the beautiful game
Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player.
How do you tell a good story about love that begins with abjection?
This is a line I’ve been mulling over for twelve days. I could begin a different essay with it, and I have (well, to the extent that two lines comprises an essay: the second line is We could start a support group, me and Japanese Breakfast), though I’m not sure that one will see the light of day. Today I want to think not about a place or a person but a sport.
I didn’t play soccer as a child. A lot of American children do: 2.3 million players in the 6-12 year old age range alone (according to this NYTimes article from 2018), although participation is declining and it’s getting more expensive to play.
My parents were suspicious of organized sports. The money, the injuries, the way adults got so invested in their kids’ performance, maybe the nature of group activities themselves — as if there was a certain mob rule or jingoism or rapacious competitiveness inevitable when you put people onto teams and asked them to win. On a car ride back from a grad school intramural game I asked someone on my team here about her experiences playing club soccer in her small Massachusetts town.
It was weird, she said. There were a lot of town politics wrapped up in it.
Adults who had grown up in the town stayed there, coached their kids with all the fierceness and violence you birth with thwarted ambition. These were the kinds of parents I had seen caricatured on TV, shaking their fists and screaming. Indeed, I’d seen (milder versions of) these parents watching my young cousins play T-ball on the field by their school. The parents all watched their charges so hawk-eyed. They yelled instructions, conferred over what to do about a boy who couldn’t really pitch. I didn’t understand how the game worked, and I blamed my parents for this, but I also felt strangely glad to have been left alone so much.
In the absence of organized sports I got to whack bricks in the backyard until they broke.
Adrianna and I used the brick dust, water, and mud to make sculptures, an insane exercise in destruction and creation we continued until our father ordered us to stop. We had so much time, loose and syrupy, especially in the summer: what would I be if I’d had to run around on artificial turf listening to instructions instead of sitting on a yellow swing, looking up at the light filtering through the leaves of the massive maple tree in the backyard? It was a decaying tree, home to a family of raccoons who were slowly hollowing it out, but the leaves would burst out lush and green anyway, an explosion of life on top of slow brown rot. I don’t think I would have noticed this without the luxury of time. I would have noticed other things, probably: how to get open, how to pass accurately. What it means when someone shouts Man on! and You’ve got time!
I took up soccer in my junior year of college. It was speed soccer, actually: 8v8, half the field, a faster game. A team of old dormitory floormates and our associates. Our sometimes-surly captain, a mechanical engineering major who’s married now. The boy I’m dating now, who never came to practice. The gregarious roommate of my then-partner. The Salinas boys, wholesome and friendly, who told me about high school cross-country runs they took in the shadow of crops, the mist of pesticides. A girl who’s an optometrist, a girl who’s a nurse. A couple people who I’m not going to use gendered pronouns for, running the field in clothes I noticed on them: long basketball shorts or corduroy slacks. At Saturday morning practice we sloshed around in the mud and goose shit by an old campus building that had been designed by a woman architect. Sometimes we ate in a dining hall after, loading up on tater tots and salad. On the field and at the long dining table I felt like I was part of something, and I felt like I was outside of something. I usually left our matches alone.
The promise of sport was friendship, wasn’t it? But I didn’t actually deepen my relationships with anyone I played with, I just saw them more. The mechanical engineer didn’t invite me to his wedding. I sent him a congratulatory note and in doing so, opening Messenger, realized we’d last talked in 2018. “Talked” meaning a wall of text from me saying I was uncomfortable with how scathingly he criticized one of our teammates on the field. He left me on read. We never spoke about it.
There are friendships that are more about physicality than other forms of connection. People talk about “face to face” (verbally communicative) versus “side by side” (shared activity) friendships. Soccer was, is, mostly side by side. My teammates and I experienced a kind of intimacy when we achieved something together that’s difficult to replicate, in its momentary intensity, off the field. When you make a goal, or keep the other team from scoring, you feel it in your whole body, a thrill, a shiver of gratitude or euphoria, of being dangled over the brink and saved again. No wonder people make all these noises. Sports are so needlessly noisy, I used to think before I played soccer, and then I screamed and high-fived and jumped in spite of myself.
For all the moments of euphoria, my relationship to this game is complicated. How do you love a person, place, or thing that doesn’t love you back? Or that does, but in a way that feels illegible, in a way that leaves you hungry and scattered?
The thing is that I’m not very good at soccer. I’m the co-captain of a team now by dint of a poor ability to say no and decent administrative acumen: I collected phone numbers and email addresses, made a WhatsApp group, ordered team shirts. Are we playing with offsides? someone asked and I had to Google what that meant. When my co-captain didn’t show for practice and my teammates did, lining up in the soon-dark of an uneven lawn at a New Haven park, asking What skills are we going to be working on today? I flailed. Bought time. Let a more confident teammate lead a conditioning drill. We ran through a 3v4 game and whooped as we sprinted to end the night.
I’m in a cafe now, sitting across from a dear friend from college. We haven’t spoken very much in the past few months. I told her about how I’d held back on showing vulnerability to another person because I could see that it would bring them closer, and I didn’t know if I wanted that. I can’t pay for that closeness, I said. I’m trying not to write more checks I can’t cash.
She pursed her lips, looked at me over her golden-rimmed glasses. You said before that friendship shouldn’t be transactional.
(The word transactional has been haunting me this week. Another person I love: Why do you think of love as so transactional?)
I guess that’s the good thing about soccer, the thing that was true both on that California field and the Connecticut one: the rules of engagement are so clear, the boundaries distinct. In our intramural games here we play 25-minute halves and we slap each other’s hands. Good game, good game. We peel off and life goes on.
It makes me so sad, he said, that you didn’t think I was passing to you.
How could I explain? That I can try and try but I can’t turn into the boys cheering at the Prem League games, the ones in the jerseys with the Emirates logo across the front, the girls with high ponytails and shin guards who’ve played since they were five, all the beautiful people playing the beautiful game kicking a ball they know as a birthright? The ball rolls where it rolls. I hope I won’t fuck it up.
it’s my birthday this weekend. if you feel so inclined, please send me a poem you love.
did you know the Chinese kind of invented soccer???
