I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace’s essay on Roger Federer, the famous one that ran in the New York Times’s now-defunct sports magazine, Play, in 2006. If you don’t remember it for the argument, you might remember it for the title, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” which even back in ’06 felt like a strange combination of terms. It’s a little hard to remember this now, with Federer’s career having settled into its gentle downward glide, but at that point Roger Federer was annihilating sports. He won everything, always, and not in a Jordan’s-flu-game/supreme-effort-combusting-into-fiery-triumph way, but easily, without sweating, in polo shirts so white they reflected every light ray. (Not even the sun could score on him, I remember thinking.) Luxury-gauche Federer, the cream-blazered Rolex hawk, was still a short way in the future, and so was ennobled-by-adversity Federer: Rafael Nadal was a niche specialist who only ever won the French Open. Federer, as far as anyone could tell, was just a mild young man who happened to play perfect tennis, tennis so perfect, and so predictable in its perfection, that anyone who rooted against him did so for the same reason you’d root against a brick wall. His game wasn’t boring—it’s never boring to watch someone do an extremely difficult thing—but as a narrative, as a story that holds your interest by keeping its outcome in suspense, it was about as thrilling as an iPhone launch.
A religious experience ought, at the very least, to be thrilling, so it was strange to see Wallace draw on the raptures of the saints to describe his admiration for Federer. “Roger Federer as Clockwork,” or “Roger Federer as a Movie You Love but Have Just About Memorized at This Point,” would have made more immediate sense. But as it turned out, Wallace wasn’t talking about narrative at all, and if he was using religious experience as a metaphor, it was a metaphor that was close to the literal truth. While acknowledging that in that year’s Wimbledon Federer had “provided no surprise or competitive drama at all,” Wallace saw Federer’s game as epitomizing the beauty of sports, which, as he wrote, has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body”:
David Foster Wallace, “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” Play Magazine, August 20 2006
There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.
There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot.
Living in a body means contending with pain, the fact of death, and the limitations of our own wills—means enduring the fact that, in essence, something is always wrong in our position in the universe. But the beauty created by a great athlete playing a game can help us dream of transcending our own physical limits, can give us the sense, fleetingly, in what Wallace calls “Federer Moments,” that our bodies aren’t at odds with our wills, that we can do what we can dare, like honest Tottenhams. Federer as a religious experience therefore has nothing to do with the thrill of competitive drama or even with an individual style of play. It has to do, instead, with the reconciling beauty of a great athlete doing the apparently impossible. That’s what Wallace, who was serious about tennis, wanted. And that’s what Federer gave him, at least at moments.
I’ve been thinking about David Foster Wallace not only because we’re coming up on the second anniversary of his suicide but also because of Pelé Week. The two arguments against wholeheartedly embracing Pelé that popped up again and again during our series of posts were (1) that we can’t appreciate Pelé because the “Pelé narrative” is too monumental and FIFA-stamped and inauthentic in its postmodern-media-fascist way to see past when we watch his highlights and (2) that Pelé’s perfection as a player is so complete that he’s not really interesting; he always won, he had no weaknesses, and his game was so ideal that it stands outside history and has no point of contact with our lived experience of the sport. I see the force of both those arguments (I think I originated one of them), but I don’t think either one of them tells the whole story.
That may be just because I want to like Pelé. But watching him through a complete game, as I’ve done as often as I could over the last two weeks, reveals a player who is neither alienatingly mediated nor tediously flawless: After a while, you’re just watching a famous 25-year-old play soccer, which is not an unusual experience for a soccer fan. And what’s wonderful about this is not that you get to see Pelé humanize himself by missing shots or committing questionable tackles, although he sometimes does both those things, but precisely that you get to watch a player whose game is almost perfect; you get to watch him fulfill the argument of “Federer as Religious Experience.” He makes acts that are extremely difficult to perform look easy. In the process—and this is incredibly obvious, but given the general resistance to Pelé that I and others have felt, it’s worth asserting—he creates moments of fantastic delight for the spectator.
If you’re used to aestheticizing sports by thinking about “style”—i.e., a way of playing as a window onto an individual human character—then you may be inclined to look at the shallowness of Pelé’s public image and assume that he couldn’t have had a real style, not in the way Garrincha or Cruyff did, because what would it reveal? He’s a living Mastercard commercial. But Wallace’s essay suggests a form of aesthetic appreciation based on something different from and possibly deeper than character or self-expression: our innate sympathetic connection with other people’s bodies, and the thrill of seeing intention freely realized over and against all physical impediments. Put simply, Pelé, even more than Federer, maybe more than other athlete I’ve seen, traffics in Federer Moments.
There’s a case to be made, of course, that soccer is uniquely adapted for the creation of Federer Moments. Unlike tennis, which augments the player’s physical capabilities with a racket, soccer takes an essential physical tool—the hands—away from the player and forces him to compete in a state of artificial clumsiness. Soccer thus emphasizes the limits of the body and the difficulty of realizing intention. When a player does something amazing, we’re apt to see it not as a superhuman feat (he made the ball travel 150mph!), but as a human victory over what’s essentially an everyday difficulty. If the crisis of having a body is that it’s resistant to our will, soccer exaggerates the crisis, moves what you want to do even further away from what you can do, then gives us athletes who do what they want to anyway. That may be why moments of beauty in soccer, compared to those in other sports, nearly always feel like consolations.
There are moments in Pelé’s games when he dribbles straight into a crowd of three or four defenders. He seems to have done that often, though in the videos now it’s sometimes hard to say who he’s playing against or what year it is or even what the score is or how much time is on the clock. He’ll dribble into a crowd of three or four defenders, which is suicide for a footballer, even in Brazil in the 1960s; it’s almost impossible to keep the fine control you need to take a decent shot when all the defender needs to do is wallop the ball away from you. Pelé dribbles into a crowd of players who have put themselves between him and the goal and whose whole purpose is to get the ball away from him, to keep him from scoring, which again is infinitely easier than the task facing the attacking player, and often in these situations, instead of trying something dazzling or virtuosic, Pelé will just stop. He’ll come to a sudden halt, with his foot lightly resting on top of the ball, and a ripple of confusion and wrong-footedness will go through the crowd of defenders as it tries to react and not fall over. Pelé will do one of those dancing shivering whole-body fakes he excelled at, dropping his shoulder, say, as if he’s about to lunge to the left, but almost simultaneously hinting right with his hips, and rolling the ball just slightly in a teasing way under his toes. Half the defenders start to guess one way and the other half start to guess the other way, but they recover, they’re professionals paying attention, and then just at the precise moment when it looks like a stalemate Pelé knocks the ball through the semi-opening created by their split-second almost-guess and tears through after it, so that one of them falls over and one of them whips around in the wrong direction, and then he’s one-on-one with the goalkeeper and it’s easy to flip the ball up into the corner of the net, in that afterthought way that characterized a lot of Pelé’s strikes. He leaps up in the air to celebrate, that famous happy hop, and the surprising thing about the way he jumps is always how much he seems to belong on the ground; there’s something physically dense about him, something that looks like it wants to sink, so that you sometimes have the impression that the game is keeping him afloat the way the ocean keeps up a battleship. So he comes down, and you laugh, because you have just seen an intelligence perform the remarkable task of solving the complete problem represented by the presence and position of the defenders and the need to control the ball without the use of hands, and you have seen a body so perfectly balanced and controlled that it could act transparently as the agent of this solution even where the solution itself required timing, strength, speed, and awareness far surpassing what most athletes possess. You have seen a thousand different soccer players face this position, and Pelé probably faced it a thousand times, but even if you were reluctant going in, the effect of the Pelé Moment is that for as long as it lasts you are prepared to swear that no one who ever got into this situation got out of it quite like Pelé.
People who have religious experiences typically describe them as something ecstatic, transporting, and revelatory. I suppose there are smaller-scale “Counterpane”-type visitations in which one simply feels a mysterious presence nearby, but that’s not what Wallace is talking about. He describes the Federer Moment as “ecstatic”—ecstatic meaning literally out-of-body, being outside oneself—and it’s the mystic saints who tend to traffic in ecstasy, who are lifted up out of their corporeal shapes into a higher plane of existence where they experience a radiant consciousness of the connectedness of all things. What’s strange about this as a metaphor for watching Federer or for Pelé is that the feeling that generally seems to remain with the mystic saints once the mystic experience has ended is not one of peaceful acceptance of the body but a profoundly unsettled desire to exit the body again, one sign of which is that if the mystic saints are not actually prone to becoming suicidal, they nevertheless tend to become magnets for all kinds of physical torture, dismemberment, burning, impaling, crucifixion, whipping, and strangulation, and they tend to to accept all these things more or less willingly and with an eerie equanimity, not because their religious experiences have left them reconciled to their bodies but because their religious experiences have taught them that their bodies are prisons they want to escape.
Wallace interrupts his story about Federer at two points to write about a seven-year-old boy named William Caines, who served as the honorary coin-tosser at Wimbledon in 2006 after he “contracted liver cancer at age 2 and somehow survived after surgery and horrific chemo,” Wallace writes. The crowd, he says, roars its approval, but as William is ushered off a strange feeling comes over the spectators: “a feeling of something important, something both uncomfortable and not, about a child with cancer tossing this dream-final’s coin.” The feeling has a “tip-of-the-tongue quality” that “remains elusive for at least the first two sets.” Later in the essay, Wallace returns to the theme:
According to reliable sources, honorary coin-tosser William Caines’s backstory is that one day, when he was 2½, his mother found a lump in his tummy, and took him to the doctor, and the lump was diagnosed as a malignant liver tumor. At which point one cannot, of course, imagine…a tiny child undergoing chemo, serious chemo, his mother having to watch, carry him home, nurse him, then bring him back to that place for more chemo. How did she answer her child’s question — the big one, the obvious one? And who could answer hers? What could any priest or pastor say that wouldn’t be grotesque?
I’ve always wondered what Wallace meant by circling back around to talk about William in the middle of what is for the most part a genuinely happy-seeming celebration of Federer. The image of the cancer-stricken child seems to have no part, that is, in the enthusiasm that motivates the essay, and yet the edge of unease it introduces brings a powerful and not unreligious strain of skepticism into the pseudo-theology of Federer. Clearly no athlete and no delight in sport can answer the “big, obvious” question about what could possibly justify a tiny child suffering a devastating physical illness. If Federer is there to reconcile us to the fact of having bodies, Wallace hints, then the reconciliation he offers has limits and outside those limits is a large and unanswerable despair. I called the awareness of this despair “not unreligious” because while it may seem like a mere challenge to belief, a sort of renegade anti-Federer atheism, the feeling that seems to follow it into the essay seems to me to have more in common with the longing for bodily mortification that is often a weird corollary of profound religious experience. That is, if we begin with a sense that something is intolerably wrong, and the power of Federer or Pelé is to make us feel that that thing is actually right (or at least tolerable), then William introduces a larger sphere of consciousness in which we realize that the reconciliation was flawed and the thing is actually wrong and intolerable after all. But that second, larger wrongness, as I read it in Wallace’s essay, and this may be unfair, because again, William is only a tiny grain of doubt within what is generally a really positive piece of writing—that second, larger wrongness doesn’t stem from an apprehension that the reconciliation Federer offers is false, it stems from an apprehension that the reconciliation Federer offers is incomplete, that it doesn’t go far enough, it doesn’t stick. It only lasts a moment, and then you’re left not knowing when God will take you up again, which is an anxiety that actually bubbles up at times in the writings of the saints. And that seems to be a condition in which a heightened consciousness of mortality, one that may well express itself as a yearning toward suffering and breakdown, is hard to escape.
For that reason, while I think “Federer as Religious Experience” gives us a way to appreciate perfection in sports that is both right and beautiful, I also think it wraps itself in the wrong metaphor, one that makes it operate on a level too deep for its real content and that thus, inevitably, undermines it. “Religious experience” freights sport with a justificatory purpose that religion itself is not able to perform a lot of the time: Not only can Federer not answer big questions, he can’t answer any questions, and it’s a grim stacking of the deck to suggest that sport is therefore a hollow shell outside which lurks despair. In fairness, Wallace doesn’t exactly suggest this, but it’s the conclusion I reach every time I read his essay, including when it originally appeared.
I don’t know if these experiences are comparable, but watching Pelé over the last few weeks, what I have felt is a frequent, temporary delight that seems to be woven into and essentially a part of my everyday, untranscendent existence. A Pelé Moment might make me shout, or jump out of my chair, but more than anything they seem to make me laugh. There is, for instance, the famous lob over Bengt Gustavsson in the 1958 World Cup final, when, as a 17-year-old, he somehow controlled the ball with his chest to elude one defender in the area, flipped it way up into the air over the head of the second defender, wheeled around the onrushing Gustavsson, got to the ball just before it hit the ground, then volleyed it into the net. On YouTube, it’s amazing; watching it in the context of the full match, it a hundred times more amazing, because it comes from nowhere. You don’t know it’s about to happen. Then it happens, and it’s impossible even though it’s happening, but it’s happening even though it’s impossible. Everything that’s wrong—the difficulty of controlling the ball, the interposing defenders, the fact that he can’t use his hands—suddenly seems right, because it merely provides the occasion for the astonishing thing he improvises. You laugh, because it’s exhilarating, and you laugh because the consolation it offers is not a consummate, religious consolation, but an imperfect, fragile piece of momentary happiness. It’s a consolation that was made to make you laugh.
Pelé doesn’t strike me as a religious experience, then. He strikes me as a comedy, or better, as a comedian: not as a stand-up comic or a satirist, but as the opposite of a tragedian, the author of the kind of classical comedy that always ends with a wedding, the kind that revels in turning the order of things upside down so that it can give you the giddy satisfaction of seeing them turned right-side up again. This kind of comedy is in the business of reconciliation: The king turns out to be wise, the lovers love each other, and the villains reveal themselves to be failures, however things look for a while. When Titania is in the forest with Bottom, everything is wonderfully backwards: The queen of the ideal is enslaved to clumsiest physicality. Then Puck flies through, Pelé scores his goal, and all the faculties go back to their right places. It has no effect on the real world, or on whatever moves in the dark, and if the real world is a place of despair, then the most it can do is to keep despair at bay. It’s rigged, like all art, and it feels like a game because it is a game. But there are worse things than keeping despair at bay. The terrible thing about happiness is that it can’t answer any questions. But when it comes, you don’t need it to. And when it goes, well, what would you want it to say?
Actually, they weren’t against the act of embracing him so much as against the possibility of embracing him: The idea was that try as we might, we can’t possibly appreciate Pelé.
When “the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.,” as Wallace writes.
A popular way to criticize Pelé is to point out that he never played in Europe. I’m increasingly convinced that this is nonsense, for the simple reason that most of the great Brazilian players of his era never played in Europe: they played in Brazil, against Pelé. Santos didn’t prove how good it was only by winning those two Intercontinental Cups against Milan and Benfica, they proved it by dominating some very good Brazilian competition, limitations of the state championships aside. It’s as impossible to compare footballing cultures as it is to compare eras, but you could just as easily argue that George Best was overrated because he never had to face Brazilian competition at a time when Brazil was clearly the best soccer country in the world.
And yet William is apparently a tennis fan.
Do we need this kind of theoretical groundwork to appreciate perfection? I recently heard about a choreographer who, when he was young, didn’t use Mozart in his dances because he found the music too easy, too perfect, and therefore too boring. After years of making dances to other composers, he went back to Mozart and suddenly understood that this perfect ease was the least boring thing on earth.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a little like soccer, come to think of it.
Read More: Football as Philosophy, Pelé
by Brian Phillips · September 2, 2010
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I feel much the same way about Sachin Tendulkar. Watching him in his prime made you feel that things can and will turn out alright.
In the Renaissance, the Italians called this ability to make the impossible look easy and the ridiculously difficult solution appear obvious ‘sprezzatura,’ and Wallace had it in spades. Wonderful writing here.
This may be my favorite Brian Phillips essay ever. It ought to be cross-stitched onto a thick fluffy quilt and slept under all winter. Also to be anthologized and reprinted very widely. I am grateful.
Great stuff Bri!
Beautiful.
That is a gorgeously written article. Brilliant.
I’ve always seen you as a something of a son of DFW, this simply confirms that suspicion. Excellent piece… and it serves his memory well.
I love this. I love that it didn’t occur to anyone to apply the DFW principle to Pele and that you not only hit on it, but teased it out with incredible finesse and relevance. Of course! Of course.
I love your conclusion; yes, Pele is indeed a comedian, and as you imply, football is comedic too. Or at least it’s a comedy over the long-term rhythm of seasons and generations, rather than individual matches or even tournaments. A comedy with heroes? How is that possible? But it is, and sometimes, it’s tempting to draw a connection with — real life. Scary thought.
Oh and this may be my favourite piece of artwork on RoP EVER, and that is saying something.
@Ronit What is this ‘in his prime’ business? Tendulkar still does that! Just because Pepsi and Visa are in on it doesn’t mean we de-link it from him. No, I’m not overinvested in him at all, why do you ask?
I have been coming here for a few weeks now, to my continued amazement. Never would I have believed that a blog like this could be produced about football—then again, I had the idea but not the perseverence to do something very similar about cars, a theme similarly lacking such a consistently idiosyncratic intellectual treatment, at least since LJK Setright is not around. This is a wonderful, mind-boggling article, one I’ll have to keep coming back to over the next few weeks.
Every laugh is a victory against death. We laugh because we know we are going to die someday.
It’s the same reason we write stories or compose songs…
This is a great article Brian. I feel I’ll have to come back to it sometime.
Much as I can’t listen to any Elliott Smith without constantly being reminded of his suicide, I can’t read any DFW and not seek out some cry for help, limn the text for some explanation of his end. Not what you were going for with this post, obviously, but I think there’s something to your read of that essay worth exploring, especially with the title.
At first blush, “Federer as Religious Experience” seems the sort of hyperbolic lazy rhetorical flourish you’d expect from — well, anyone, really, as “religious experience” has currency as metaphor for something otherworldly and unbelievable. You’ve sounded out the problems and connotations that emerge from that particular device, but the question for me is why DFW didn’t have that moment of exultant joy that you describe about Pele, why he didn’t recognize his cartoon-eyed bugout at Federer’s play as a moment of WOW! rather than an opportunity to ruminate for thousands of words about the religious experience. That’s the feeling I have gotten from the admittedly little DFW I’ve read: he so thoroughly describes, in the most exhausting detail, everything surrounding the moment that you actually forget that the moment is what actually matters, and that he hasn’t said anything about that at all. It’s as if that moment of joy is too direct, too thorough, and so he has to construct the surrounding air as a way to cushion it.
Which is, in a way, what we’re doing, and what we’ve all been doing since none of us were in the stadia where Pele played. YouTube clips aren’t close to the electricity of a live match, and all the wonderful essays that have run here (this included) can’t match the thrill of seeing kinesthetic genius as itself. Maybe that’s why us word-types constantly try to translate those nerves into words, and why DFW (whose nerves were besieged by words throughout his life) came the closest to describing just why it is so impossible for us to describe what Federer or Pele did/can do.
And since DFW was nothing but words, a constant stream of information masquerading as a human, a rational mind that could never shut down (until he forced it to, until he took the ultimate ecstatic step to escape the prison of his own flawed body), anything outside of that, anything that couldn’t be narrated would have to be damn near miraculous.
Great essay, thanks for writing this.
Great video, btw… what an extraordinary impression of balance he leaves you with. Those times when he’s at full sprint, and he hurdles over a lunging defender and somehow hardly breaks stride. I remember I once found myself watching some motorbike race or other where it was tipping down with rain, and time after time, Valentino Rossi would be riding round a corner and the wheels would lose grip and skitter out underneath him, and before you had time to process that fact that he was clearly going to crash, he’d somehow have rescued it. And I know nothing about motorbikes but even I could see that what he was doing was almost supernatural.
@sjc And you, sir or madam, thanks for writing your comment, as it’s exactly what I haven’t been able to put into words for years now.
“It’s as if that moment of joy is too direct, too thorough, and so he has to construct the surrounding air as a way to cushion it.”
and
“And since DFW was nothing but words, a constant stream of information masquerading as a human, a rational mind that could never shut down (until he forced it to, until he took the ultimate ecstatic step to escape the prison of his own flawed body), anything outside of that, anything that couldn’t be narrated would have to be damn near miraculous.”
I can’t help but to be somewhat drawn to Brian Blickenstaff’s article (http://www.runofplay.com/2010/04/23/the-game-has-evolved/) on the football evolving while reading this. Just as I watch Xavi and David Villa move with such ease and calmness against Lichtenstein, I cannot help but think that Pelé was up against many Lichtenstein-esque defenders. Does that take away from the quality someone like Pele or Garrincha possesses? Not at all. However, this difference, not in the human body but in class (technique, footballing mind, tactical awareness, whatever you want to call it) is what adds comedic value to these occurrences. Villa and Xavi, of course, did not gain their reputations by consistently making semi-professionals look silly. They did so by making the best in the world look like semi-professionals.
Having watching Federer pull of a “Tweener” against an unranked opponent trying to stay in the US Open brought an emotion of the lesser player’s face. This face didn’t say, “I’m playing against a God,” but rather something more along the lines “I’m playing against a wall. Oh well. At least I have the opportunity to play against the best wall in the world.” Pele, like Federer, undoubtedly attempted the ridiculous in so many of these low-risk situations. Win-win situations. If Pelé lost the ball when going up against 4 defenders, well, it’s alright, he probably already scored the 2 goals that gave Santos a 2-nil lead. If he embarrasses the defenders and gets his hat-trick, then it’s an experience. A religious experience though? To an opponent used to playing in a game of margins, perhaps. But to a supporter seeing someone like Pelé, constrained by the same body the supporter belongs to, perform these acts for the sake of a challenge and for the sake entertainment? You must be having a laugh…
Compelling work. I can help but think on orson swindle’s recent easy about, I know, college football *blech!* and the suicide of Hunter Thompson. Another great read. Another great, honest look at the importance of sports.
Keep it up!
Wow
Sasha Frere-Jones, music critic, writes the following in last week’s New Yorker:
“Watching “Fela!,” though, I kept having a sacrilegious thought: “I bet Fela’s actual band wasn’t this good.” I know I could be wrong. Though I’ve never loved the original albums Fela made in Nigeria, I also realize that they aren’t nearly as well recorded as those of his American analog, James Brown. Had I seen it live, the genuine article might have flattened me. But most Americans never had that chance, and Antibalas does justice to Fela’s legacy—the circular, simmering pattern of Afrobeat, a style that is distinct from the hard downbeat of American funk. So what to do? Rue that we never saw the original Fela, and get caught up in comparisons? The writing of new verses and choruses shows commitment, no matter how familiar the style may seem. Perhaps we simply adjust our expectations and give less credence to the importance of novelty.
In an interview with Philip Roth, Milan Kundera said, “When I hear learned arguments that the novel has exhausted its possibilities, I have precisely the opposite feeling: in the course of its history the novel missed many of its possibilities.” If so many musicians are comfortable with returning to the past to pick up lost possibilities, we might do well to let go of our allegiance to our heroes, so that more of their work can reveal itself.”
Reading the article, I couldn’t help but think of RoP’s Pelé week and in particular, this most recent, thought provoking post. Not exactly sure why.
i’ve actually started becoming afraid of coming back here – firstly because i fear that i would have to submit my nascent hopes of being a writer to an exhibition of virtuoso writing so amazing that you think “why should i even bother writing”
but beyond that selfish thought, there is a greater fear that i had stumbled upon a moment of brilliance that i’ll never feel again, and surely this post and all others can’t be as good as the last one. and yet every time. amazing. i wish you knew cricket. it really needs some philosophical ruminations right now.
Wow. That was a little piece of transcendence right there! What an absolutely wonderful essay.
oustanding
Incredible. Thank you, Mr. Phillips.
You make make me want to be a writer.
And glad that I will be one.
It’s just sport. Looking into it a bit too deeply?
@ds Sorry. “Pelé just knows how to win.”
@Brian Phillips Sorry if my comment came across as flippant or dismissive, I really didn’t mean it to sound that way, all I was trying to say was surely sports are in the grand scheme of things relatively inconsequential. I’m a casual football fan, but I only too aware that sport is often just a distraction, a hobby, that provides casual entertainment for a while but is really not that meaningful or important- like watching a TV soap or playing a video game. I could understand this sort of deep and thoughtful analysis about a piece of art or music, but football?
@ds wasn’t opera ‘entertainment’ at some point in its history too?
@ds I spend a lot of time watching and reading about sport. It has the power to make me feel intensely and to make me irrationally elated or depressed. To my mind, anything that’s capable of doing that deserves thoughtful analysis, particularly when it affects millions of people in the same way.
@Brian Phillips I think that reading the Pro Verceli drama of last year was the most meaningful event in terms of emotional investment. I’m sure others share that sentiment.
Also, thoughtful analysis is fun – even (and especially) when applied to a seemingly inconsequential topic (such as sport). I, for instance, love the circular reasoning of the argument. Sport is narrowly defined to exclude politics and other serious topics, ergo sports is unimportant. Wa la! Isn’t that fun?
Can’t believe this essay somehow slipped by me.
It’s beautiful. And fucking brilliant.
I don’t know how many players can incite this kind of passion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYpf1tVJLOg&NR=1
I’m a little late to the party here, but fantastic job on this
Late to the party as well, but fantastic nonetheless. Officially subscribed (and linked to)!
@Brian Phillips Just spend a good two hours reading and then re-reading your work. I started with two rather recent Grantland pieces, one on Pep Guardiola, which was nice, and another on Pele, which not only had a brillant concluding sentence — “I just know that if I were David Beckham, or Peyton Manning, or Kobe, and I felt myself falling deep over center field, I would hope to God that time might lose me in the sun.” –, but which led me to crawl around for more of your stuff.
I usually rarely comment on other writers’ work, smug son of a bitch that I am, but this one does it; not only does your work echo (or strangely predate) much of my own football writing, not only does it articulate a sense of detached attachement to a thing as beautifully, repulsively addicting and under-researched as sports, it’s also brillantly written.
I’m not even sure if I’d concur with your opinion on Foster Wallace’s fallacy, but the mere fact that I found a sports writer recognizing the connection between a somewhat scholastic view of religious experience and the prevalence of that ever-glowing icon Pele — let alone alone writing it up this well — has me doing the Happy Hop; a sport article this good is a very, very rare thing in my country (and, I guess, in any country for that matter).
Thank you.
Read this many times over the past few years.
Brian, I’d like to let you know that you’ve inspired a lot of people with this magnificent piece. Thank you