sports!
i went to a dc united game tonight. i haven’t seen soccer live in forever, so this was a treat in many ways. and so trippy–sports are so damn trippy! the fandom, my god–it’s utterly bizarre how into “their” team a lot of the folks were. kinda like nationalism in a weird way. in fact, every time dc united scored, a guy would run the perimeter of the field holding aloft a huge flag with an eagle on it, looking way too much like some german flag from the 1930’s.
then there’s the whole winning/losing thing–i can’t help but feel so sad for the losing team; it almost ruins things for me.
but being out at a such a “dc” thing was great, with an interesting mix of people–though almost everyone was white, surprisingly. we had great seats, high enough so that the whole field was spread below us, but close enough that we could watch the players’ moves well. it seemed to take them a while to warm up, but after awhile they were moving smoothly, passing across the field, faking out the guy guarding them, arching upward to greet the ball with their head. it was amazingly entertaining, like an enormous green stage upon which 22 guys gracefully ran and rolled and seamlessly shared that little ball, clustered on one end and then spread evenly across the field. lots of little details of action made the whole picture quite fascinating, like one of those flemish paintings from the 16th century where there’s always more to look at.
and i was thinking, “damn, dance doesn’t stand a chance!” of course, dance is great. but this soccer game, even for a non-fan like me, was so entertaining in the true sense of the word; it just grabbed me and pulled me into the action so that i forgot everything else and only wanted to see where that ball went. dance, in contrast, suddenly seemed painfully slow and serious and ponderous.
but then i had a new thought that i asked my friend: why was this game not dance? and we never came up with a satisfying answer. because ultimately it was about movement–yes, movement with a motive, but that doesn’t make it not dance. someone could’ve choreographed that whole game, including all the goals, so that nothing was actually random, and the “performers” weren’t actually trying to get the ball in the goal but were just performing choreography.
i don’t know why it matters. but it seemed interesting at the time.
Postscript
i just read a post about soccer vs. dance by doug fox on his great dance blog. it says this:
Soccer is similar to dance in that it’s at heart about the offensive team creating and using space in unpredictable and innovative ways to help push the ball closer to the other team’s net.
i love that idea of consciously using space in a certain way, but to be honest, i’m such an incredible soccer neophyte that there was no way i could have picked up on any subtleties of team strategy and how the players used space on the field. there was just too much going on. in fact, it was hard for me to imagine how even the players would be able to remember their strategies and play formulations while scrambling to keep track of the ball. but like with dance–like with anything–i guess it all can be learned over time.