Every Four Years, This Consumes the World

This is the first year in a long time where I've found myself being pretty woefully negligent with following club level football in Europe. A couple solid reasons (excuses) can account for this. I no longer have television, so I couldn't watch the matches if I wanted. I've tried the whole getting up ungodly early on Saturdays and Sundays and heading to the few bars and burrito joints that feature about five or six televisions showing matches from all across the world, but for some reason the last place I'm in the mood to be at that hour on the weekends is in either of those places when I could instead read in bed with a cup of warm tea. Liverpool, the English club I normally follow, has suffered through a pretty ungainly year, failing to even make the UEFA Cup for next year. Additionally, finding Spain's La Liga matches on television is plain arduous work, as in scour the Spanish and Italian speaking enclaves (and the enclaves within enclaves, like honeycombs inside of honeycombs) and trying to find which one in particular shows Barcelona's matches and then struggle and squeeze my way into a seat, not a chair, but a spot on the floor to sit, as in this is San Francisco and that's a hell of a lot of work to watch a game, and given that I had my trust placed firmly on the shoulders of Leo Messi to carry Barcelona all the way to the end, which he did, I wasn't extremely desperate to watch. I haven't been totally absent, as in I've been keeping up with scores and developments, but I haven't been as ardent as in years past. In a lot of ways this has good thing. My early morning weekend focus was thus unchained and allowed to shift elsewhere. Nobody ever really needs to follow sports as closely as they allow themselves.

Now, however, with the kickoff for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa a diminishing and anticipatory one (one!) day away, it's time to get back in gear. If there's any time undeniably appropriate for football fanaticism, it's the World Cup, a time in which the entire revolving, three-quarks-away-from-losing-its-collective-mind globe in some cases literally shuts down to watch its darling. Maybe the Euros could rival the World Cup, whose occurrence comes in the halfway point between each World Cup serves as but an appetizer, but the fervency is a tad watered-down. Despite all Americentric delusions, this is, as far as the rest of the world is concerned (and that's a boatload of intelligent people), the time when the world's rightfully most popular and important and all-embodying sport takes center stage for a month and is just fucking supreme. A month of athletic jazz. A month of elegance and class, and no, not that the players involved are rigid symbols of either of those two things, but the game itself: watching football is watching an elegant and classy performance. Even America experiences a tiny little peak in its y-axis of football spectatorship during this period, and why not? No other sport has as much nationalistic pride caught up and ensnared in its spikes, trampling up and down a wide open pitch. Check out the stands, the banners and the gonfalons threading trembling quilts across the mezzanines. Listen to the songs' roar before match play. It's an arrantly bewildering experience. For one month, what is globally recognized as the greatest sport on earth assumes its merited place. And football is just that, in every possible way, a game of physics, geometry, and philosophy: when to push, where to push, who to push, when to pull back, attacks and defense, the game an amoebic mucilaginous creature that changes with every decision a team, even a player makes. This is a tactician's dream, chess with living, moving, dynamic people. I will state without reproach: if a person does not enjoy football that is a deficiency on their part, not football's. There is something lacking inside of you, not the sport, something fundamentally absent.

Spain's Fernando Torres and David Villa doing what will, I hope, be a common occurrence: celebrating sensational goals.

As always, my allegiance goes to Spain, who will kick things off against Switzerland on the 16th. Rebounding from a few injuries some of their key figures suffered during club play, it should be interesting to see what they can pull off. The good news is Torres, Iniesta, and Fabregas are all three (putatively) healthy and fit. For a month my Europhilia is vindicated. With that: ¡Viva la Furia Roja!¹

The charge remains: it's all still children's games. Just damned good ones.












1. There was what may or may not border on an unhealthy and quite realistically offensive amount of hyperbole present in the previous paragraphs. My own personal, un-vulcan exuberance got the best of me. I don't apologize.

The End of Something Abominable

I'm talking about football. Or what the Americans roguishly call football. For twenty some odd weeks those us for whom football is at the very least a bore and at the very most an injurious affront must endure what manifests into a monster-show of hysteria driven by violence and latent sexual appetite satisfied through this violence, a-few-strips-of-fabric-shy-of-being-nude cheerleaders to further wet that appetite, overpriced (and awful) beer, and slow, lurching entertainment mixed with mass consumer marketing trying to pass as athletics. The question, "did you see the game?" becomes so ubiquitous that the words are spoken almost as a nervous tic instead of genuine interest. Cashiers at corner stores linger when ringing you up, their eyes fastened to the upper corner of the ceiling, where a television hangs like something dead and alive the same time. People, normally once active, hole themselves inside for paralyzing blocks of hours at a time to watch a sixty minute game that somehow winds up taking nearly three hours. And then after one final orgiastic hurrah -- it ends. How did Eliot put it? Not with a bang but a whimper? He could have said just as much about the American football season and been equally as spot-on.

I've got around the next six or seven months to recuperate in the blissful silence returned to me while footballs spends its half-year hibernation hungover and tending to its chronic bruises. Baseball, while I harbor just as much disinterest in the sport, doesn't clatter and roar with the same kind of fervor as football. Because it's spread out. Football is acute and winnowed down to only a few months of drunken, body-painting, jersey-wearing, inclusive-we-speaking intensity. Hell resurfaces in October when the end of baseball and the beginning of football converge to bear a freakish spawn of unsettling American boredom and misdirected focus. Until then, I'll be enjoying myself quite wholesomely. 

A Plea

Dear world,

Please shut the fuck up about Tiger Woods and what may or may not be his infidelities. I don't - and no one should - care. 

There's something sick and perverse intrinsic to our culture that loves, desires, salivates and almost orgasms at the chance to publicly tear someone down, to take every skeleton in their closet and not only bring them out bone by individual bone but then kick those broken skeletons around and invite a team of forensic investigators to further comb the now empty closet for additional infractions. I don't know what it is; we love to see icons brought to pieces and the red-eyed fervor with which people demand it happen is sadistically similar to what I imagine witch-hunts in Salem and tribunal Inquisitions in Europe were like. O! How better off we'd be if we all focused on our own lives with the same amount of scrutinous eyeballing as we do the paramours of our bent voyeurism. 

The stranger thing about America is that Tiger will rise again and the adoration thrown at him well be magnified and multiplied compared to what it was. As quick as the culture is to send out opprobrious recriminations and dash their heroes to salt, they're even quicker to forgive, to welcome the fallen deity back into the pale spotlight they'd preferred him before. It's our modus operandi: the culture finds someone they love somewhere in the midst of pop stardom and catapults him or her from mere athlete or mere performer, turning them into a social and moral beacon, an icon, a symbol for the mythical and mostly nonexistent American Dream, a symbol for all things sterling and pure and righteous, and then as it's finally revealed that this individual isn't all that, that he or she is in fact a regular human being, or worse, a downright despicable person who just so happens to excel at a sport or have a simply breathtaking voice and a handiness when it comes to performances, the culture is then filled with roiling rage, resentment, indignation. They are, in their own minds, duped, cheated, lied to, the emperor not so much pantless but offensively criminal, a history of fraud and deception in addition to his total nakedness; but we are, as a society, complicit in the creation of this icon. We turn them into what they become. We create this plastic, deeply flawed image of them and once it's inexorably shattered, we're shaken. I often wonder if this is something innately American or a (sadly) human characteristic altogether. Perhaps this is how morality became established for early humans, through public judgment and denigration; the public wants to stone you for your actions, ergo your behavior and your attitude probably sucks and it would be a good idea to refrain from doing that again. 

And then what? We demand explanations. We demand to know what happened. Was a crime committed? No? What about the crime against us? Doesn't matter. Crime or no crime, there needs to be conferences, addresses made to the nation with the speaker equal parts shamed and emboldened, pretty apologetic letters ham-fistedly stuffed in the mailboxes of every household in America, those inside watching and reading along, their hands held amid whispers that "this too shall pass." The figure categorically owes the public, as has been stated in this particular instance, a precise and detailed testimonial of everything, right down to the bowl of cereal he had the morning of.  Apologies, looks of remorse, sorrow, incalculable shame and failure, assurances to improve, to become a better person, a better husband, to cut his nails more often, to drink more mineral water, to not drive so fast, to eat less meat (it makes us carnal!) to smile more, to be better, a better listener, a better thinker, a better father. He has to coddle the public as if their fragile psyche were at stake (it might be). 

But!

There's no need to worry.  Thanks to America's short term memory, crippling attention deficit disorder and constitutional fickleness, that failure and contrition needn't last forever; we wouldn't want it to anyhow! Where would be the fun in that (nobody likes a Debbie Downer or in this case a Timorous Tiger)? Instead, we ask that you rather speedily pick up your pieces, rebuild yourself and reformulate your image once again; rise back to the echelon we shouldn't have ever in good conscience thrust you before, but what the hell. We want, in addition to the tabloid-splattered and gossip-heavy sensationalist stories of your demise, the heroic feat of your phoenician ascension from the ruins. Because you are, after all, a man who makes millions of dollars for swinging a small club at an even smaller ball and why anyone would expect anything more from you or anyone being fed obscene amounts of money for doing one isolated task for entertainment's value is truly beyond me. The irony of this now standard cultural phenomena is that while we think it exposes the person in question, what's really exposed is us, the culture, our petty juvenility. 

1 out of 2

One horribly embarrassing American pastime down, one more to go. What do the last 60 games acccomplish that the first 100 and whatever didn't? It's like allowing Bowling to go on for 1,000 frames, an exercise in futility. Baseball in November is one of many signs that there is no god. 

Speaking of which, in a post-game interview Mark Teixeira, one of baseball's self-appointed preachers, thanked God and credited God for leading him to the right team, the Yankees, which means one of two things. Mark Teixiera's decision had absolutely nothing to do with the $180 million dollar contract presented to him by the Bronx Bombers' fulsome czars for swinging wooden bats at leather balls in tight polyester uniforms or the Christians' god is now blatantly peddling in US currency. Considering the value of the US dollar, that God might want to think about switching to the Euro or, even better, the Yen, as it continues to skyrocket. 

Just once I want to see some athlete, either in stone-faced sincerity or sheer sardonic ridiculousness, thank Odin the Wanderer and his wise beard from which all answers originate or Zeus and his sexy lightning bolts or Kutkh the Raven God of the Chukotka or some distant moon or lunar deity or the Algonquin's gitche manitou or Aphrodite, that little minx; or Quetzalcoatl, the feathered-serpent deity given to us by the Mayans, among many other important things they gave us, like calenders, astronomy and chocolate. Something with a little fucking imagination. Make up a new God, because you know in another thousand years or so these current ones will be resting on the shelf with the rest of antiquities' deities. I'd like to see some sign that somewhere in the midst of America's cluttered, superstitious mind a sense of humor and an halfway decent imagination still exist. As of yet I'm unconvinced. 

If Being American Were a Test, I'd Likely Fail

In many respects I'm probably a pisspoor American, at least insofar as how Americanism tends to be culturally measured by the majority of Americans, which doesn't bother me. I've come to terms with that and in most cases prefer it. But if there's any particular time of the year when I'm reminded most of my failure to score big on the American Barometric Scale it's right around now, when baseball season hits high gear and enters the playoffs and the American Football season is writhing from its hysterical inception throes, leaving everybody practically salivating in front of the screen and exalting about how great a time of year this is, while I reluctantly respond: perdón? 

Because baseball and football are not just boring for me, they're painfully exhausting. Watching either or both is a laborious chore. Even hearing about them is torturous. One can then imagine how difficult this makes things. Basketball, hockey, and whatever other sports Americans occupy themselves with don't matter so much because they don't consume the entire collective consciousness of the country at large the way these other narcotic-like games do. And that's basically what they're tantamount to, narcotics, amphetamines, a high that lasts just long enough to get people through the work week until the next game, at which point they'll get their fix one more time, juiced and ready to go off spandex, sweat, primal grunts, masochistic violence, rotgut beer, and repugnant food. 

In truth, that's all good and well. To each their own. I'm not going to disparage them (too much) for this proclivity of theirs. My main principle is to keep these two worlds, mine and theirs, from colliding. Football fans on Sundays or Mondays or, as the season progresses - I'm aware that the NFL network tries to start pumping out as many televised games as possible - even on Thursdays and perhaps even some-odd Tuesdays are not a joy to be around. So when I have  my Saturday or Sunday morning breakfast in one of the few local football (see Soccer) pubs disturbed by testosterone-addled wildebeests demanding that the station be switched to a real football station to watch the three hour pre-game buildup to the game, you can see where I might be irked. Worlds have collided. Just finding a pub or tavern nearby to watch live European soccer matches is difficult enough, not to mention the time zone differences resulting in my having to rise at around seven in the morning on a weekend, which isn't necessarily the most preferable way to spend my days off.  

There are times when I think American football is one of the bellwethers for the end of Western Civilization as we know it. Hyperbole? Sure. But maybe only a little.

Dabbling in Treason

The US soccer team plays Spain on the 24th in a semifinal match for a place in the Confederations Cup Final in South Africa, a sort of preemptive warmup for the 2010 World Cup also being held there. One need not be preternaturally wise - or even a football aficionado - to posit that the US is heading into this as an underdog. With that I apologize to all underdogs, past and present. Likening them with the US team isn't even precise. If there were something less than an underdog, perhaps a small, less limber, less likely of a contender than said original underdog, that might fit. The under-est of the underdogs. Now I suppose I should be a good American and root for the US but the truth of the matter is I'm not. I simply cannot root for them. 

What they play is a brand of football so uninspiring, so fractured, and so poorly put together that not only would pouring my allegiance into them be fruitless but I'd feel it was misdirected - if I'm going to get excited about a side, or a match for the matter, I want to get excited about a squad that's going to be ecstatic to be out there representing their country, not roll over and allow themselves to be steamrolled by a Brazil squad without so much as making a peep. For myriad reasons, the US squad is dismal. Not once have I ever got the sense that, other than a few key members, they take it all that seriously, nor have the coaches ever had a clue about what they're doing and who they're filling the ranks with. 

Whereas with Spain that's never the case. Even in a match where they're on the unfortunate and rare outclassed side, they'll at least give an entertaining and hard-fought performance, one that doesn't leave me entirely ashamed of giving a damn about them. Even on an individual basis, I'd rather watch any one Spanish player with the ball all to himself than watch the entire US side fumble around waiting for something to happen rather than create a damn chance of their own. Not to mention my predilection and adoration towards Spain both as a country and a football squad run core-of-the-Earth deep and equally as fiery with ardor. So España it is. ¡Viva la Furia Roja!

If this knocks a few points off my patriotism measurement, well so be it. My unflattering comments here wouldn't be the first time I've let loose a brickbat against the contemporary states, athletics or otherwise. For the US squad's sake I hope Spain romps us. Maybe supreme embarrassment on an International stage will put things into perspective. 

And now after that brief restorative taste of fresh air it's time to take another deep breath, hold it, and submerge back into the work at hand.

"If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely."

DeLillo

Més Que Un Club

Andrés Iniesta proves yet again why he's not only one of Barça's most dependable players, but one of Spain's as well. The guy is absolute class and one-hundred percent clutch, managing to do it all while remaining quietly under the radar. Of all the big names on that side, he's never the one you'd be quick to name, but goodness does the dude come through time after time - for country and club. Sent a bullet into the top corner. 

Applause are due to Chelsea's Michael Ballack, who proves yet again why he is one of the most obnoxious and bitchiest players of all time on a team that is mostly comprised of the most obnoxious and bitchiest players in all of professional football.  Quite a feat, if you ask me. 

And so La Liga is back in the Champions League final, which couldn't make me any happier. Oh, how I would love, absolutely gush at seeing Fergie, Ronny, and the rest of that smug Man United squad have their feet swept out from under them. If that is to be accomplished, though, I do think Barça has got to, not change their game altogether, but focus it maybe, sharpen and point it. It's great that they dominate possession and move the ball around on one tight, well directed rope after the other, and it looks beautiful, but it comes down to what Torres said about Premier League defenders when he first joined Liverpool. They're much stronger and equally as fast as La Liga defenders. Chances of tiring them are slim and they can muscle you out to boot. I think that's what Barça saw in Chelsea's side. They had evident difficulty putting the ball into the back of the net. Coming off of a 6 goal romping of Real, one would expect goals. Second half chances were there, aplenty, but nothing came of it. Henry will be back, and he's got a track record of familiarity as well as goals against Premier League defenders. That's quite good, so I'm hopeful.

All in all, it's been a good yeah for Spanish football. Euro 2008 champions and now representing the best of European Club Football at the Champions League final in late May with a Barcelona squad that is definitely one of their recent bests. If anything, I'm excited for a non all-English Champions League Final, and I'm thrilled at the prospect of Man United getting undone. 

And fuck Chelsea. And fuck their complaining. And fuck their unending whining over calls. Hiddink will clearly make excuses and blame the officials, as will probably Lamps and Terry. There were enough wrong calls made on Barcelona to make up for that, not to mention a missed penalty from the first match.