Letter Two | 11/21 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

There’s a line towards the end of Sally Rooney’s Normal People that describes the way the set of behavioral expectations around “traditional” masculinity—you know, bros, guys, lads—restrict and redirect all kinds of emotional expression, like changes to a river’s course:

“Back in fifth year when Connell had scored a goal for the school football team, Rob had leapt onto the pitch to embrace him. He screamed Connell’s name, and began to kiss his head with wild exuberant kisses. It was only one-all, and there were still twenty minutes left on the clock. But that was their world then. Their feelings were suppressed so carefully in everyday life, forced into smaller and smaller spaces, until seemingly minor events took on insane and frightening significance. It was permissible to touch each other and cry during football matches. Connell still remembers the too-hard grip of his arms.”

Without a language and a framework that makes emotional expression socially possible, those emotional energies, so the assumption goes, build up like pressurized gases. Remember here that Connell and Rob are in high school, and God knows (so do you!) that we, I especially, had difficulties finding effective methods of emotional expression and management.

It’s not news to you that Rooney floats around my head a lot—without paying rent, as the saying goes—for a cluster of reasons, but the phrase insane and frightening significance has proven particularly sticky. On one hand it’s not inaccurate, either the description of the feeling or the light sociology that constitutes her analysis of it. When I watch soccer and sometimes when I play there remains a kind of inertial force to the emotional wave—sometimes, at least. And that force feels natural, which is to say sublime, beyond conscious personal control. For that reason it's terribly exciting, which I mean literally. There’s something terrifying, “insane and frightening,” about it. And to be sure my experience of that force, both in my past and present lives, is influenced by my experience of gender in conscious and unconscious ways.

But on the other hand I’m not sure if things are quite as clear as Rooney seems to suggest. My own masculinity, for example, has (thank god) undergone a fair bit of revision since I was Connell’s age. My moods are no longer so totally predicate on, say, whether Arsenal win, and whereas I was once an American football player who (in order to survive, really) had to embrace, affirm, a certain kind of cruelty and pleasure in violence, these days, in my second life as a soccer player, I am or at least try to be a very nice player. I cannot imagine playing under the conditions of absolute frenzy that reigned when I was sixteen, seventeen, and asked to flatten other people.

Nevertheless I am still sensitive to that force, that emotional wave. There is still something extrapersonal, something a little more than immanent, about my experience of soccer, whether in spectatorial joy (the Timbers Army or the Riveters celebrating a goal, say) or in participatory regret (missing a defensive assignment and conceding a goal, say). Maybe I spent too long as a Football-playing American Boy to ever unlearn that emotional orientation, but I don’t think things can ever be so determinatively clean. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing, necessarily.

All that to say, this project seems like an affirmative reinterpretation of the Rooney quote. It stands as a form of emotional expression (among other things) linked to our own emotional linkages: to soccer and sports, but also to each other, and to the other people who might or might not actually appear in these pages (posts?) but who are present regardless. There are probably literally infinite paths of critique we could pursue in light of this most recent hay-tumbling between sports and late capitalism, and we’ll wander down plenty of them, I’m sure. But it’s also good and right to begin here, I think, in a slightly more reparative mode. You, at least, and our friends—we aren’t sponsored by Budweiser. (Unless a megaconglomerate wants to sponsor this project, in which case, bring it on, corporate daddies, I’m an underpaid graduate student and will say whatever you want me to.)

I’ll talk a little more about the last four years in my next letter, because I’m nearly out of room here, and, you know, there was a soccer game today. The opening match, Ecuador and Qatar—I had the Fox broadcast, so the generally inoffensive John Strong and the bumbling but occasionally sweet Stuart Holden were on commentary. I watched it on replay after my pickup game this morning, and I fell asleep at half time. It was abysmal. Ecuador won 2-0, both goals in the first half, but I have no idea if they’re any good because Qatar were totally lost. They played with a kind of unprofessional mania. It was the worst goalkeeping performance I’ve seen in a while. There’s a too-easy comparison to be made here between a Qatar team in actually very sharp burgundy Nike shirts playing in a gorgeous stadium, but playing so poorly it wasn’t even an interesting badness—between this and the whitewashing, the slick branding, of the World Cup in general. We’ll get to that.

One thing I cannot help mentioning: the first apparent Ecuador goal, an Enner Valencia (I remember him!) header from a bicycle-kick cross following a bit of Benny Hill goalkeeping, was ruled offside by the new “semi-automatic” technology, and in realtime you literally couldn’t see it, the offending kneecap, because of the fineness of the line and also because four seconds elapsed (owing to the general chaos in the box) between the “pass” that rendered the Ecuador player offside and the moment he actually touched the ball. Everyone, including the broadcast team, was confused, until Strong said the call was “scientifically precisely measured.” I’ll talk more about this, I’m sure, but I’m glad to see that this World Cup has already epitomized not only the minimal superficiality of attempts to make this World Cup morally and politically defensible, but also the fabulously misguided attempts to render the sport “scientific and precise.” Both problems, perhaps, share a root: technocratic neoliberalism. More to come.

I’m back on the picket line tomorrow morning. I’ll try to listen to USA/Wales—I have a Welsh friend here who’s going to have either a very good or very bad day.

Much love,

Ryan