Livin’ in Division in a Shiftin’ Scene

25 November 2006

Bolton 3 – 1 Arsenal
Diagne-Faye 10' (A)
Anelka 45' (A)
Gilberto 45' (F)
Anelka 76' (A)

Classic 06/07 Arsenal form. You might even call it vintage Arsenal. Two weeks after crushing Liverpool and four days after crushing Hamburg, Arsenal returns to lose pathetically to Bolton. Bolton isn't bad, they're actually fairly decent this season, but you'd figure after Liverpool and Hamburg,…. You'd figure. I guess that's the problem: Arsenal figures too, but they can't figure, they have to perform. And when it doesn't matter, they don't perform. Only problem is, eventually that adds up to fourth place. Thanks guys. Maybe, if you keep underachieving, we'll stop demanding so much of you, and you can "shock" us in 07/08 by, I don't know, winning something. Mind you, that's a suggestion, not a demand: heavens forbid you do something your fans want. Maybe you should just keep passing the ball, right, that has to count for something? Sure, goals win games, but passing looks cute, and really it's quite beautiful, and this is the beautiful game, let's make it beautiful. Winning ugly is for losers, and well, we certainly aren't losers. We're just not winners, either. When you think about it, this is, for the most part, the life that I am sitting down to lead. My teams can’t win everything every year, they’ll be lucky to win once every ten years. So, nine out of ten years, I’ll be unsatisfied with the results that my team gives me. Why bother at all? I can hope, one year, the Yankees, Arsenal, the Redskins, the Wizards, George Mason, and Andy Murray, will all win in their respective sports. This has about a ten-year window, because Murray’s career is limited within his sport (which is tennis). So let’s say, instead of Murray, my given tennis player of choice. If all of those win in one year, I should probably just kill myself, because it’ll never happen again. But, it’ll never happen in the first place, and I wouldn’t kill myself if it did. I’m not sure what I hope to achieve, and in all honesty, I may not be hoping to achieve anything. Sports are, almost by definition, an exercise in the existential. Existentialism denies any meaning behind the universe; rather than viewing the universe as a place pulsating with the energy of life, existentialists see it more as a system, an objective network through which we, as mortal beings, establish various ideologies to project order onto something which inherently ignores order. Rather, it is not that there is no order, but there is no knowable order; much like there is no knowable reality. For example, God’s existence is not provable or deniable. The only acceptable route is to either accept or reject his existence on the basis of faith. I, rather than concern myself in the pursuit of something which I believe is unknowable, pursue that which I believe is knowable: human society, the reality that we create with each other. The greatest truth is that which we do. Thinking alone does not create, but agreeing with each other does. Our government is real because we choose it to be: should we so desire, as a people we could determine that our government should not exist, and it would be gone. The rules of sport have been agreed upon and thus sport exists: we make it so. Defining reality by dialogue, however, is a slippery slope, because dialogue is not static. Meaning amongst words shifts over time, like erosion on a beach. But, as Sartre pointed out, our essence is determined by our existence. The scope and entirety of our lives form in relation to our experience of the world. Similarly, words are shaped by our use of them. We grow up and learn the definitions of words, but as we learn them, we attach them to observation, and slowly use them to mean what we say, rather than say what we mean. The relationship within social dialogue is synergistic. Likewise, sports mutate as time passes. The focus within a sport transfers from one angle to another. A lot of changes happened to baseball in the 1920s, and home runs became more commonplace. Babe Ruth brought the home run to prominence, and ESPN created an appetite within the viewer for non-stop home run footage. One hundred years ago, home runs were crazy and rare; today they are cool, but more importantly they are a yardstick of a player’s ability and dominance. My love of sports comes from this demonstration of existentialism and social constructionism. We have built these sports, no one else. They do not come from some mysterious past, some unknowable secret. They were invented by people, and they represent our ability to come together and make something bigger than ourselves. Of course, to this end, they are also ours to destroy, as is being done by steroids. I’m one of the (many) people that absolutely detest steroids; they remove any element of humanism from the game. By increasing the standards for athletes, they belittle the ‘natural’ contributions that came before them, as if somehow, 61 home runs is not good enough. An interesting aside is that no one, at the end of 1961 season, when Roger Maris got his 61st home run, no one cared: he was shunned because he hadn’t done it in 154 games like Ruth had, he had done it in 162 games. Is this analogous to steroids? Certainly not. If Barry Bonds had hit 73 home runs unenhanced in 190 games, I’d be impressed. Baseball is a sport that wears you down; with the second longest season in sports (only overshadowed by soccer seasons, which go on generally for a crazy nine months), maintaining consistency is what is really impressive about the sport. Getting on the field, day in and day out, going two-for-five, stealing a base, making that mental effort to compete almost every day: that’s what makes baseball real. Us normal people, we who aren’t millionaire athletes, we don’t get to take six-month off seasons from work. Sure, they weight-lift and train in the off-season, but we know that’s wholly different from working 8 hours a day. It’s different mentally. Work wears me down. Conjuring up enough thoughts to keep writing here seems arduous at times. Eventually though, at the end of the day, it still feels important to me. Perhaps it’s comparable to the value of sports: this project that I am erecting, that seems to change direction every week, is another example of existentialism, of social constructionism, the two defining factors of my philosophy. This project has become my discussion with society: I am questioning it, conversing with it, exploring it, trying to understand where I fit in. This work provides an outlet for both my external thoughts on the world, and my internal thoughts on myself. My name is Sam, and I’m having a quarter-life crisis. I’ve been having one for some time now. I bring this to you, gentle reader, so that you may understand our generation, so that you will sympathize with our struggles. We were shorn of our innocence early in life, such that our sensibilities have become jaded, such that many of us stopped caring. I don’t want to make things right with the world because I can’t; but I can make things right with myself.