The World's Game

The bar is stone and worn to a dull shine. The air is still but not unpleasant. The doors around the corner stay open. You get the sounds of the cars, mixed with the clinks of stacked bottles and glasses and the rustle of ice and relaxed conversation and friendly profanity and occasional cell-phone melodies that linger in your head. There is usually no music but occasionally there is shouting. In the corner of the ceiling across the room from the bar, there is a single color television bolted which broadcasts soccer and soccer only, and the soccer stretches out so that pre-soccer lasts fully as long as post-soccer, while the soccer itself, the playing of it, seems to embrace the natural life of a man in its compass, a journey of generations, like space travel, during which a file of scrubbed and smiling boy heroes degenerates into a roving band of filthy old bloody-minded cripples, driven insane by the blast of airhorns and the logorrheic drift of all the hieroglyphics everywhere enclosing the field of play. As in the game of life itself, there are well-dressed men calling the shots from the sidelines, and also as in the game of life it is impossible to be sure where any one competitor stands or what the stakes are in the final accounting. One of the artists I know is a soccer fan and he once tried to illustrate a match structure for me, but the napkin he was drawing on ripped and we gave up. He was contemplative for a while but eventually was back to shouting again. Someone else tried to explain to me how the game of soccer developed organically from an ancient and proud ritual involving voluntary human sacrifice, which seemed to me to go without saying.

Human sacrifice is a topic one learns to tiptoe around. People seem to have a complex about this having (supposedly!) happened and deny that it represents something intrinsic or endemic in the old culture. If it happened, it was a product of exogenous forces, extenuating factors. Famine. Ice age. Meteor. You sense their culpability and how it might terrify them, though it’s hard to come out and say, “Of course I appreciate that *you* were not responsible and would never condone any such thing.” I try to contribute as little as possible to discussions on this theme, and yet, it seems like it turns up often: in cinema, tv, music, body art, tasteless political cartoons.