Letter Ten | 11/29 | Joe
| today: our first guest contribution! thanks, Joe! |
Dear Ryan and Russ,
First of all, let me thank you for conducting this project and publishing it for others to read. I’ve found your creativity to be inspiring, and your thoughts have struck a nascent chord within me.
Secondly, thank you for inviting me to write. Similar to what Russ mentioned in an earlier letter, I feel self-conscious about putting my own thoughts on paper and publishing them. You both write so beautifully that it’s intimidating to enter the conversation. Forgive the following ramblings.
You both have written about the conflict you’ve felt entering this World Cup, joy alongside spectacle and atrocity. For me it’s certainly no different, except that I’ve been somewhat surprised by the joy I have found. I was not particularly excited for this World Cup. Part of this is due to the horrific realities of what it took to put the event on. Another part is due to the distraction of a move to a new country and the start of a new job. And a final part was the distance that I felt growing between myself and the boyish kind of joy that the World Cup used to bring me.
Does getting older bring fewer joyful moments? Maybe it’s the repetition of experiences that comes with age—fewer experiences bring that feeling of something new, something novel. Maybe it’s the control that adulthood gives and demands. I can weed out the things with the potential to inflict pain, but consequently limit opportunities for joy. Maybe it’s the fact that those experiences as a child were constructed by loving adults who (fairly enough) don’t feel the need to do so for a 27-year-old.
This World Cup has brought me joy, however. I had forgotten how it felt to be on a knife’s edge as a 50/50 ball bounces in the box. I had forgotten how it feels when the Cup is all the world can talk about. I was just staying at a hostel in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, where a game was was always on the TV. I could strike up a conversation with one of the guys who worked at the hostel, the only other person watching. We probably had few other things in common, but we had the shared experience of the matches. Russ, you have written about how rare singular cultural moments are any more. The World Cup is the exception. As trite as it sounds, the World Cup does remain special.
It also reminded me of the joy I felt in 2018, on a trip with my dad down the Mississippi River, watching Russia’s World Cup over a shitty wifi connection from a house boat. It’s reminded me of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, when my parents installed a new home entertainment system in time for opening kickoff, which I’d set as the selfish deadline. And it reminded me of a long-forgotten memory from the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan when a friend’s dad copied all the US games onto VHS tapes for my birthday. He was one of the few adults I knew then with a love for soccer that seems more common now. Those video tapes felt thrilling and special.
This World Cup has reminded me that soccer makes me feel like a kid again. Russ can attest that I was jumping up and down when Tim Weah scored against Wales, and that I was yelling at the TV when we gave up that stupid penalty. I will have a pit in my stomach when the US is chasing a goal in the first round of the knockout stages, begging for another Donovan-vs-Algeria moment to bail us out.
I think that’s what makes the cold disregard from FIFA and its corporate backers feel like such a gut-punch: they own our joy. They knew we cannot turn away because we can’t resist that feeling.
So how do we take ownership of our joy again? Ryan, you’ve written smartly about the solidarity that sports can exemplify. I couldn’t agree more. The earnest human connection from sport goes hand in hand with the joy I derive from it. Your thoughts about amateur soccer are thought-provoking too. It makes me wonder whether this World Cup really could have been any different, something other than the uber-professionals performing for the hyper-exploited on behalf of the soulless machine.
One thing I’ve found myself frustrated with about “the discourse” around this World Cup is the obsession with the absolution of guilt for the privileged spectator. Wearing a rainbow armband does little to organize human power capable of seizing oil wealth from the monarch homophobes, but I guess it does a lot to absolve some guilty European consciences. Don’t get me wrong, I’m guilty of this as well, but sometimes I want to yell: “Your guilt isn’t buying anybody groceries, motherfucker!”
I write this knowing I’ll tune in to the US/Iran match on Tuesday and briefly experience that guilt-suppressing-joy. So what do I know? Maybe only that I believe change must come from something deeper than guilt—something like joy and love. Thank you two for letting me engage in this international exercise in both.
Joe