-Footed and Football. Emphasis on The Fleet-Footed. Territories covered: Italy, Africa, the west coast, the east coast, and the strange land in the middle. But don't fret: mostly we'll talk about Ireland. Since that's where the story becomes a story, more than shreds and scraps. But I'll need your help. It'll take both of us to piece it together, to see what fits.

From the Vaults: Euro 2008, Falling for the Russians

There's not much I can add to the technical accounts or the general mob of giddiness around the way Andrei Arshavin is playing, but I'd like to add my gasp to the chorus. It's nice to see the sportswriters besotted for a change, reminded of why they become sportswriters in the first place. Using their words. Taking a few moments to set aside their legitimate criticisms of the materialism of the game, their necessary muckracking, to pull out some dusty poetries.

Usually when R. and I watch a game at the pub in Pasadena, we have to park a couple of blocks away, and walk past the Humane Society. The collective whimper leaking out is audible. We keep talking. We walk faster. We push our hands deep into our pockets. But today when we passed by, an Asian family was leaving the building, a mom and a dad and a young boy of maybe 11 or 12, with a serious, kind face. In his hand, he held the leash of the happiest dog I've ever seen. A mutty sort of maybe-Labrador grinning from ear to mangy ear. I had what I felt was a logical reaction to this scene: I burst into tears. Even from across the street, I was overcome by the dog's relief.

Mind you, I don't mean in any way to compare Arshavin to a dog. But the feeling I experienced watching that scruff of a dog look up at his new owner did not diminish as I watched Russia play the Dutch; it grew. The Russians were light, and fleet-footed, and fearless. Of course, this is Hiddink's way, to send his team forward even if it's a suicide mission. And of course, it's Russia's way right now as well, their oil enabling Ikeas in Siberia as the rest of Europe packs up their table linens and prepares to crumble into the sea, villas first. 

But like that dog, who could hardly believe his good luck at finally getting the chance to be a real dog, to be himself- to love this little boy, and bark at the postman, and sleep the hot Pasadena afternoon away- these Russian boys with their supernaturally terrible haircuts, their pale and flushed and wiry bodies, and their insistence on dribbling like it was still in style- showed that they're at this tournament not just to convince a club to buy or sell them.

They're on that field just to play, to say fuck it and push forward down the field, instead of hugging the back line and waiting to die. To feel the weightlessness that comes from not waiting anymore, and to rush into the selves they have been preparing to be. They are becoming themselves on the Euro 2008 fields, because a soccer star can't be a soccer star without the world watching, just like a dog can't truly be a dog without a little boy chasing him around the yard. It's thrilling to watch.

Here is Not The Beginning

Before this there was a concussion, a tongue swollen from orange slices, and the night of firecrackers in Siracusa. But if we want to see our way through all of this- with whom else could we possibly begin?