Letter Twelve | 12/1 | Peter

| welcome to December. another guest today: our friend Peter. back to regularly scheduled programming tomorrow. |

Ryan, Russ!

I don’t mean to be flippant about this word, given how it’s used problematically in discussions about mental health, but if the shoe fits—athletes at the highest level are crazy.

To be among the best at a game as violent as American football, you have to be a certain kind of reckless and unrelenting. That one’s obvious.

Hockey players? Hockey is like football with knives on your feet and a rubber bullet flying around at 100 mph, broken up by a zamboni and literal fistfights. The caricature of a hockey player is always missing teeth.

Baseball has both speeding projectiles and an archaic adherence to unwritten rules, which sometimes demands a mere fistfight escalate into a bench-clearing brawl. It’s no mistake that we refer to a baseball locker room as a clubhouse: they’re like frat houses.

Basketball is not as physically dangerous, but elite basketball players are almost all crazy with irrational confidence. They believe they’re the best player on any court, and no matter how many times they miss, they’re sure the next shot is going in. In a team sport as well-populated as football, you can get away with humility. It’s a lot harder to succeed in basketball that way.

Soccer players are crazy, too, and I’ve been thinking about this while watching the World Cup and reading your letters.

There are physically dangerous aspects (the writhing player often is in pain!)—I will never understand how someone brings themselves to stand tall in the wall or head away a laser without concussing themselves. It’s the one sport whose commentators routinely refer to an act as “brave.” (As long as I’m here, I want to take a moment to laud Ian Darke and Derek Rae. In general, Fox’s commentators are far inferior to NBC’s Premier League crews, but Darke’s feel for drama and Rae’s linguistic mastery are a joy).

But the real crazy in soccer players is something very different than the other, big-four American sports. It goes well beyond their willingness to throw their head at a ball that someone else is about to swing their foot through.

Soccer players are crazy because they must dedicate themselves mentally and physically to the same small tasks over and over again for 90 minutes with the merest hope those tasks might produce something. I love what you both wrote about scoreless draws and highlight reels, because the highlights are simultaneously the most important and least important aspects of a game. Argentina doesn’t win without two moments of magic. But it took 90 minutes of shithousery and collective endeavor to make those moments happen. The highlights are not what make soccer players crazy—it’s everything else.

A center forward is crazy for making run after run when maybe only a handful of passes will ever arrive. A center back is crazy for remaining mentally switched-on, sensitive to where the forward is at all times. A midfielder is crazy for running and passing all game long, recycling possession and covering for someone else, playing a through ball or making a last-ditch tackle. A goalkeeper is crazy for maintaining focus when they might get seriously tested only once or twice. Attacking, every player must doggedly pursue chances; everything just might come together in one glorious moment. Defending, putting one foot wrong can lead to immediate disaster. That’s crazy—and yet the descriptor that probably best describes a great soccer player is “class.”

Now throw these crazy classy people into the crucible of the world’s biggest sporting event. Suddenly their countries’ hopes and dreams depend on those carefully-placed feet, that razor-sharp focus.

And then on top of that consider the geopolitical context that weighs so heavily. Not only must the players perform well between the lines, but they have to conduct themselves with, well, a type of “class” outside those lines, too.

Maybe by now you’re thinking of the same player I’m thinking of: it’s Tyler Fucking Adams. (I have to confirm with sources but I’m pretty sure that’s his legal name now). The US highlight reel from the group stage will feature passes and finishes from Pulisic, Weah, and Dest, but for me (and I’m hardly alone) the best play has come from the inglorious industry of the team captain running and tackling and covering. Given the admiration the two of you have for work rate, I’m sure you’ve been similarly taken.

He has also, in one of the strangest international incidents in recent memory, had to answer for the actions of his side’s social media team—forced, along with his manager, to answer for US foreign policy, the legacy of the “peculiar institution,” and the honest mispronunciation of “Iran.” It was an unfair task, but he did about as well as one could expect, kind of like Pippin enduring an hour of Denethor’s questions.

It’s a good reminder, amid all the game-winning goals and big-time saves, that the craziest thing a soccer player does is play, moment by moment, game after game. It’s the craziest thing any of us do.

“What’s the bravest thing you ever did?” asks the boy in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road. His father spits blood and answers, “Getting up this morning.” Sometimes we measure our lives in the big moments, but I think the real work is done in the everyday.

I think of you, Ryan, on the picket line. The odds are against you, surely. They’re not going to make a movie about you and your colleagues. Maybe you will get what you are fighting for, but in the grandest sense, the collective “you” won’t—can’t—beat “them.” But you’re fighting the long defeat, that noble defense of the circle of light against the outer darkness, just trying your best, which is the spirit that holds together epic tales and our own little lives. It’s inspiring.

I think of you, Russ, doing the unappreciated work of teaching. I’ve taught teenagers English. It’s damn hard. And while maybe once or twice you will have a moment that feels like it’s straight out of Dead Poets Society (which is a truly terrible depiction of the study and instruction of lit and lang), most days are a desperate struggle to get something to stick. But the world is better for your work, even if you don’t get the credit. (I’m not saying teaching is like serving in The Night’s Watch, but, well, okay, teaching is like serving in The Night’s Watch).

I think of Joe’s letter, too, and the way our pursuit of joy changes as we age. Maybe the blissful exuberance of childhood is gone, and the fever-dream of college, and even the bright-eyed optimism of beginning grad school or your first grown-up job. But we have the opportunity every day to fight for our joy, even if that just means being kind and choosing to love and holding onto the people who touch our lives.

“Just” that. “Just,” in the same way Tyler Adams running himself into the ground and holding together a team of baby eagles is “just” him doing his job.

Crazy.

All my best,

Peter

Letter Eleven | 11/30 | Miles

| another guest today. welcome, Miles—we’re glad to have your elevated eye |

Dear Ryan and Russ,

Thank you for letting me contribute. Following the beautiful letters of others, I’m worried about my fragmentary thoughts, written on my notes app over several days. Call it thinking out loud, or stream of consciousness. Perhaps another day I’ll write something unified, total. Today, however, is not that day.

         Monday, 10:30 AM Eastern Time:

30 hours before the game begins, it’s already a shitshow. The U.S. soccer federation’s attempt to show solidarity was well-meaning, superficial, useless, and guaranteed to provoke. Iran was equally adolescent; the questions directed at Tyler Adams and Greg Berhalter were clearly directed from above, if not dictated outright. The Atlantic is running headlines about how the geopolitical situation adds even more tension to the game. It doesn’t, but their wishcasting is telling.

         Tuesday, the non-time of the plane:

The game is starting. I am on a plane, and because I refuse to watch anything involving Alexei Lalas—including a pre-game show—I have no clue what the lineups are. I get my bearings quickly, as does the US. Pulisic immediately goes on a run; though his nutmeg to beat the last line fails, it’s a good sign. 

I have finally figured out the lineup. It seems fine. Despite his tactical brilliance against England, I remain unconvinced by Berhalter.

Weah’s header! Uncomfortable with his surroundings, anxious about the defenders behind him, he strives upwards, towards the heavens, towards abstraction, when it would’ve made so much more sense to stay grounded, within the realm of the concrete. Perhaps I am projecting here. 

Speaking of altitude, watching “live” television on the back of an airplane headrest is odd. The game freezes and jumps back several times, leaving me—and the rest of the plane, judging by the cheers and groans—minutes behind.  Furthermore, the monitor has no depth. Every time the ball leaves the ground, I lose my bearings.

         When the goal comes, a scattered cheer goes through the plane. It dies off quickly, as if we expected everyone on the jet to be watching, and are made suddenly acutely aware that this isn’t the case. We’re above Zion National Park, in southern Utah. This feels significant in the moment, though I am not sure why. 

         The second half is miserable. With each minute that passes, it feels more like watching Australia after they took the lead against France. The question is not whether the equalizer will come, but when.

Americans, as a rule, are not much on defense. Perhaps it is too long spent as a superpower, or the fact that we have oceans protecting us from the rest of the world, or some remnant of the frontier, the way we rewrite ourselves as the very indigenous groups we attempted to genocide: performing hit-and-run raids, not bunkering down and waiting for attack like settlers (see: the narratives of the revolutionary war we’re told). 

It’s probably no surprise that it was Patton who got a late-empire big-budget movie, and not Bradley or Eisenhower. “No one ever defended something successfully. There’s only attack and attack and attack some more.”

We’re not a nation that prides itself on defending. The one time in our mythology we tried it—Remember the Alamo—we got absolutely routed. 

Instead, America tends to attack in the name of defense. The war on terror, our sanction-regimes against North Korea, Iran, and Cuba, and the “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq were all offensives in the service of “defense.” In global politics, this produces misery, death, and destruction. But it is necessary for soccer. Defense must have an offensive component. I never thought I’d say this, but maybe Berhalter can learn some pointers from Kissinger.

The game is almost done, we have nearly survived. My plane is 500 feet from the ground. An American Airlines jet is directly alongside us. It is the 97th minute when the wheels touch down, and the tv cuts out. The plane groans, but perhaps it’s for the best. “Watchful eyes are too hard on the soul,” as Townes Van Zandt says. I’m suggesting someone learn from Henry Kissinger, so he might be right. Thankfully we won, and I can hate Kissinger again. 

Best,

Miles

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

Letter Nine | 11/28 | Russ

Cape Town

Dear Lack,

You ever wish you could live forever?

This is a question posed by Luisa (Maribel Verdú) in Alfonso Cuaron’s road trip film Y tu mamá también. Luisa asks the question as she, Tenoch (Diego Luna), and Julio (Gael García Bernal)—the three main characters—reach the end of their journey: a secluded Mexican beach named “Heaven’s Mouth,” their very own Eden.

This scene is a brief moment of idyllic respite in a film otherwise marred by disorder. Y tu mamá también is messy—filled with sex, hedonism, joy, vulgarity, love, betrayal, death. Inasmuch as it a story about two teenage boys trying (and, it should be said, failing hilariously) to seduce an older woman, it is also a story about Mexico, a country trying to find itself as it copes with corruption and classism. It’s raw, unwaveringly honest. It’s my favorite film. 

I remember the first time I saw Y tu mamá también: on a warm Monday evening in August last year. The Clinton Street Theater in southeast Portland was commemorating the 20th anniversary of the film’s release. I hadn’t seen a film in a theater in over a year. I don’t remember details: whether I wore a mask (most likely) or if the Clinton checked vaccination cards (surprisingly, I don’t think so). But I do remember the film’s indelible mark on my mind. Y tu mamá también awakened a new interest in film as a form, as literature.

As the film opens, we see Tenoch and Julio, two best friends whose girlfriends have left for a summer in Europe. Though they preach fidelity, the two boys are in fact eager to spend their summer drinking, smoking, and sleeping around as much as possible. Tenoch is the son of a corrupt government official; Julio, the son of a working-class single mother. In front of one another, this doesn’t seem to matter; they are at ease, their friendship loving. However, through both image and narration, Cuaron offers the audience moments that defy this illusion, such as when Tenoch, sharing a bathroom with Julio, lifts the toilet seat with his foot before peeing. Tenoch can’t bring himself to touch it with his hand. His best friend, in his eyes, is dirty.

Tenoch and Julio meet Luisa (Tenoch’s cousin by marriage) at an opulent wedding thrown by Tenoch’s parents. It is here that the two boys tell Luisa about “Heaven’s Mouth,” a beautiful beach they plan to visit. Luisa is married and politely refuses. A few days later, however, Luisa calls Tenoch and asks to join in.

I’m fascinated by Cuaron’s narration of tragic realism. The death of a migrant worker is one example. Another: Tenoch, while on the roadtrip, realizes he’d never visited the home of his nanny Leo, a woman he called “Mommy” until he was four years old (a neat detail: the woman who plays Leo, Liboria Rodríguez, was Cuaron’s nanny, a woman he later honored in his film Roma). And: the off-screen rift between Tenoch and Julio, their class difference. Cuaron reminds us of the harsh realities of the world, lest we get sucked too far into our protagonist’s Epicurean daydream.

As it must, the internalized contempt, jealousy, and anger Tenoch and Julio have felt for each other boils to the surface. It is clear that they will never be friends again. Only thanks to the strength of Luisa, who chastises Tenoch and Julio for behaving like immature pissants, does our trio reach the ocean. Here, they meet a fisherman (Chuy) and his family, who take them on a boat trip to “Heaven’s Mouth,” a secluded beach that Tenoch and Julio thought they made up to seduce Luisa. The boys play soccer with Chuy on the beach, who imagines himself as former Mexican goalkeeper Jorge Campos. Everyone laughs; the moment is more meaningful than anything Tenoch and Julio dreamed about earlier in the film. It is a moment of pleasure. It doesn’t last nearly long enough.

As Chuy ferries the trio back to the beach where he found them, the narration cuts in: at the end of the year Chuy and his family will have to leave their home to make way for the construction of an exclusive hotel. Chuy will never fish again. “Heaven’s Mouth” as we see it will cease to exist. The daydream will end. Reality will set in.  

Such has been my experience with the World Cup. I mentioned in my first letter that I wasn’t looking forward to this World Cup, that I worried the only beauty would come from the shared experience of our project. But I was wrong. There have been times I have been enthralled by the beauty of play, when watching has been pleasurable. I don’t know if there’s ever been some unspoken rule about not discussing the matches outside of our letters. If there was, I’ve already broken it twice. Once, after Messi scored against Mexico, and again as Spain was playing Germany. Both times I texted you because I had to. I had to know if you were experiencing the same joy I was.

After reading your excellent last letter about Messi, I know that you must have. As much criticism as this tournament deserves (which is more then we can say), the play on the field still warrants lavish attention. Spain’s Pedri, for example, plays idyllic soccer. Like Messi, he floats in space, is so unbelievably poised, moves in slow motion. The Spain/Germany match was a wonderful 1-1 draw. Only after the final whistle blew did I start to think more critically again about the tournament. Reality began to set in. 

I read yesterday that Qatar spent over $200 billion dollars on the World Cup. While the most obvious reason for this is that it allows Qatar to rebrand itself, pragmatically I wonder what will happen to the stadiums after the tournament is over. How many will be used ever again? Does the romance of the play on the field influence the physical space?

An assignment I give my students at the beginning of each school year is called “Story of Place.” Students are required to write, in as much detail as possible, about a place that is special or sacred to them. Invariably, wealthier students write about holidays; less wealthy students will write about something smaller: their bedroom, their grandmother’s kitchen, their cul-de-sac. Almost always the latter are stronger pieces of writing. A piece about a resort in the Maldives—though glamorous—lacks the texture, history, and sensory detail of a lived-in space.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is how will this World Cup be remembered aesthetically? Does this even make sense?

In this piece (also from Lit Hub), poet Ross Gay remembers the basketball courts—or secluded hoops—that he loved. An excerpt I particularly like:

“And the beautiful old gym where I went to college, which they replaced with an ugly new one. And the beautiful old gym where I went to grad school, which they replaced with an ugly new one…All the beautiful old courts I have known that they have replaced with shitty new ones.”

It makes me think about all the soccer fields we’ve played on: the grass field on San Juan; the sunken field near the University of Washington in the middle of summer; Newberg, where we had to climb over the fence each time; Chapman Elementary in Northwest Portland where the field was diagonally canted; and on and on. 

But the most beautiful must be Gilbert Creek Park, the space that became the genesis of our love for soccer. Even though the goal was muddy in the winter, hard dirt in the summer; even though there were holes in the grass that today would surely tear my ACL; even the fence behind the goal had a hole, which we always seemed to nail dead-on, forcing another awkward, apologetic “Our ball is in your backyard”; even though the net around the goal didn’t fit right, leaving holes in the top-right and top-left corners, which we, of course, aimed for (in my memory, only Nate ever squeezed a shot through); even though our field was anything but glamorous, and instead very much lived in, it was our field and it was beautiful and playing there made me want to live forever.

Much love,

Russ

Letter Eight | 11/27 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

I love the phrase from the Guardian piece you shared, “ambled vaguely,” because in context it’s obviously not at all a compliment, but in other some other situations—well, one particular situation that I have in mind—the ability to able vaguely is evidence of a kind of genius. I mean Messi, unsurprisingly, whose speed of play, especially as he’s gotten older, is famously slow. Messi plays precisely at an ambulatory pace. Hence the observation, shared again and again online, that Messi spends the first five or ten minutes of a match walking around, figuring out space, getting a sense of the defensive shape—a perambulatory version of Thomas Muller’s Raumdeuter sixth sense. This piece from Lit Hub, of all places, is pretty good on Messi’s walking—maybe no surprise because it’s from Simon Kuper, he of Soccernomics notoriety. And just a few days ago Laura Williamson opened her piece on Messi for The Athletic like this: “His general operating pace is so slow that the fleeting injections of urgency make those decisive moments even more spectacular. Walk, walk, walk, look left, look right, walk, walk, walk, jog… bang. Find the space and then exploit it.”

This is exactly what Messi did in Argentina’s 2-0 win over Mexico. After sixty minutes of just dire soccer—simulation, inelegant roughness, sluggish attack, a general malaise—Messi took possession of the ball at the top of Mexico’s box without, somehow, a defender within five yards. And then he rolled the ball into the corner of the net: exactly in the corner of the net, and without any more pace on the ball than was absolutely necessary to get it beyond Ochoa’s glove. It was casual, seemingly effortless, almost preordained.

         Here’s a take for you: Messi’s a gimmick, a gimmicky player. But I mean this as a term of approbation! Is it time for some more literary theory? It is. It is time for more literary theory. In her book Theory of the Gimmick, Sianne Ngai—to vastly reduce a complex and intricate argument—ties our feelings about gimmicks in works of art to our feelings about labor and value. It’s because gimmicks feel like shortcuts, in the same way that cliches or sentimental tropes make claims on pathos without, as we say, earning it, that we dislike them—we feel cheated, like we came to this work of art to experience the result of an artist’s long, laborious work, but what we got instead was something easier and cheaper—as if we ordered our art from Wish. (Of course, the notion that art must be the product of protracted, agonizing labor is itself an ideological construction, and it’s pretty clearly related to the favorite phrase of the Worst Guy You Know: How is that art? I could do that. The implication being that artists ought to possess and perform not only genius but tireless work.)

         As I laid out in an earlier letter, I have such affinity for players who work hard, whose primarily contribution to the team’s play is fitness and ground covered—the so-called engine-room players. And one way some fans distinguish Messi and Ronaldo, their personal forms of excellence, is along similar lines: Ronaldo is sculpted, machinelike, efficient, relentless—whereas Messi is elegant, aesthetic, unconscious, natural. Like all binary constructions, this one is reductive, but there is some truth in the observation that so much of Messi’s appeal is his apparent effortlessness, his ability to turn a physical sport that demands world-class levels of cardiovascular fitness into something like painting—his ability, in other words, to make the question of the sport not how much can my body handle? but instead what, right now, would be the perfect thing? Flaubert, it’s said, was obsessed with the mot juste, the word that fit a situation exactly. Messi we could call an artist of the mot effet, the perfect action or effect. (I don’t speak French, so please don’t come for me, Francophiles—come for Google translate and the American public school system.) And this is so attractive in part because it fits well into our other dominant cultural narrative about artists: that they’re inhuman cosmic geniuses whose experience of the world sits literally on a different plane.

         But there’s also something utopian in Messi’s lack of labor. In fact it’s precisely his lack of labor, his ability to embody, to perform and invoke, a kind of laborless play. Too much is made in popular culture, I think of Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of the flow state, which does identify a real phenomenological experience but which is too often invoked to describe any situation of changed time or mindlessness. In this case, though, maybe there’s something to it, because the sense of being-out-of-time is one thing that, to me, marks the difference between labor and play. Of course there are economic and political differences that, in the grand scheme, are more important. But work doesn’t feel like play, nor play like work, what Messi points to just by walking around the field is the possibility of rigorous, robust, aesthetically gorgeous play that has only the lightest, most tenuous attachment to the exhausting kind of labor we often turn to sports and other kinds of art to escape. That is, Messi suggests what’s possible on the outer edge of things, much in the same way that any really visionary art does, art that exists on the very limit of what the form considers possible. That is, a new way of being, in this case a kind of absolute play, a play of pure immanence, of a relationship to space not captured by phrases like covering ground or tearing across the grass but instead words like floating, spanning, and wandering. To wander when everyone else is running is maybe to find what Michel de Certeau calls a “tactic” of soccer, an everyday method or approach that falls outside the purview of “official” and dominant “strategies.” Of course, one has to be Messi to actually do this, to achieve the realization of the possibility. But we can still move in the direction he points, however slowly.

         My letter, too, will be short today—I’m on deadline for a couple of other writing projects. But it’s worth thinking about whether writing is another activity, another space, where this kind of thing is possible. Writing doesn’t always feel labored to me, although it does always feel like labor. Finding a way to split labor from laboriousness—again, not politically, not in its definition re: wages and alienation, but in texture and feeling.

         This just in: Germany draws with Spain 1-1 and so is still alive. A great goal from Füllkrug, the possessor of a great story: in the second division last year, now leading the Bundesliga in goals.

         Talk soon!

         All my best,

         Ryan

Letter Seven | 11/26 | Russ

East London 

Dear Lack, 

What a joy it was to read your most recent letter; I have just now finished a second pass. As I sit here trying to collect my thoughts, let’s talk about the US/England match.

I don’t know if there is a fanbase more fickle than England’s. In the aftermath of the England/Iran match—a dominant England display, 6-2—clips of England supporters in pubs across the country popped up online. Geysers of lager erupted and choruses sang: ENGLAND! IT’S COMING HOME! 

Contrast this with the reaction to the 0-0 draw with the United States. This morning, my friend Mia (referred to mostly as Randall) shared this piece from The Guardian with me. The best quote from the article is the following:

“In reality this was 70 minutes of cold footballing custard, jetlag-ball, football played by a man struggling to escape from his sleeping bag…At times in the first half, as England ambled vaguely, it felt like we were watching a kind of performance protest, an England team standing bravely against the basic idea of this World Cup as an entertainment product.”

The cynicism. The despondence. The rehearsed misery. Hilarious.

Like you, I thought the match was marvelously entertaining, and it irritates me to no end when people consider 0-0 draws boring. I wonder if this is a consequence of the “highlight reel”? There is a seemingly endless amount of soccer to watch (satirized quite brilliantly in this skit by comedian David Mitchell), which, I think, speaks to the issue of “unlimited content” that I mentioned in my previous letter. Now, I reckon few outside of Germany have the time or desire to stream a second division Bundesliga match (ha!), but even for those interested in soccer beyond their favorite club there exists a problem. One can never watch all the soccer one wants. So—the solution becomes the highlight reel, the fragments considered the most important: red cards, saves, and (most of all!) goals. 

For fans, the highlight reel isn’t a bad thing. I frequently go to YouTube or some other site to watch a condensed version of a match I’m interested in. But I wonder whether match highlights have conditioned people to believe that the lack of “action” and “excitement” makes a match boring or not worth watching. Or maybe it has to do with a lack of attention. Barcelona, a spectacularly dominant team when we became interested in soccer, are mostly remembered as the club that platformed Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest player ever in men’s soccer. How easy it is to find compilations of his genius. But those compilations often don’t show the integral work of players like Sergio Busquets, whose presence and control in the midfield contributed to Messi’s genius. There are so many valuable moments in a game of soccer. Put simply, a nil-nil draw can be thrilling. Last night’s match certainly was.

Now I may just discredit everything I just ranted about, but I want to take some time to write about Brazilian forward Richarlison’s bicycle kick against Serbia. It was the type of goal that only superlatives can describe: the most breath-taking, absolutely poetic, exceedingly awe-inspiring. What must be going through a player’s mind in the split seconds before they attempt something so outlandish? Is it instinctual?

Relatedly—you write about your history of playing soccer so beautifully. If the foundations of your game consist of running and effort, then the foundations of mine consist of luck and, yes, instinct. What do I mean by this? A recent example: in my final season for Bad Lads we had a rematch against a team called River Place. Late in the first half we were down 1-0, and, frankly, fortunate that the deficit was only a single goal. River Place had possession and were passing the ball at the back. The center-back dropped the ball to their keeper, and I stepped up to press. As the keeper wound up, I jumped and stuck out one of my abnormally large calves. The ball smacked my calf, spun in the air, bounced just short of the goal-line, wound towards the post, hit the post, and then finally crossed the line. Match tied, 1-1. (We lost the match 4-1.)

Immediately after the goal, I remember, Nate ran towards me and yelled, “Another bullshit goal!” God, he’s so right. I scored around 20 goals for Bad Lads. I figure around half were a result of being in the right place at the right time. Ricochets off of thighs, calves, knees: absolutely lethal in the 6-yard box. Unconscious instinct.

In all seriousness, I, like you, have also struggled with my confidence on the pitch. There have been several times when I’ve walked away from a match and thought, What am I doing out here? It’s amazing how just one poor touch on the ball or one misplaced pass can have such an emotional effect. However, as you mention in your previous letter, we are both almost thirty. I’ve managed to reduce how much I criticize myself. I still care, of course, but a poor performance doesn’t ruin my day like it used to. If I ever play for Bad Lads again I’m sure I could contribute some more bullshit goals. Although by then we might be in the Over 30 division.

Apologies for the shorter letter. There’s definitely more I’d like to say, but I have to go to Hams. The Springboks are playing England in their last match of the year, and hopefully we can give English fans something else to be disappointed about.

I’ll be back in Cape Town tomorrow.

Keep well,

Russ

Letter Six | 11/25 | Ryan

Berkeley

Dear Russ,

The US/England match has just ended, and I’m sitting down to write with the huge satisfaction offered by a 0-0 draw that felt as exciting as any barnburner. If there’s any better evidence for the fact that scoring, or even something as poorly defined as “excitement,” isn’t the same thing as quality or appeal of sports, I haven’t found it yet. There’s nothing like a really good nil-nil.

         I’m not unfamiliar with your feelings about the state of mainstream American cinema, but I think you’re right to point out again the way nostalgia operates as a kind of formal and emotional readymade—a shortcut, like stock footage. I think sometimes when there’s Online Discourse about nostalgia and the slew of reboots and revisitations pumped out by Hollywood and Netflix alike (have we collectively decided on the locative noun for streaming services? Hollywood is to the film industry as what is to streaming?) folks confuse nostalgia for history—as if any attempt at historical fiction or the reanimation of an archetype or story or (god) intellectual property counts as nostalgia. But I think we should also keep in mind that nostalgia is a certain orientation towards history. As you say, nostalgia “feeds into the conservative ideology that traditional values and a return to former glory are the answers to societal decay.” And what’s more, it also invents the past even as it appeals to it as a solid, collectively accessible object. Nostalgia doesn’t only frame and shade the past—it creates a certain past for certain purposes. This is the really tricky thing about nostalgia for me: it’s actually obsessed with the future, it’s a project of creating the future, by way of manifesting a past. It’s like alternate history generating itself in real time; it shunts us off into a parallel spacetime. Conservatism is also always utopian, in its own way, even though it disavows its own futurity in pretty insidious ways.

         So the question becomes how we can interact with history in politically (and aesthetically!) useful and interesting ways. Chris Bachelder’s novel U.S.! does this, I think, in the way it carries forward the literary-political work it associates with Upton Sinclair by literally translocating Sinclair to the present day. Of course, some critics would say that we can only ever approach history ideologically, with the baggage of our moment and its own political-cultural contradictions. And maybe that’s true, but the goal isn’t to strip away ourselves until only HISTORY as such remains. It’s to recognize that, in a Heisenbergian way, we rearrange and reshape history whenever we dredge it up, and so we can exert at least a little control over what kind of history we want to handle, and towards what ends.

         This is true in the context of soccer, too. What parts of the sport and our particular allegiances do we carry forward? There are all kinds of stories we can tell, and in our cases, because we are relatively young and came of age in a context of globalization, of sportwashing and Branding™, our stories were never going to be unadulterated or “authentic,” a word I despise. My attachment to Arsenal began, yes, with you and Nate in familiar adolescent ways, but it also began with FIFA, the videogame, the marketed object produced even then I’m sure under conditions of exploitative crunch. On one hand, what could be more postmodern, more mediated, more despicable, than an attachment to a club that began with an ersatz electronic simulation? I didn’t grow up in North London; I didn’t watch Arsenal in the days of Liam Brady or Ian Wright or Rocky Rocastle or even Henry and Bergkamp. On the other hand, does the displacement of authenticity as the vouchsafing of proper, worthwhile attachment mark a good thing, the end of the Benjaminian aura of locality? It doesn’t feel any different to me, watching Arsenal play, because I began with a virtual goal scored by Robin van Persie rather than a day at Highbury of the kind Nick Hornby describes in Fever Pitch. But, of course, there’s no way I could know—I have nothing, no alternative to compare it to. And we do, after all, feel something like the loss of (or a nostalgia for!) local authenticity when we see the Timbers explode into mainstream relevance, when sitting in the Timbers Army no longer feels like a subculture but instead, like a Blazers game or college football Saturday, something for bros to do while they drink. I don’t know.

         A different kind of negative nostalgia appears for me sometimes when I think about my history playing the sport. Here I really want to address the very good questions you asked me in the last letter. What I mean by negative nostalgia is the complex feeling of longing and regret when I think about, for example, the first couple of seasons I played with you and Nate and everyone else on Bad Lads. When I first joined, I’d been playing soccer for five or six years—four spent in casual weekly games as an undergrad, and then two more during my MA when I played three or four times a week. I was still so raw, as they say: underdeveloped technically and tactically, and already cognizant of concrete ceiling on my ability that forms whenever you don’t play a particular sport growing up. You can improve, but you can’t ever really make up for lost time. The liquidity that’s possible when you grow into your body and your mind, and also into the sport, at the same time—its window is small and unidirectional.

         And so looking back on that time now, there’re two competing but coeval feelings. I remember the literal act of playing with y’all so fondly, and I recognize too that I couldn’t be even the player I am now—which is to say, still a player of severe limitations—without that experience. At the same time, I think about how I played then (in a literal sense, the style and rhythm and ergonomics of it) with something like shame, the complex kind of shame that isn’t regret, really, but a recognition of the strange, alien distance between who you were and who you are. It’s hard not to ask, what could I do then if I were the person I am now? But of course this is a nonsensical question, paradoxical, without real meaning—but that’s in part why it’s also a question with so much appeal.

         The internet loves to talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect, the pop-psych concept whereby someone really ignorant of a skill or topic might be too ignorant to realize how ignorant they are. I think when I first began playing on Bad Lads with you all, on a team for the first time, I was just crossing that threshold, just learning to limn my own limitations. I was thrilled to blend in, to look like I belonged—I went out to play fullback with the idea that, out of possession, I would defend by running, and in possession I would spend as little time as possible with the ball. I made it a kind of joke, my limitations, sometimes by literalizing them, by pointing out that when I had the ball I pretty much just ran the touchline, vertical up and downs. But of course also I loved the sport, and loved playing with you all, and also so much of my identity had become wrapped up in it—I had already become a diehard, the kind of fan who would stream a second-division Bundesliga match in the morning if nothing else was on—that it felt embarrassing if I made a mistake, because it feels embarrassing when your passion for something and your ability to do it are misaligned, asymmetrical.

         This is the negative nostalgia I’m trying to describe: not negative in the sense of detriment or injury, but negative in the sense of negation, of complex paradox, of Keats’s negative capability, the juxtaposition of two antipodal positions or feelings or concepts in your mind at once. It feels like my relationship to playing is still significantly self-contradictory: I play so much these days, four or five or six times a week, and although I feel tackles and collisions in ways I once did not, I’m still mobile. I think, really, I’m probably in the best shape of my life. And something has changed for me, playing. Moving from fullback into the midfield for Bad Lads, as insignificant as that seems in pretty much any context bigger than my own head, felt like an affirmation for me. I can, at the men’s-recreational level here in the Bay, control the ball and turn and play a pass and occasionally wriggle out of tight spaces. I can still run the channels. I take corners and free kicks now.

         But I know two things. One, I’m twenty-nine, and even though I’ve bought myself a few more years, things have to peak and decline eventually, and probably soon. Two, I still feel that emotional tug, tied somewhere deep inside me at the convergence of my attachment to the sport and my self-identity and the particular matrix of hopes and anxieties I’ve cultivated over my life, that reminds me that my mood is still often significantly dependent on how I play. I’m not sure if I’ll ever have a casual relationship with soccer, with playing the game. I am, for better and worse, someone who forms strong and intense attachments, and it’s very easy for me to mingle my sense of self with external objects and activities. Part of really getting older, I think, isn’t the blunting or erasing of these intensities—it’s recognizing these intensities as somehow intrinsic to me, occasionally sharp or painful but also useful and important as the form and material of the relationships I form with the world and the people in it.

         And so—maybe it’s silly, even slightly sad, to be twenty-nine and feel a little dim glow of joy when, for example, I have to miss a game and teammates say, well, that’s not good, we need you. But recognizing your own silliness is probably a decent and healthy thing to do, and it could be worse.

         I could’ve purchased Twitter.

         Looking forward to talking about the USA game. I hope you’re enjoying East London!

         All my best,

         Ryan

Letter Five | 11/24 | Russ

East London

Dear Lack, 

It is just past lunchtime and I am in East London, the city where I was born and spent the first twelve years of my life. After clearing security at the Cape Town International Airport, I wandered around the terminal trying to kill some time. I entered Exclusive Books, South Africa’s main corporate bookseller—it’s very similar to Barnes & Noble—and browsed, as one does. I was hoping to find either a copy of Ruth Ozeki’s newest novel The Book of Form and Emptiness or the new George Saunders collection, but, sadly, neither were in stock. What was very much in stock, however, was Matthew Perry’s memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. Surrounding the floor-to-ceiling display (imagine, like, 50 Matthew Perrys looking at you, sizing you up) were various pieces of Friends merch: T-shirts, planners, belt bags, stationary, hats. Our society’s need to capitalize on everything that has ever made us feel good is forever ongoing.

But what does surprise me is how popular Friends is with teens today. The show ended in 2004, and some of my students weren’t even born when South Africa hosted the World Cup in 2010 (let that sink in for a second), and yet they’re avid fans, or claim to be. I regularly see them wearing Friends merch. This really makes me wonder: can a monocultural thing like Friends ever exist again? Will teens in, let’s say, 20 years wear Stranger Things merch? Possibly. But Stranger Things is already nostalgic for itself, nostalgic for its own nostalgia.

As opposed to the moment when Friends was at the height of its popularity, what we see today is the combination of unlimited content but in genre, style, form. We have lots of stuff but very little of it feels new. Hence the popularity of nostalgia as a mode: Stranger Things, The Crown, Top Gun: Maverick. Nostalgia is the crutch on which popular media seems increasingly to lean. This, of course, feeds into the conservative ideology that traditional values and a return to former glory are the answers to societal decay. But what the popularity of nostalgia really highlights is the great dissatisfaction and sadness people feel with the present state of the world. It’s also very easy and cost-effective for companies to recycle old intellectual properties, but that’s maybe something I’ll talk about later.

That’s right Matthew Perrys, you set me off.

As my plane, departing, rose through the clouds, I looked down and saw the Atlantic, a sheet rippling in the wind. You know I dislike flying very much. And, despite my best efforts to remind myself about the structural integrity of planes, the statistics surrounding crashes, and how pilots can very easily avoid turbulence, at the first jolt my stomach sinks, my hands grip the armrest, and I close my eyes, trying desperately to focus on anything but my own mortality (I also realized that continuing with White Noise, a novel that deals very much with the theme of death, was not the best in-flight reading material). 

And so—I thought about the World Cup. 

I managed to watch all of the Morocco/Croatia match. It started at noon, and kick-off aligned exactly with the middle of the school day. Because of this, teaching proved impossible. And, because we are now two weeks away from the long summer break, I decided to have the stream on in the background while students worked on their end of term research project. It was a thrilling match. Both Morocco and Croatia showed such finesse and guile, and there were several times when I stood up (drawing the attention of the class, who expected me to say something) because a dangerous ball was played into the box. Despite finishing 0-0, it was one of the most exciting matches of the tournament.

Sadly, I was unable to watch Japan/Germany, which is disappointing because of the story I’m about to tell you. Since yesterday was the last school day of the week—as an “American” school we get Thanksgiving off even in South Africa—and the World Cup is in full swing, the school decided to make yesterday a kind of spirit day. Students were encouraged to wear jerseys that represented their favorite team in the tournament. I wore the only international soccer jersey with me: Japan’s, from a couple of years ago. Over the course of the day, several students approached me and asked why I was supporting Japan. Each time, I said something to the effect of: I like the way the team plays. I had a wonderful time when I visited Japan. I think the jersey looks cool. All of which is true. But at the end of the day one of my 8th grade students, wearing a Bayern Munich jersey, approached me and took it a little further. He told me that if Japan somehow managed to beat Germany that he would complete an extra piece of writing, but that it would be written entirely in Japanese. However, if Germany beat Japan, I would have to do the same for him in German. I agreed. 

The reason I was unable to watch the match was because I was coaching. It was our practice, and we’ve come a long way since our 7-4 defeat to begin the season (this doesn’t sound so bad, except for the fact that I coach basketball). The end of practice coincided with half-time. Germany were up 1-0 after Ilkay Gündoğan scored from the penalty spot. The student with whom I made the bet came up to me and told me he was looking forward to my letter. You will understand my smug satisfaction at the final score: 2-1 for Japan, who managed to score two goals in the second half. I look forward to that extra piece of writing. 

I was unable to watch either the Spain/Costa Rica or Belgium/Canada match closely because I was hosting a Friendsgiving party. The matches were on in the background, so I was saw two of Spain’s seven goals, but as you can imagine my attention was on other things. From what I could gather: the young Spanish squad are very good, Costa Rica struggled immensely, Canada were the better side in their match, Belgium underperformed and were fortunate to get three points. 

As for the Friendsgiving—what a lovely celebration. I wish you could’ve been there. How lucky I am to have hosted an event for fifteen people, none of whom I knew five months ago. I hope, whatever it is you’re doing, that you at least have plenty of leftover turkey for your sandwiches. 

I want to end this entry by talking about something you mentioned in your last letter. To quote: “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 the former.” I couldn’t agree more. 

During this trip to East London, I have no doubt that I’ll visit the Hamilton Sports Club, known as “Hams” to members and rivals. Hams is a unique building. The main entrance leads to a ballroom that is still used for wedding receptions and other “events,” although I’m never quite sure what they are. The ballroom is connected to a bar that serves as the club’s hub. There are four floor-to-ceiling fridges  stocked with beer, cider, wine, and mixers. To the left of the fridges are the bottles of vodka, whiskey, gin, and brandy. Although there are a few tables and chairs inside the bar, most of the members sit outside on one of the twenty-odd wooden picnic tables. From there, the facilities that make Hams a sports club come into view: the two rugby/soccer fields, the cricket nets, the bowling greens, and the tennis courts. 

When I arrive with my grandfather, I’ll make the rounds, say hello to every member in attendance, listen once again as my grandfather introduces his grandson “from America.” And then the stories will begin. I’ve heard them so many times before, but they still make me smile. The details often change, the names of the people involved are never consistent, but I know when to laugh, and really the stories are genuinely funny. There was the time my grandmother pulled into the club with her Mini Cooper, didn’t pump the breaks quite enough, and crashed into the fence surrounding the tennis court. Or the time my grandfather, well into his fifties, played in a cricket match and dove to his right, eyes focused on his outstretched right hand, ready to make a “brilliant” catch, only to have the ball embed itself in his left hand, which was facing the other direction. Still counts.

More than anything, the stories of Hams are a constant reminder of my father’s childhood: when amateurism was sport culture and even those who played for the provincial team could still be counted on to grab a beer at the club. The bonding possible when playing sports for their own sake is something I always longed for. But for you and me, who grew up in the era of professionalization, an era where kids are oftentimes conditioned to play a single sport with the hopes of some future financial gain, this type of experience seemed like an impossibility.

But then I think of Bad Lads A.C., the amateur club we were both lucky enough to play for. At the end of your last letter you asked me what I’d like you to spend time writing about. I have two ideas, the first being your experience playing for Bad Lads and/or your current team. The second is about the upcoming South Korea/Uruguay match and how your support of the South Korean team ties to your own identity. No matter what, please do remember that I have financial stakes in the match. I’m sure you’ll agree that the potential monetary gain I stand to achieve from the outcome of Uruguay’s performance in the tournament is the most important thing about our shared World Cup experience. 

 I plan on writing about Bad Lads next time. Missing you.

Happy Thanksgiving, 

Russ

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  

Letter Three | 11/22 | Russ

Cape Town

Dear Lack,

I’m laughing. On Sunday evening I went to a restaurant called Peddlars in Constantia, a suburb of Cape Town. It’s a family-friendly bistro with a bar at the center: children kitted with colorful headphones and iPads next to a table of six slamming Jägerbombs. I watched the Ecuador/Qatar match with a colleague named Brian who recently moved to Cape Town after teaching in Ecuador for four years.

The game began. Two and half minutes elapsed. The Qatari goalkeeper made a complete mess of a punch. Enner Valencia scored. Brian and I erupted in cheer and applause. The referee waved off the goal. The broadcast showed the replay. Valencia’s kneecap was caught offside. Oh man, Lack is going to have some things to say! I thought. 

As I write this on the second day of the tournament, I have watched three of the four matches. Qatar were abysmal. Aside from an attempted header at the end of the first half, Qatar showed no sign of looking dangerous. The thing I found most amusing the entire night from a Qatar perspective was a brief shot of their fans (all men?) replicating Iceland’s Viking Thunder Clap.

Ecuador on the other hand played better than I expected. They fashioned a collective, workhorse style of soccer that I think you’d appreciate. I also like teams that celebrate together. After Valencia’s second goal in the 31st minute, a header into the bottom left corner, the whole team made a circle, dropped to their knees, and raised their hands to the heavens.

The Netherlands/Senegal match was physical and sloppy. Senegal, I think, were unlucky to lose 2-0. They were easily the more dynamic team in the second half and created the match’s few moments of excitement. I specifically remember an absolute rip of a volley from a Senegalese player that the Dutch goalkeeper managed to parry away. My thoughts and prayers go out to that man’s wrists.

The Netherlands took their whole style of play from center-back Virgil van Dijk: 20% headers, 80% being a brick wall. And in the 84th minute after a costly mistimed punch from the Senegalese goalkeeper, substitute forward Cody Gakpo directed a glancing header goalward: 1-0. The Netherlands then simply saw the match out until a late counter nine minutes into added time. 2-0, full time.

I’m curious to hear what listening to USA/Wales’ 1-1 draw on the picket line was like. Rather than very good or very bad, did your Welsh friend end up having a very fine day? Some brief thoughts about the match: USA were the dominant team in the first half but couldn’t put the game away when they needed to; Tim Weah had a slick finish to score the USA’s lone goal; Wales played well enough in the second to deserve a draw. Moving on.

I am inclined to begin every letter from here on out with an excerpt from Sally Rooney.* Much like you, I am a fan (let’s be real: I would read a collection of Rooney’s grocery lists). Normal People recounts the ebbs and flows of a relationship between two young Irish folks as they enter early adulthood. But what captivated me (and many others, I venture) were Rooney’s thoughts on vulnerability, mental health, life under capitalism, and purpose.

In the opening of your last letter you touched upon the necessity of language to make emotional expression possible. You are spot-on in your connection between this idea and our own lives (for the record, you are, in my view, a very nice player). To this day there is something ineffable about finding something else that allows me to express how I feel. This, of course, most often comes by way of reading, through language. Something clicks. The weight of those feelings is released. They’re still there, but they exist outside of the body. I can’t explain it, but hopefully you understand a little of what I’m trying to say.

The most recent example of the click came after I finished Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. The core of the text is summarized by the following quote attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”(You, of course, know this already. After all, you were the one to recommend Fisher to me. But here is as good a place as any to spread Fisher’s work.) I’ve been thinking a lot about this phrase over the past few days as FIFA and Qatar continue to be scrutinized by fans and media. People are rightfully outraged by FIFA’s corruption and greed, by Qatar’s human-rights abuses. However, what irritates me greatly is people’s apparent surprise at this occurring at all. Did they not think that similar injustices happened in previous World Cups? Moreover, what can be done to ensure that such things don’t happen again?

Thus: It is easier to imagine the end of the World Cup than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

This is not intended to be profound. Rather, it is meant to ask people to think less—or not only—about criticizing FIFA and Qatar and instead start thinking about the larger issues that made the situation possible in the first place.

So—what can be done? I’m afraid I’m a little too cynical to believe that fans will simply stop watching the World Cup. Those in power have too much money and influence and can too easily sportswash the tournament. FIFA, of course, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Why wouldn’t they? It makes perfect sense that FIFA president Gianni Infantino would come out to implore supporters to focus on the matches and “not allow football to be dragged into ideological or political battle that exists.” Which is a ludicrous thing to say.

What about the players? I deliberately avoided discussing the England/Iran match until now because I think it remains the most compelling match of the tournament so far. Not because of the 6-2 scoreline, but because of politics.

On the one side you have the Iranian team taking a political stand against the country’s leadership by refusing to sing the national anthem before the match. This act of solidarity with the anti-government protesters back home, whose outrage at the Iranian government’s use of their “morality police” to suppress women—often violently, as in the recent case of the tragic death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, killed for noncompiance with the country’s head-covering rules—is obviously political.

On the other side you have England, a nation where soccer is intrinsically linked to the working-class. And, as the country faces an energy crisis, it is the working-class who will suffer while the Tory government shrugs. I was happy to see Marcus Rashford get on the scoresheet. After the government made the callous decision to not extend a free-school-meals program during the height of COVID, Rashford launched a campaign to “end child hunger” in the UK (the country with the sixth-highest GDP in the world). His work placed enough public pressure on the government to see it enact a £120 million food fund.

I would never expect the players to be the ones to take on FIFA and the wrath of global capitalism. But reading about players like German left back Paul Breitner, who pulled out of the 1978 World Cup four years after winning the tournament in 1974 because he morally objected to the Argentinian military junta, under whose leadership tens of thousands were killed, or Brazilian midfielder and medical doctor Sócrates who co-founded the Corinthians Democracy movement in opposition to the military government—it does raise a little bit of hope. 

I have gone on long enough. 

I’ll leave you with this: there is a great piece by former Manchester United striker Eric Cantona that he wrote for The Players Tribune in 2018. In it, he details his family’s legacy as escapees from Franco’s regime, as immigrants in flight from poverty. On the back of these personal stories he shares the following:

“We are living through times of widespread poverty, war, and immigration…Football is one of life’s great teachers. It is one of life’s great inspirations. But the current business model of football ignores so much of the world…Football should be for the people. This does not have to be a utopian idea.”

That, my friend, is language that clicks.

Until next time,

Russ

 *I won’t begin each letter with an excerpt by Sally Rooney. Zach would roast me.

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

Letter One | 11/20 | Russ

Cape Town

Dear Lack,

It’s hard for me to imagine beginning this first letter without turning it into a saccharine piece of remembrance and gratitude. So—please be patient with me.

When we began the first iteration of this project in 2018, I remember feeling self-conscious. Am I really going to put my voice out into the world? What if my writing is bad? What if I don’t have the language to express how I feel? These questions—a few among many—I asked myself constantly, caught in the downward spiral of self-doubt. Thankfully, I had you to pull me out. 

You reminded me that no thought in my head was ever going to look as good on paper, and that this is true for all writers. You used an analogy: to create a house you must first gather some bricks (I use this same analogy every year with my students when they struggle with their own writing). In a sense, you told me to get over myself. And I did.

What we created four and half years ago remains the most meaningful creative project of my life. It was the perfect amalgamation of everything I cared about: reading, writing, soccer, and stimulating conversation with a close friend. Now, as I near the end of my 20s, my relationship with each of these passions has changed. I find myself writing more, although not lots more. I find myself reading more and with greater breadth. Currently, I’m reading Don DeLillo’s White Noise in anticipation for the upcoming Noah Baumbach adaptation. I was also inspired to pick it up after stumbling upon a review by Ryan Napier, who says the novel “remains one of our most perceptive visions of contemporary America and the desperate illusions of consumer society,” which is fitting, given the state of global soccer. 

We, of course, would not be embarking on a second run of this project were it not for our shared love of the sport. But it’s become much harder to remain interested as a spectator when everything seems to be influenced not by narrative or beautiful play, but by financial growth and branding. In 2022, FC Barcelona play home matches at the Spotify Camp Nou and the professional league for men’s club soccer in France is called Ligue 1 Uber Eats. Over just the last four years: the infamous proposal for a European Super League, the invasion of cryptocurrency, the very recent NWSL abuse scandal, and the wild inflation of ticket prices. I find this all terribly depressing.

The Men’s World Cup in Qatar starts tomorrow, as I write this—today, as you read it. I should be excited, but I’m not. Rather than feeling energized by the prospect—some of the best teams in the world competing in my most beloved sport— I feel fatigued. We have known for years that this World Cup has a sickening human cost even more obvious and brutal than is typical. Why has the beautiful game become so ugly?

Despite this lassitude, I do feel an even greater excitement towards this project than I did in 2018. Maybe it has to do with geographic distance. Four and half years ago we were both living in Portland, where we could see each other regularly, watch World Cup matches together. Now you’re in Berkeley and I’m in Cape Town, South Africa. Sharing our feelings and thoughts, whether through conversation or writing, is more challenging given the lag across multiple time zones. But, to me, this makes it much more special. Maybe some kind of romance and beauty can come out of this World Cup, after all. 

Thank you again, my friend. I can’t tell you how much you and this project mean to me. 

Until the next letter,

Russ

P.S.—I asked Nate to put a $10 bet on Uruguay to win the tournament. At the very least it’ll be something interesting for us to follow as the tournament progresses. Do you think they have a chance?