In case you missed US women’s national soccer team defeat Brazil on Sunday here’s what happened: The US scored in the 2nd minute. The 1-0 lead stood until the 68th minute when Brazil scored on a penalty shot that was riddled with controversy. The American goalkeeper Hope Solo made an impressive save but the referee called a relatively mysterious encroachment violation that allowed the Brazilians a second chance which they promptly converted. The Americans faced an uphill battle. The penalty shot was accompanied by a red card and the US would have to find a way to score while playing the rest of the game shorthanded. After 90 minutes of regulation the game went to extra time. Then, just two minutes into overtime Brazilian superstar Marta scored a magical goal. It looked like the US was done for. Time ticked down, hope began to slip away. And then boom. In the 122nd minute this happened:
Pretty wild. Just a few moments later the referee blew the final whistle and the game was decided on penalty shots. Hope Solo came up with a brilliant save and the Americans converted all 5 of their shots. Incredible comeback victory.
For the last 48 hours I’ve become obsessed with Wambach’s last minute heroics. I’ve probably watched the highlight video over 20 times. The perfect cross, the Brazilian goalkeeper’s horrible mis-read, the perfect header, an authentically ecstatic celebration.
I’m not the only one. I’ve read a number of columns in which an incredible amount of meaning is taken from Wombach’s goal. It is part of a “fairy tale” about American “heroes”. It has been called “one of the toughest, most inspiring displays the sport has ever seen.” Others have gone as far to say that the goal reveals something about the American spirit through a never-die attitude. Julie Foudy, an ex-national team player and an ESPN commentator tweeted this soon after the game:
What I luv about sports/soccer. If Abby hadn't scored, 1 min later, the world wud've forgotten the courage displayed 2night. Thank u #uswnt.
Foudy is picking up on what we all intuitively know about sports. The meaning of a play is drastically different depending on where it happens in the game. What Foudy is not saying is that if Abby had scored 1 minute earlier, the memory of the game would have been slightly different. Or if Abby had scored 20 minutes earlier? Or if Abby had scored first and Marta had scored the last second goal? Very different. It’s not just whether you win or lose, it’s how you win or lose. It’s how the story, or narrative, of the game played out. In this case the story has a climax at the end that allows us to re-interpret earlier portions of the game. We extract meaning about country and nation and spirit and heroes because of how and when Abby scored and not just that she scored.
Sports like soccer are a weird beast in this way. The game marches toward conclusion regardless of what actually happens inside the game. The clock provides all players and spectators with a definitive sense of “how much is left”. So the tension that’s built has a unique character. Not only do we NOT know what will happen, but we DO know precisely when it will have happened. The knowledge of the precise quantity of game remaining transforms the qualitative meanings of what happens.
Compare this to a sport like baseball which has a slightly different dynamic as the game winds down. It is the bottom of the 9th inning, 2 outs, the home team down by a run, 3 balls, 2 strikes, nobody on base. After the batter fouls off several pitches the pitcher delivers a ball and the batter takes his base. The tension that built up during the last at bat is momentarily relieved. The game could have ended with the previous at bat but it was extended for at least one more batter. The same dynamic actually plays out with every pitch. Because a batter can foul balls into the stands ad nauseum the fans and players can never be positive that the next play is their absolute last chance.
While the difference between baseball and soccer narrative “count downs” are subtle, it points to different experiences of gaming. Tension is built in different ways. Baseball builds tension in a herky-jerky style while soccer’s tension builds in a slow and steady hum as the clock marches toward completion.
So when Julie Foudy finds “courage” in the American performance she is doing a reading of just these dynamics. She makes a curious claim, though. She says that if Abby hadn’t scored, we would have “forgotten” what was obviously there: the courage. I actually think that if Abby hadn’t scored we would have taken a different set of meanings from the game altogether. We would have reinterpreted the overtime as a “coming up short” not a “courageous near miss”. This sounds close to what Foudy is saying except she wants to believe the courage was there regardless of the goal, I'm saying that we see courage because of the goal.
So things that happen toward the ends of games help us reinterpret the sequence of events that happened up until that point. Lots of things in social life are like this. The verdict at a trial, for example. While we might have thought the defense’s opening statement a bit bizarre, after the not-guilty verdict suddenly it seems rather brilliant. The climax at the trial is, by definition, the end of the narrative. And the end tells us what happened in the beginning. As we come to the end of a great novel we may begin to sense the urgency of the ending coming toward us. But we also rush to find out what happens on page 300 partly so we can know the full significance of what happened on page 10.Writers know these dynamics and play with them. The most obvious example is writer and director M. Night Shyamalan. Many of his movies give the audience one set of impressions all movie long before he throws in a last minute twist. In the Sixth Sense we find out that Bruce Willis is actually a dead ghost (and has been all along). In The Village we find out that this 19th Century New England village is actually some kind of historical project that exists in a wild life preserve in the 21st Century (and it has been all along). Unfortunately for M. Night, his last second heroics are a little too overbearing. Audiences have started to expect them and they have come to seem corny. It’s as if Abby Wambach had played cowardly all game long just so she could have the pleasure of making you realize it was actually “courage” that she was doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment