were as influential in shaping
regional sports teams as their
national denomination would im-
ply, the borders' artificiality
would still trump superstition.
Localities therefore only hap-
lessly demand to be implicat-
ed or vindicated in the play of
arbitrary avatars. We sometimes
designate our viticultural ex-
ponents with the same aspiration,
but we don't pit Riesling against
Malbec to define itself, any more
than we confine ourselves to pol-
itical strictures of taste. Or do
we. Our domain is chance, its sub-
ject is play. It bears a smile.
i Linus Wördemann
iii David Adamo
2012
Having read several of your postings concerning the sport of football (as it would be called, involving teams other than the US) I think the topic of ball sports suits rmbl well. I know, you have talked about lots of other sports. Rowing, to be sure, and others I can't recall at the moment. But your trope of soccer as wine, soccer as politics, soccer as masculinity is compelling. I am making a large assumption that, like me, you are not primarily a "sports" person (most fans of your page would agree that literature dominates). But you draw the connections well between sports and rmbl's other interests: food, wine, fashion, politics, music. This one particularly interests me as I have observed in the social media a nationalistic tone concerning these games that I imagine would have been very similar to a pre-WWI tone, were there the anonymity of online posting available at the time. How could one poor team represent the whole of a nation? It can't, but it can serve as the subject of our latent xenophobia. They are set up to be the whipping boy from the start. Thanks for pointing this out.
ReplyDeleteI have always wanted there not to be a schism between literature and sport, as Homer showed there cannot be. But writing demands the same self-effacement and we don't believe in that much these days, and so our followings of sport, no less than our reservations, are deeply estranged from its nobility.
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