Letter Four | 11/23 | Ryan
Berkeley
Dear Russ,
I’m especially taken by your descriptions of Breitner and Rashford and Socrates—the latter a player I admire very much—as people who took definitive political measures, whether an active withholding (as in Breitner’s case), a mediated pressure campaign (in Rashford’s), or a savvy detournement of his own cultural significance (as in Socrates’s threat to leave for Italy if free elections weren’t respected). In each case there’s a sense of strong action, of willfulness. One reason, I think, that we like to see our sports stars perform political actions we approve of (the same is often true of our artists, although in both cases it’s too easy to conflate laudable politics with aesthetic dexterity, virtue for virtuosity) is that we imagine that physical and athletic strength ought to correspond to political and ethical strength. It’s right there in the language, the fact we can use the same word in both cases. It just makes sense.
I just read a collection of Julius Deutsch’s essays. Deutsch was an important member of the interbellum Austro-Marxist political scene in Vienna, and he conceptualized Marxism as a program for every scale of life. The physical body, he suggested, must be fit and prepared, must be made strong, before it can stand in solidarity with others as a class body, as a proletariat body politic. (Clearly there are some assumptions here that read in a contemporary context as rather ableist.)
I’ll probably mention Deutsch in future letters because I like very much his critique of sports as personal and collective control—not through the disciplining of the body (he liked that very much) but through ideological and institutional means, the creation of a preoccupation with competition and records, and of a quasi-nationalist rivalry between sports clubs tied to workplaces and industries. (It’s harder to organize a general strike if you hate the guys down at the brewery because they knocked your defender into a trash can last week.) Consider this bit: “The brutal and egotistical desire for success that characterizes capitalism is reflected in bourgeois sport . . . bourgeois sport has degenerated into a mad obsession with records. . . . Exaggerated high-end performances are the essence of bourgeois sport.”
Is it possible that one reason it’s so easy to love people like Rashford is that the way they do politics fits so well into Deutsch’s framework of “bourgeois sport”? Could it be we look at Rashford’s meals campaign in the same way that we look at one of his goals or his end-of-season statistics? What I mean is that a familiar logic is at play, an emphasis on the individual player, the hero, who accomplishes one or several clearly defined and easily countable actions. Politics becomes about the right people doing the right things—just as, in much contemporary discourse, sports are about the great people doing great things, the Homeric champions in all the glory of their aresteia. Maybe it’s not quite Carlylean Great Man Theory, but it’s pretty close.
Deutsch advocated for amateur over professional sports, itself not an unproblematic claim, because he thought that sports ought to encourage “fraternity” between players and spectators, between people. The game or match was a stage, an event, a space where certain emotional and social and aesthetic intimacies could occur. More recently the sociologist Eric Anderson has called for something similar, new visions of sports as opportunities for collective, collaborative action. In both cases, the telos of sports is neither success as such nor the demonstration of excellent or aptitude. Instead, it’s sociality and beauty, and this is the really, really key thing: those things are possible in the very greatest intensity at every level of sports. There is not more beauty in professional soccer than amateur soccer, and the social bonds constructed in the latter case are just as strong, or stronger, than in the former.
So what do we do with Messi? (See, yes, I’m talking about the World Cup, the thing we claim to be here to discuss!) Argentina lost to Saudi Arabia today, 2-1, and everyone is very upset because this is Messi’s last chance at a World Cup win, and it’s somehow his responsibility to cap his career with a heroic national performance, an epic in the classical, narratological sense. As you and everyone I’ve ever spoken to knows, I’m absolutely fed up with the state of popular sports discourse (and most other popular discourses, my god. You know those twitter threads that are like, hey leftists, what’s your most conservative political opinion? Mine must be that so much of the language we use to describe the most important things in life is just so, so bad: so imprecise, so inelegant, so indicative of a lack of care and generosity). Is Messi the GOAT?, people ask. What a maddening question. (Also it’d be so easy to do, like, classical deconstruction of GOAT, the way the positive term carries its opposite inside, goat in the sense of scapegoat, sacrificial loser.)
If Messi fails to lead Argentina to a Cup victory, so says the great collective voice, then his legacy will be forever blurred, the sharp edge blunted. We will never see him the same way again; he’ll never sit in our minds the way champions do, because unlike Pele or Beckenbauer or Jordan or Brady he wasn’t strong enough to drag himself and his Argentinian packload to the top of the stupid mountain.
I’m not going to suggest that this reading of Messi is wrong because championships are a silly method of individual evaluation, although this is true. Instead, I’m going to say that it’s a mischaracterization of strength. According to Deutsch, the individual body’s strength becomes meaningful only insofar as it allows something more to happen when placed alongside others. And so Messi’s real strength, what is sublime about Messi, is his ability to create moments of beauty that galvanize people in a way usually only the traditional arts can. Messi’s aesthetic strength is otherworldly; he becomes, so easily and so often, the third thing towards which two people direct their attention, and in doing so become a temporary community.
Considered in this way, maybe the players who resemble Messi in a political context don’t look like Rashford but instead Justin Fashanu and Robbie Rogers—the first professional and the first professional American players to come out, although Fashanu’s story is tragic—or Brandi Chastain and Alex Scott, who inaugurated a future for women (for folks of myriad gender identity) as players and fans, who created newly possible lives.
I think Argentina will be fine, and I do not envy Mexico, who play them next. I did not watch Denmark/Tunisia, and I saw only the saved penalty in Mexico/Poland, Ochoa doing Ochoa things. France and Australia was terrifying because once Australia snuck the first goal, it was like France decided to care, and the way a collective emotion can suddenly ignite across eleven people at once is really beyond analysis and only barely within the possibilities of description. The only metaphorical images that come to mind are clichés. It wasn’t exactly an awoken animal or an unstoppable meteorological event. It was more like the sudden passing-down of judgement from a sovereign, like a thief about to escape with the loot who, as they step through the door, realizes it was all a setup. Giroud scored twice, to draw even, incredibly, with Thierry Henry as France’s leading scorer. I realize that I know nothing about Giroud’s politics, that his personal life seems flighty in a stereotypically intriguing French way, and that my opinion of him is clouded by his years at Arsenal, but I cannot help but love him. Everyone should see this gif, which I think epitomizes everything Giroud is about.
I did this last World Cup, too, wrote too much about random bullshit like an Austrian Marxist no one’s ever heard of instead of myself. Is there anything you’d like me to spend time with in the next letter?
In tired solidarity,
Ryan