It being the first innings of the election season, the end of the second quarter of the year, the dog days of summer approaching and the hay fever season in sudden death overtime—quite literally, I fear—it seems characteristically predictable of me to turn my halting attention to sports. No baseball rant or reminiscence, I promise. I am thinking this evening of women’s sports, primarily, and of the ways they delight us.
First off, women’s soccer. It’s in the news of late, as the American team is making a bit of a run at the World Cup this year, hoping to regain the ascendancy the enjoyed briefly in the late ‘90s and a few years after. I’ve not seen any of the matches yet, but I did watch the first half of another women’s game last night, a fierce grudge match between two Latin American teams. I am a nascent soccer fan at best, crowded on the fandom scale with millions of other earnest boomers, some of whom, men and women both, go even so far as to cluck their tongues, shake their fully gray heads and mutter in an inner voice so low they can almost pretend not to hear it: Now there’s a game I could have been good at. Really good. Maybe made a name for myself…
Now, I am as hair-trigger delusional as the next guy if a fantasy is engaging enough, but I’ve never gone that far. At my youthful athletic prime, which lasted for almost an hour one June morning in 1971 (unfortunately during Language Arts class and not on the playground) I am certain that neither I nor anyone I knew could have come up with the name of a single player of the world’s most popular sport. We lived in Ohio. Soccer was a game we played for a week in gym class in seventh grade, in between rugby and bocce ball during “Sports of the World Month.” (You could pick tennis instead of bocce or swimming instead of rugby, whatever the eff-gee-aich was up with that.) Then I didn’t think about the game until my first child, at the age of five, was determined to have a measurable pulse by the local Tiny Clueless Children’s Soccer Club, and thus assigned to a team of earnest, shin-guarded turf-tumblers. For genetically mysterious reasons he excelled at the game and rose steadily in its ranks until he was injured playing for a local “select” team during his senior year of high school. Then I went back to ignoring the sport completely until quite recently.
Thus my education in the game was slow, tamely paced, and, as I have learned since, utterly inadequate to prepare me as a knowledgeable fan. I picked up some jargon. I admired the stand-out players. I hoarsened my lungs with invective hurled at terrified referees barely old enough to shave. I cheered when our team won, commiserated otherwise. I became deft with an Ace bandage and familiar with nearly all of the items in the team first-aid kit. I sliced ten thousand halftime oranges. Under the park lights with my son I played the dummy keeper, the dummy forward, the dummy midfielder. (And every weekend, the dummy chauffeur.) I ran the lines at games, flagging off-sides with decreasing confidence as the players got older, louder and profane in their reactions. All told I spend thirteen years as a soccer dad. I learned almost nothing about the game.
In 2008 MLS soccer came to Seattle. Although a vast, rowdy contingent of the city’s sports fans became overnight devotees, Seattle sports media still keeps the game at arm’s length, reporting on it with the squeamish enthusiasm of a rookie docent displaying a Brazilian tarantula at the insect zoo. This aversion, sadly, is a matter more of politics than aesthetics or even plain ignorance. Sports-talk radio stations, TV networks and big-city newspapers are owned without significant exception by far-right-leaning fat cats who embrace the twisted tenet that soccer is and ought to remain a sissy, European, socialist, faggot game. They particularly are incensed when municipal football fields are used for soccer play, sullying the sacred turf of America’s legitimate pastime with the mincing flicks and crosses of foreigners who don’t even swear in a language that real men understand. Professional match and transaction reports are relegated by fiat to late-night broadcasting and the last pages of sports sections, along with the fishing and clamming reports, PCL box scores and track-and-field results. Eschewing the imprimatur of the airwaves, Seattle fans still turn out in green screaming droves, meeting before each game in a Pioneer Square park to sing fight songs, accompanied by a ragged brass band, after which they march en masse to the stadium (corporate owned, so god knows what its name is today), waving their gaudy team scarves stretched high above their heads. It is a wondrously quirky and endearingly awkward thing to observe, or better still to be in the midst of. And yes I suppose it is a little Eurogay after all. Maybe if they didn’t march so en masse.
Which brings me back (somehow) to women’s soccer. It’s been with us for a long time, but most red-blooded ‘mericans first took note of it when Brandy Chastain showed off her sports bra in 1999 after scoring the winning World Cup penalty kick. I struggle still with the newsworthiness of this moment, but it did mark a notch-raising in the national consciousness of the Beautiful Game for Girls. Twelve years later, I am pleased to see that Association Football is enough of a legitimate lobe of the collective Seattle sports brain (for it is a beautiful game, more so each day to me) that one is every bit as likely to see it on the big screen above a bar as any other offering, even, *gasp,* at some few places on Autumn Sundays. (Yes, these places serve mainly gay socialist anarchist atheist perverts. Your point?) The game on view quite often is the women’s variety—not as often the men’s, but never met in my experience with the protests, yawns or less-than-modest receipts that might accompany a game of women’s basketball, for example. (More on this anon.) Last night, the bar was nearly full and the room perhaps half-so, a reasonable week-night draw with no karaoke or trivia to boost the door. The game was close, hard-fought and for some reason the bartender had the volume up high. Usually it’s off altogether, as there are four screens in the place, often with four different showings, nearly always sports. Last night the only other game, on one of the screens, was the Mariners vs. Someone That Was Beating Them, and no one was paying it any attention. (Even though this has shaped up so far to be a year of modest rehab for the club, there has been no perceptible buzz about the M’s since Bill met Monica.)
I find the women’s game every bit as captivating as the men’s, and no it has nothing to do with anyone’s bra. I’m not savvy enough to recognize core differences in strategy, attack or technique, but the matches I’ve watched seem, not unlike women’s hockey, to be somehow a purer and more poetic version of the men’s game. The geometry appears more precise, the passes more purposeful, the fundamentals more joyfully executed. A woman running and dribbling a soccer ball often looks like a perfect model of what an awful lot of the men are trying to do. But one difference is clear from the get-go, and whether it’s good or bad depends on your perspective from the stands: Women can’t flop for shit. Their efforts at face-plant drama on the pitch after a trip, elbow or shove are pathetic imitations of the thespian histrionics of even high-school level male players in the U.S., and can’t touch the skills of little flopping boys abroad.
Are women simply too honest to flop? Are there basic social standards, clear right/wrong lines and canons of ethical rectitude that are genetically hard-wired into the live-bearers of babies, while we mere inseminators muddle along on some lesser moral plain? (Well, duh, of course we all know this to be the case; I just hadn’t thought about it in a sports context until last night.) The efforts of professional soccer gals to feign life-threatening, crippling injury, engendered by physical contact frequently no more aggressive than one would find in any grocery store line the day before Thanksgiving, are typically risible in their lack of resolve, execution and persuasiveness. It’s a wonder they even bother, when they do.
In the match I watched, a midfielder took a genuine hit from a defender just outside the penalty area. It didn’t seem to be an intentional blow, and no card or even warning ensued; it was a collision of two women racing for the ball, with the larger running on a higher head of steam and catching the midfielder sideways, sending her pin-wheeling across the grass. She lay for a moment in tentative imitation of a genuine flopper; flat on her back, legs splayed, corpse-like, one hand thrown backwards across her forehead in a gesture of departing resignation. Her teammates hurried to her side while he team doctor gathered his bags beyond the touch line and the crowd hummed in skeptical speculation: Was she dead? Had she broken something? Were her injuries internal? Or perhaps nonexistent? It’s a moment of Big Good Fun for a soccer crowd. I suppose it’s the sissy, Socialist equivalent of that rare half-second of silence at a NASCAR race, when a car on the midfield is engulfed in flames and every Bubba in the bleachers is praying silently that the driver has been fatally burned and will emerge in a moment to die horribly in plain view. Generally the driver instead bounces out of the smoke plume waving an asbestos fist of reassurance (drawing unconvincing applause from the Bubbas), not unlike our midfielder, who, after a few seconds, actually stood up without assistance, laughed, shook her opponent’s hand and resumed play.
Laughed? Shook hands? An insult to flopping, is what it is. Even an apprentice male flopper would have played the moment at least thirty seconds longer, allowing the doctor to arrive while keeping one eye on the on-field camera crew, ready to intone a choked, barely audible requiem in his native tongue should the microphone come near. Flopping is serious business in the men’s game. American players typically are the worst at it, but then, as the U.S. plays catch-up in all other aspects of the game it’s not surprising that flopping skills will have to assert their place in the culture over the coming generations. Is not an art that can be mastered willy-nilly or overnight.
In all of Europe, some parts of Latin America and a growing number of African communities, flopping is taught from a very early age. Summer flopping academies (les ecoles tomber) abound in the suburbs of most large French and Italian cities; so popular with wannabe FIFA-parents that admission is as cutthroat-selective as that of any Westchester County preschool. Children in many soccer-centric communities are encouraged from the cradle to respond instinctively to all flopping opportunities (“floportunities,” as they are known to Premier League families). Infants are conditioned to cry inconsolably at any touch, even a caress, and to hold their breath and turn purple at any cross word or the slamming of a door. At the professional international level, first-class flopping creates a parallel dynamic to the actual contest on the pitch that can have far-reaching political implications. A truly well-executed flop, meaning one in which the flopper spends at least a full minute in gyrations of agony while play is stopped and the announcers begin a solemn appraisal of his career, is an occasion for the marshaling of riot police and the possibility of post-match marshal law. Should a yellow card be issued, attorneys clear their calendars, diplomatic channels are opened and trade agreements are in instant peril. On those occasions when the red card is waved, fighter squadrons may scramble, and prime ministers are summoned déshabille from the sweaty boudoirs of ambassadors’ wives. Seldom do these incidents escalate further, but in the Beautiful Game, one must always be ready for Ugliness. Never has a female flop elicited more than a snarky text from a diplomatic underling. As superior as they are in just about everything else, when it comes to flopping, the girls just don’t get it.
She laughed, for crying out loud.
Not that girls can’t play dirty. God no. A couple of years ago, a University of Mexico defender embraced her fifteen minutes of infamy by grabbing the ponytail of a rival BYU player and hurling her to the ground. The UNM woman was suspended, and the incident was a fleeting Youtube sensation, not that there are any other kind. I have a niece who plays rugby, who was perhaps fifteen at the time. I mentioned the story to her at a family dinner, just the bare-bones facts that I had read: that the offending player, who subsequently turned up in a fistful of home-made videos as a habitually aggressive, not to say dirty competitor, had made a flap (not flop) with her vicious Yank of the Hank. My niece—a lovely, poised , sparkle-eyed young woman, simply stared at me, waiting politely, I realized, for the rest of the story. Informed that this was the story, she was genuinely confused. Was the victim, she asked, in the perpetrator’s way? Was the ref looking? In other words, what was the big deal? Taken aback, I asked her if she had girl-handled other players by their ponytails. “Of course,” she said, sincerely baffled by my curiosity. “It’s rugby.”
I mentioned women’s basketball. It’s as popular as anywhere in Seattle, as the Storm, our vaunted Gal Team, has brought the city its only sports championship, indeed its only reliable sports competency, since the Super Sonics took the national crown in 1979. (I am discounting a fluke appearance by the Seahawks in the 2005 Super Bowl, a dreadful contest that eked out a Neilson rating significantly below that of the Home Shopping Network.) Despite its local popularity, both the Storm and the league are in perennial crisis mode. Indeed, a lot more digital ink is spilled forecasting the sport’s demise than reporting on games. I know both men and women who love to see the Storm play live, though come to think of it I’ve never heard of anyone watching them on TV, and couldn’t say whether the games even are broadcast. Without exception these folks either are the parents of girl hoopsters or themselves former players whose spouses come along because—well, imagine the consequences to a husband of declining to attend. To the rest of us, and to our admittedly small-minded shame, the women’s game more often than not is a tedious embarrassment; an unintended parody of its taller, faster, testosterone counterpart. While a grown woman sprinting down a soccer pitch is a thing of grace and splendor, a grown woman making a layup looks simply silly. This is merely an observation, presented as an opinion.
Women’s hockey is another kettle of estrogen. It’s not something one sees on the screen, to my knowledge, outside of the Winter Olympics. But each time the Games roll around I anticipate a reintroduction to the only way I’ve ever really comprehended the game. It’s not just the vaunted de-emphasis on vicious checking and side-show fisticuffs, or the pure grace and precision—not unlike soccer, come to think of it—of its practitioners that attracts me. It’s the fact that I can see the goddamned puck. As fast as the women’s game is, I still can, perhaps as often as not (though never more) actually follow the little black thing they’re batting around. When I watch men play, I never see it. Never. No one does. Near my semi-usual grocery store is a tavern that is run by two hockey-crazy fellows, and naturally their hockiphile buddies pack the place during the final run to and during the Stanley Cup. I was in during the recent championship, after a game but watching highlights on some hockey-only channel (who knew?) that’s always on above the bar. An owner and I got talking about the women’s game, and the puck. He laughed, but I sensed discomfort, and became doubly suspicious when he turned his back quickly and began dunking an already clean pint glass in the soapy water. I pressed him: So: can you see the puck when you watch? He ignored me, suddenly whistling. I bided my time. When he came to offer a second pint I had him trapped. Do you? Do you see the puck in motion? He shuffled a little, one foot to the other, grinning fretfully. Finally he shrugged. I’ve seen it, he said.A couple of times? He ducked his head, laughed a little choked laugh. Yeah. Sure. A half dozen maybe. And you watch every day, I said. He grinned again. His face was red. Suddenly he did a funny little dance, hopping from side to side, his considerable bulk jiggling like custard. Then he nodded. You know where it is, he said, his voice cracking a bit with indignation. You watch the defender. Which way he leans.
Right.
Softball needs a word here. It’s women’s basketball backwards. Softball is a women’s game. The spectacle of men playing fast-pitch softball is rare. I’ve only seen it played by male oldsters, former minor leaguers and top-notch amateurs, well into their dotage, and such contests no way are intended as a spectator sport. They attack the game with the lazy confidence of age-advanced hand-ball players, certain in advance of every angle and bounce, so that the defenders, even the infielders, seldom need to move more than a half-step in any direction. The women’s game is “soft” ball too, but it’s hard core and then some. Being on the perimeter of an NCAA-level softball game, or I imagine in the midst of one, god save us, must be as close a waking experience as a human can have to being on the playing board of an old-time pinball machine. The pitching is absurdly fast, and the paltry wingspan distance between the hurler gal’s release and the plate requires a hitter’s bat speed to be approximately equivalent to that of sound. Once the ball is in play, a frantic choreography ensues that is a distant cousin at best to the comparatively lazy waltz of a baseball play. There is a palpable sense of urgent, reckless desperation on a softball field—one senses that these women would and perhaps will do (and likely have done) anything to win. (Short of flopping, I suppose.) My understanding is that there is currently a women’s professional softball league consisting of four teams. I don’t understand why it’s not more popular.
A sport played (almost) exclusively by women that is a recent huge pop culture favorite in the Pacific Northwest is Roller Derby, so it too deserves a word. The word is Why.
It’s nearly 11pm on the Third of July, which I commemorated earlier by composing a guitar instrumental of the same name; a syncopated finger-picky thing that borrows shamelessly from the “Jamaica Farewell.” Outside I hear the muted explosions of distant fireworks, unless it’s a tactical air attack on the llama farm in Greenbank. I suppose if the wrong something got into the water up at the Naval Air Station, Bob’s your uncle on where the bull’s-eye would land. If llamas aren’t a threat to National Security, I don’t know what is. Precious, temperamental, aloof, over-sensitive, volatile, neurotic critters are llamas—the soccer players of the animal kingdom. I wonder if llamas flop. No, come to think of it, I don’t.
Time to calm the agitated dog. God bless Vespucciland.
