Romantic About Soccer?
“How can you not be romantic about baseball?” Brad Pitt, playing Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane in the 2011 movie MoneyBall posed that rhetorical question. If you haven’t seen MoneyBall, stop reading this immediately and go watch it. Life is all about order and proportion and you clearly lack both (I’m joking, but only slightly).
Russian short story master Isaac Babel wrote, “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” That is to say, writing has an unmatched power to engage the emotional life of man. Now write about baseball and we have the recipe for a romance that would make Tristan and Isolde blush.
From the time I was a small boy I always loved baseball. Baseball movies and baseball books always seemed to me to be the best the world had to offer in regards to sports content. Baseball was timeless. Baseball was nostalgia in 9 innings. Baseball was my father and it was Texas. It was New York and of course it was Iowa.
Now I love the intensity of basketball and I’d have much rather been Michael or Kobe than Jeter or Big Papi but I’m pretty sure that when the heavenly Jerusalem descends and this world is cleansed with the fire of the crimson love of Christ, that if one sport is making it through that eschatological baptism it will be baseball.
It certainly won’t be soccer. As Christians we are to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” We are to mature and to “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” Soccer fails to grow. It fails to use the whole body. Short on sanctification, it’s a sport that hasn't evolved to use the hands of the athletes—athletes running around as if we aren't gifted with opposable thumbs. Its a primitive, sub-eschatological sport (but quite useful for getting us in shape for basketball season).
No, I can’t get romantic about soccer—at least I thought I couldn’t until last week. Last week I watched the Chapel Field boys varsity soccer team play a hotly contested regular season game against Burke Catholic. Truly a tale as old as 1517. For a sports junkie I know very little about soccer beyond the basic rules. But anyone who knows sports can easily spot an athlete when they see one.
At one point one of those athletes, senior captain Jonah McDuffie was fouled in the box, only a few yards from the goal. The referee blew the whistle and awarded him a free kick—a layup for an athlete that has made plenty of those—having lead the boys basketball team to the state championship game (not to mention being named first team all-state). But Jonah didn't take the kick. A sophomore, Davey Acuna did and he calmly sunk it into the back of the net — score tied 2-2.
The next day I stopped Davey as he was leaving my history class to ask him what happened on that play. Was there some weird soccer rule to explain why Jonah didn't take the kick and he did?
“No, Mr. Chiarot. There is no rule. Jonah just came up to me and kept saying he wanted me to kick it.”
“What? Why?”
I mean Jonah had been scoring goals early on in the season at an impressive clip. This would be another easy tally on the stat line and would surely help with post-season accolades. Davey, getting slightly emotional, said that he told him that he believed in him and he’d (Jonah) be gone next year. It was a passing of the torch.
You see, sports aren't ultimately about sports and in a short time no one will remember the outcome of these little games we play. But I’m sure Davey will remember what Jonah did. He saw first hand what leadership, selflessness, and love look like. Jonah quietly and unassumingly decreased that his teammate might increase.
I never played soccer. I don’t care for the game. I don't have any personal memories associated with it and yet that story—the story of Jonah (one of my favorite students) and Davey (another one of my favorite students—thats the nice thing about Chapel Field—lots of favorite students) made me feel something that I can only describe as nostalgia. C.S. wrote that nostalgia is actually “...a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience...These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
That nostalgic feeling was just a longing for a day in the future when all men and women will act like Jonah did in that moment. It is a longing for things true, for things good, for things beautiful. How can you not be romantic about soccer?
Maybe in heaven, behind the baseball fields, there will be room enough for one small pitch.
Justin Chiarot serves as a humanities teacher at Chapel Field.
