Sport/Therapy: Thoughts on Depression & Runner's High

Runner's high is just what the name suggests: a sense of euphoria.

I feel this on a really good day, when I run for more than an hour. Once you hit it, you feel like you can run forever. If that wind catches my sail at 60 minutes, I'll run another 40. I started logging way more miles after I first got a taste of it. Euphoria is a great motivator.

Recent medical studies have shown that the biochemistry of this state is real, and that it looks just like the euphoria of "new love" - and, interestingly, the deep pleasure of listening to music that blows your mind (see "Yes, Running Can Make You High"). I sometimes feel this intense pleasure when playing soccer - I love pick-up games that last for hours. The pacing is different, but the payoff is similar - on a good day, I feel in love with the pitch and everyone on it. (The high in soccer is distinctly social - I am sure the nature of this high is why so much soccer literature is so outrageously romantic.)

Anyway, journalism on "runner's high" suggests that running has a natural anti-depressent effect. I don't know if that's accurate - but it sure is true that "runner's high" feels good when you are feeling it, and, too, if you are in the habit of running that long and that far, you are at least able to get yourself out of bed and out of the house.

But it turns out that athletes can have their own form of athletic depression: "overtraining syndrome." According to this 2002 article in Peak Performance, it looks just like major depression - but is signaled in the athlete by "decreased physcial performance." That drop in performance compounds the difficulty of depression's symptoms (difficulty sleeping, loss of interest/motivation, weight loss/disordered eating, irritability, restlessness, etc.). [Image: Yrsa Roca Fannberg's "Falling" (2009).]

According to Laurence Armstrong and Jaci VanHeest (authors of the study on which the Peak Performance article is based), disappointing performance leads to more and harder training as the athlete tries to grapple with feelings of failure and is driven by the sense that "harder" work will somehow get them back on top. The syndrome produces a vicious cycle and can be hard to notice because athletes are so good at doing the very thing that "traditional" depressives seem to struggle with. An athlete tends, by definition, to be very active - and often lives in a world reluctant to acknowledge the reality of psychological struggle. (Laurence Armstrong and Jaci VanHeest's study can be foud in Sports Medicine, 32(3) 2002, pp 185-209.)

I have been wondering if, in all these new conversations about treating depression in athletes, people have explored the impact of antidepressants (increasingly prescribed to everyone) on "runner's high." As happy as I was when an anti-depressant relieved me of the disabling cycles of panic and anxiety which tormented me in my 20s, I was sad to find that experiences of euphoria became muted - I distinctly remember, in fact, that I couldn't "feel" music the way I used to. (I also didn't cry at the movies like I do normally. Or sink into spirals of complete despair.) I didn't run much back then. No more than 30 minutes a couple times a week. So I have no personal experience with the impact of an anti-depressant on runner's high.

Some anti-depressants lift the "floor" of your lows, while also dropping the ceiling of your highs. Surely, they must have an impact on how athletes experience the pleasures (and anxieties) of their sport. And I wonder how that kind of chemical shift in feeling impacts people in competition.

Armstrong and Vaneest's study recommends that atheletes suffering from depression work closely with their therapist, coach, and (ideally) nutrionist - the only way to track the effectiveness of any treatment is to keep very close track of what one is doing, and how one is feeling. This of course means bringing the darker side of the athlete's emotional life into the open - to acknowledge experiences of depression as an aspect of the self - as one of the things that make us unique, and even uniquely driven.

Potential

By "potential", we mean something more than possibility. We mean something there - latent, just beneath the surface and waiting to be coaxed into open air.

It's what kills fans. Feeling the potential for our teams, and yet watching the reality unfold, match after match. And still believing. You feel foolish. And then you look at the people on the pitch, and on the bench - and remember: the potential. You think: Yes, they've lost or drawn or looked awful even as they've managed to wrangle a few points here and there. But the potential is real.

And, of course, it is.

It's one of the things that binds us to them - potential, and our ability to project the wildest possibilities into the future of the players on the field; our conviction that a little tinkering here and there - and that potential will be unlocked!

Look at Barça. They've just set a La Liga record for reaching 50 points mid season.

The realization of Barça's potential makes the season (as it is unfolding) extraordinarily satisfying. You don't have to be a Barça fan to know that this side has long had perhaps the greatest potential of any playing. But recent years have given much cause for suffering. That misery is not caused by the team playing badly - but by the great disparity between the team's performance and its potential. Now, the long tested faith of fans is affirmed by game after game of not just convincing victories but victories won by playing their game.

Events like this feed our need to believe that every now and again, the beautiful maybe you see just there, just out of reach, rises up and becomes real.

Marta. Again.

FIFA just announced the winner of the award for female footballer of the year: Marta. Again. Now, I am a fan. I love Marta, and am thrilled she'll be playing for the LA Sol. (I am learning to embrace the fact that the team is named after mediocre beer.)

But since 2001, this award has been given to exactly three women: Marta (three times), Birgit Prinz (three times), and Mia Hamm (twice). As deserving as these three women are - are there really no other players that the coaches and players casting their votes can think of?  

I think the lack of imagination here reflects the lack of exposure of the sport. These are basically the three players that players and coaches know best - for reasons that have far more to do with access to tournaments, to footage of the players, to, in fact, any information about women's football at the international level. These are the players that everyone is aware of.

But I think that those of us who have been watching Brazil seriously (in not just final matches, but throughout tournaments) would have nominated Cristiane. Five goals in six matches in the Olympics (for example) - and two (gorgeous) assists. She was the top scorer in the 2004 Olympics, too, by the way. Her performance in South American cup competition is also exceptional - and it looks like her presence on your roster guarantees your team silverware.

This is not to take anything away from Marta, but as a fan of international women's football,  I find the lack of imagination in the selection kindof depressing.  Not for what it says about the sport, but for what it says about awareness of the women playing it at the top level.

[Check out this great post from theglobalgame on Marta and her move to Los Angeles - this is possibly the most well-balanced and researched article on her to date in English!]

Short Shorts & a Günter Netzer Sighting

First, a bit of television history making the viral video rounds:



There is oh so much to say about this.

I will confine my comments here to observe that the gentleman in the leather jacket is Günter Netzer, an early Ferrari-driving, nightclub owning popstar-footballer. One of his most fabled moments on the pitch arrived in the final for the 1973 German Cup. After a season of public power struggles with his manager, he announced a move to Real Madrid a week before this final game against Koln. The manager had him start the match on the bench. I am not sure I understand the details, but I think the manager tried to sub him in during the first half, and Netzer refused to go on the field. And then, during the second half, he shed his jacket, and said "I will go on now" and scored the winning goal. You can see that goal here, starting at about 2 minutes.

A friend of mine told me about Netzer and this incident in August, and, amazingly, we saw Netzer at an airport in Berlin just a few days after that conversation. I thought of asking him to autograph my copy of Moby Dick (the only thing I had in my hands that someone could sign, as it happens), but I didn't have a pen, don't speak German, and got shy.

Happy Holidays!

The Professor's Somewhat Highbrow Gift Guide

1. Jonathan Maghen et al, Municipal de Fútbol (Christof Keller Editions/Textfield, 2008/ ISBN 0981632505). $80.00 - though available for less on Amazon. This is total self-promotion.

Municipal de Fútbol is a unique combination of art, graphic design, and fútbol. Centered on Michael Wells's gorgeous photographs of amateur men's teams playing in leagues across East and South Los Angeles, the book explores the visual texture of fútbol angelino - the most popular sport in Los Angeles, and a defining aspect of LA culture lived below the radar of Anglo media. (Click here for photos of the whole thing.) For $80, you get a box containing two books of photographs (with essays by yours truly), a set of five artists prints, a fold-out poster of an LA amateur team, and - incredibly, an Adidas jersey for a European national team. $80 is a lot, but given all that you get for that, it's really a steal. This is not your everyday soccer product. It's an awesome gift for the person in your life interested in grassroots football, and perhaps the best glimpse at football culture in the US that you'll find. It's fully bilingual, too.

Amazon has it - for $53! Get on it!

2. A national team jersey with the name & number of a favorite female player.

A decent on-line sports store will let you customize a national team jersey, giving you the option of honoring your favorite footballing goddess. And while there is a certain poetry to wearing the US # 1 shirt with the name Solo emblazoned on the back, why not celebrate the international game? For example - a Brazil shirt with number 8/Formiga,11/Christiane, or 10/Marta. Nigeria's 4/Nkwocha, or 12/Uwak. Germany's 1/Angerer or 9/Prinz.

This is a great, original gift idea for fans of the women's game - for especially but not only younger players. Broadcast your love for Brazil, England, Nigeria, or Germany's football cultures, as well as your admiration for the women who represent these countries in international competition.

3. Pete Davies, I Lost My Heart to the Belles (Mandarin, 1997/ISBN-10: 0749320850)

This is a must-read for fans of the game - and not just the women's game. Davies followed the Belles throughout the 1994-1995 season, when the team was just cresting their incredible run as the overwhelmingly dominant force in English women's football. It's a brilliantly written chronicle of a team's ups and downs, and remarkable for the portraits it offers of these largely working-class women training and playing (some on the English National Team) on their own time. It's great on the euphoria of a good win, on the psychological agony of injury, on the challenges of training and managing a team with next to nothing in terms of resources. Every amateur player no matter their gender can relate to these stories.

But there are elements to this story that are very specific to the issues faced by women in the UK. This season saw the fallout from a BBC broadcast of a controversial documentary about the Belles which portrayed them as foul-mouthed and "hard. " I haven't seen it, but something tells me the controversy caused by the documentary is related to the particular anxiety women footballers provoke - that playing the sport is unladylike, and that the sport is full of lesbians. Davies doesn't "out" players, but the book seems to me a loving portrait of a working-class lesbian community. If you are a lesbian reader, you are very likely to see lots of things tucked between the lines (the pubs the team frequents are clearly gay pubs, for example). And it's hard not to wonder if the FA's upset at the BBC documentary and their crappy treatment of Belles players wasn't homophobic. But none of that is addressed directly. Writing for the general reader, Davies negotiates this thorny terrain carefully.

I don't think he uses the word "lesbian" once in the whole book, even though it is really a memoir of butch-bonding - a sport writer palling around with a bunch of 'tomboys' for an entire season. You can feel throughout how deeply moved he was by his experience of getting to know the Belles - and I suspect that if he wasn't already a pretty enlightened guy, by the end of this experience he emerged with a deep respect for women, and for lesbians in particular.

Do you know a female player who is a fan of the English men's game, but knows nothing about what her sisters endure across the pond? Are you a female player and want to share what the women's game feels like with your brother, or dad? This is the book.

I don't think it is still in print, but Alibris sells used copies of it, and you can also find it on amazon.co.uk for next to nothing.

4. Eamon Dunphy, Only A Game? The Diary of a Professional Footballer (Penguin, 1999/ISBN-10: 0140102906). Listed at $12.27 on Amazon.com; available new via amazon.co.uk. Also try Alibris.

It doesn't matter what you think of Dunphy - this must be one of the most incredible examples of football literature out there. Originally published in 1979, this diary records Dunphy's thoughts while he played his last season with Millwall. The book contains some of the most wildly romantic writing about how great playing football feels when all goes well, and some of the most compellingly bleak prose you'll find about the misery of being a sub. It's an awesome read, and no memoir I've read can touch it.

5. Peter Schnall, This is a Game Ladies (Partisan Pictures, 2004 - available on DVD) $19.99

I've praised this documentary before. This has to be one of the best sports documentaries about women athletes ever made. As much as I love Dare to Dream, the documentary about the USWNT, this is a much more complex portrait of C. Vivian Stringer - an already legendary figure in US university-level athletics - and the Rutgers University Women's Basketball Team.

I think I cried through at least half of it. This is a gift for the coach in your life, for the women you know who played college-anything, for fans of women's basketball, and for young women of color looking for role models in high-level athletics.

6. Eduardo Galeano, Soccer in Sun and Shadow (English translation Verso, 2003/ISBN-10: 1859844235) $17.00 (but you can find it cheaper than that on the internet)

This is a love letter to the beautiful game written by an internationally renown Uruguyan writer. Written in very short "chapters", it is the kind of book you keep nearby for moments when you just need a pick-me-up. This is the gift you give to a guy/girl who loves the game, when you want to really get their attention. It is, quite possibly, the most beautifully written book about soccer - the book that captures most closely the nature of our affection for it.

This book is in print - it is widely read in Latin America - and readily available. This extraordinarily poetic book will rock the world of whomever you give it to.

7. Helmuth Costard, Football as Never Before (1971). 16.90 Euros

A DVD edition of Helmuth Costard's amazing real-time portrait of George Best playing for Manchester United (in a match against Coventry). The perfect gift for the hard-core Man U fan with a wee bit of interest in film, art, or just George Best. (The film is hopelessly sexy!) This is plainly the inspiration for Douglas Gordon/Philippe Perano's Zidane film (which is itself available in Europe and I believe due for a release in the US.) Elsewhere, I've described Costard's portrait of Best as the film Andy Warhol would have made if he made a football movie.

I am not sure how to buy it without navigating German websites - here is a link to the DVD's page on its distributor site (this is how I bought it): Zweitausendeins

WARNING: This is only for those of you who can play/deal with DVDs in region 2.

8. Stephen F. Ross and Stefan Szymanski, Fans of the World Unite!: A (Capitalist) Manifesto for Sports Consumers (Stanford, 2008 ISBN 0804756686). $27.95 ($18.45 on Amazon)

This is for your hard core sports fan with a head for business. This book responds to how "fans of baseball, football, basketball and hockey have long been exploited and oppressed by the monopolistic practices of team owners." These two guys examine the economics of team sports globally to tease out the good and the bad in diverse sports systems. The book is really based, though, in their comparison of the international soccer system with American big league sports.

Learning from the lessons offered by both domains, they map out the ways that leagues and teams currently alienate and betray their fans - and propose a series of changes in the way leagues and teams are run. It sounds dry - but for the serious fan, this stuff is fascinating. I'm totally getting this for my accountant brother-in-law. It'll make any reader of it instant winner of late-night beer-fueled arguments about what's really fucked up with the MLS.

(This book is also my prescription for those knuckleheads who think that the US has the most profitable professional leagues in the world - the guys who can't imagine how anyone ever makes money off of soccer.)

9. Mia Hamm, Go for the Goal (Harper Collins, 2000/ISBN: 0060931590). $12.95. This is easy to find in the US. Bizarrely, it is not in bookstores in the UK, though you can find it for nothing at Amazon.co.uk.

This is not an autobiography. This is a book about how Mia Hamm, one of the greatest players the game's ever seen, plays the game. It's really meant for young players - but I must admit, I learned a lot about basic skills from reading it. It's totally useful. I am amazed that this isn't for sale in England - where the women's game is the fastest growing sport. This is a great gift for young players, and old women like myself who are just new to the game. It is very clearly written, and includes drills! Women fans of all ages will enjoy this - though this is not really appropriate for experienced players.

10. Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I talk About Running (Knopf, 2008/ISBN ISBN-10: 0307269191) $21.00. Easy to find.

Murakami is one of the world's greatest living writers, and it turns out he's a marathon runner. This is a down-to-earth portrait of his relationship to long distance running. It is refreshing to read something so thoughtful about what sport means to a "regular" person (meaning the older, non-Olympic, amateur athlete). This is a fantastic book for the athlete in your life who loves to read. If they love to read, they probably know Murakami's novels and will be tickled to discover how much they have in common with him.

Fútbol Mania: Local Teams Featured on Time Warner On Demand

Time Warner's digital on-demand service has a channel dedicated to local amateur soccer. Fútbol Mania profiles teams playing in the 2000 leagues (their figure) in Southern California. I just went through their current offerings (they post new 15 minute episodes every week) and was really psyched - the highlights are good, and the commentary is fun (as far as I can tell - it's in Spanish).

You can find it by going to channel 1, and choosing "local." It should then show up on your menu.

I think I'm just going to tell people who talk about how people "here" are not interested in soccer to just shut up. I mean, what media outlet produces a weekly show about an amateur sport no one cares about? If that was how Time Warner worked, they'd be profiling the women's teams playing in these leagues. (None of the games profiled right now feature women's teams. Shameful!) Anyway, click here for their slightly corny announcement video.

My Favorite Couple: Soccer + Basketball

Soccer's closest cousin is basketball (I'm not alone in thinking this). While basketball's scoreboard couldn't look more different from the minimalist tally of an exemplary football match, the best games in both sports have nearly identical point differentials (1-2 points). They are distinguished by similar brands of spectatorial intensity - the time-outs in a basketball game are all that keeps its audiences from having a mass stroke. Fútbol fans are as crazy as their heroes are fit - we are conditioned by the insane emotional demands of a sport that requires you to spend 90 minutes on the edge of your seat or screaming at the top of your lungs.

I stand by my February comments:

Watching a baseball game has the pleasures of a day out with your friends. Watching a fútbol match is like a crazy one night stand with a sex fiend. There's no rest, no pause for reflection - it's like jumping off a very, very tall cliff. Twice. This is why football fans are so nuts. And sometimes dangerous. Think: Fatal Attraction x 40,000.

I love any attempt to couple basketball and soccer. Like the guys in one of my neighborhood parks who warm up before a soccer match by playing keepy-uppy on the basketball court, and heading the ball into the net. And then, while I was amusing myself with this Kaka homage (recommended to me by youtube, no doubt for its gay disco soundtrack, which I adore) I came across this bit of backyard genius:



I don't understand why there is a hoop in this guy's grassy yard - a few folks on the youtube page ("impossible soccer shot") raise this as evidence of fakery. But if you don't have a paved driveway, and you want to practice free-throws and jump shots, a hoop in a grassy backyard will do. And maybe he put it there to practice this shot. People have dedicated themselves to crazier things. Here, though, the ball sure looks like it goes in and then bounces off the post and lands in the bushes to the right.

Doubters also say this guy's celebration isn't nearly as intense as it should be. But I've seen that particular brand of cocky restraint excersized by teen masters on my own team who act like there is nothing more banal than their jaw-dropping footwork. And then there is Berbatov, famous for the "lack of joy in his celebrations." So I'm not a big fan of using affect as a measure of the magnificance or veracity of the goal given us in these personal videos.

If people resist the idea of this video on the assumption that it can't be done, perhaps it's a reflection of an unwillingness to sit with the idea of this odd couple. But these two sports have more common than people seem able to realize. Both, for example, are associated with underprivileged classes, requiring a minimum of resources to play and enjoy. And yet we continue to imagine them as so far apart.

So, thanks to whoever you are with the marvelous "do" and the shot of shots. I believe it, no doubt because I want to.

.

Who Wants it?: Playing Against Boys/Playing With Girls

Sometimes I think I play with women, and I play against men.

Let me explain: I play in a weekly scrimmage in which I'm the only woman on the field. Last week I had fairly typical night for a female player in an all-male setting. That sort of game looks like this: My teammate has the ball, and there is plenty of space between us. I call for the ball. I'm open, probably because I am not being marked. This may be because I'm a girl. I would like to be seen as enough of a threat to be marked, but I am not above exploiting my invisibility to defenders. So I call for the ball again.

He now has two defenders on him. He looks around for someone to pass it to. I am still unmarked. I perhaps try to get in a better position to receive a pass, and call for the ball again. It is as if I am not only invisible, I am apparently mute as well. I call for the ball in Spanish, and in maybe even in French. I call for it again. He is still holding onto the ball and then he decides to, say, pass it back or attempt to cross it into a cluster of players.

This happens two, three, four times in a row. By which point I am fully demoralized. If at this point in the game the ball is passed to me, I am not expecting it. I either do a bad job controlling it, or get rid of it too quickly. I stop wanting the ball, so I am not fighting for it, and I drift out of the game entirely.

This is where I usually ask to play defense - which is a funny position for a girl my size in a guy's game. But by this point I am mad - at myself as much as my teammates.

Most of the game has been spent trying to make myself visible, to get in the game, and then digging myself out of the psychic hole that swallows you up as you wonder "Is it because I am a girl?" or "Am I that bad?"

So, once I am on the back line I play with the particular focus bestowed by rage. I think very cynically: "He's going to bring it up on the right, because I am here and he thinks he can get around me." And he probably can, since he's 15 years younger than me and has been playing a lot longer. But I can push him wide, and steer him to the next defender - containing him. That almost always works. Often, guys will call for the ball even when I am marking them. I love this. The more they do that, the more likely I am intercept the pass or force the turn-over. And when my foot is on the ball, they have nobody to blame but their own limited imagination.

I love the very particular frustration that those guys display when I get the ball away from them. I think I enjoy defending against guys for this reason. If I've spent the first half of the game being ignored, I play the second half like a castrating bitch. (This is more or less how I experience certain aspects of my professional life as well!)

When I play soccer with women, this stuff just doesn't happen. You either want the ball or you don't. A player who repeatedly doesn't pass the ball to an unmarked teammate who is calling loudly for the ball will catch shit from the entire team. And if I'm not getting the ball from a teammate, I just think she's an ass. I don't think she's sexist.

I became a much better player by playing with women. I got the ball a lot more often, and was expected to do more with it. (There is nothing quite so awful as that thing guys will do with girl-players - where they act like it's a miracle when you complete a pass. It takes the pleasure from the compliment if you realize that your basic competency has come as a surprise!)

Without the demoralization of playing with boys handy as a rationalization for limits in my ambition, I had to ask much deeper questions of myself. If I wasn't getting the ball, it was because I wasn't calling and fighting for the ball. It wasn't because the team didn't believe in me. It was because I didn't believe in myself.

The players I most admire play with an incredible confidence. The ball seems to find them. It's like they are fueled by a cocktail of desire and belief. Taking the field with women like this is just plain liberating.

And with that, I'll raise my glass to our new President and direct your attention to the video below, made by students at my home university - UC Riverside.

Yes We Did!

Kick It Out?: What do we mean by "It" when we talk about homophobia & football?

England's Football Association is apparently developing a campaign targeting football's homophobic culture. This isn't the first time the FA has made gestures in this direction, so pardon my cynicism about the depth of this organization's commitment to the topic. That said, the current campaign is being generated by Kick It Out, the FA's anti-racist program, which seems fairly successful in its consciousness-raising efforts.

Interest in the prevalence of homophobia in the English football world (something that hardly makes Brits unique) has peaked due to an October incident. Tottenham fans, who obviously had nothing good to say about their own team at the time, sang vile homophobic and racist chants at the Portsmouth player and English international Sol Campbell (long the target of such abuse, partly animated by resentment about his move from Tottenham to Arsenal).

I obviously have a lot to say about this subject: homophobia is a defining element of sports culture. It is deeply ingrained, and is a form of hate to which many leading figures in the sport feel perfectly entitled (like Chelsea's Scolari, who has said he'd kick any gay player off his side). Homophobia animates hostility towards the women's game - so much so, it is indeed hard to tell the difference between it and simple sexism. (For women in many parts of the world - including England - just playing soccer is enough to make you a "dyke" and target of homophobic abuse.)

The homophobia of English football is a reflection of its homosociality and - dare I say it? - we will have homophobia in the game as long as we have sexism in the game. The two are absolutely linked.

The term "homosocial" comes from sexuality studies, and describes single-sex spaces in patriarchal culture (like the military, the US Senate, fraternities, and sports teams) - these are environments defined by the exclusion of women. Defined, too, by the exclusion of all things feminine, effeminate, womanly, gay, or queer.

Clubs have made some interesting gestures towards gay and lesbian fans (see this story). This is a huge step in the right direction. But I'm going to say that just as important to changing things is the active support of women's involvement in the game, the elimination of baldly sexist advertising, and general consciousness raising among the people who work behind the scenes and in front of the camera about how to show respect for all of the people involved in football culture.

I am not saying the only way to get rid of homophobia is to have co-ed football. But we may not really get rid of homophobia in the game until we get rid of hostility towards women. Flip-side, too, is that we won't see an honest embrace of the women's game until we see a celebration of the lesbians who play it.

I just find it really hard to imagine how sports culture is going to make homophobia unacceptable without changing attitudes about not just sexuality, but gender too. The two go hand-in-hand.

New Brunswick, NJ - A Secret Center of the Women's Soccer World?: Left Wing Meets Charlie Naimo [And Indugles Herself in NJ Fantasies]

Yesterday I got to meet Charlie Naimo, who is currently the coach of the W-League league champions The Pali Blues and is also the manager to the WPS Los Angeles team (whose name will be unveiled this weekend at Sunday's Galaxy game).

Walking into the Pali Blues office in Santa Monica, my eyes went first to the Formiga jersey on the wall (framed by shirts from Kelly Smith and Marinette Pichon). If you read my blog, you know that I am a huge fan of the Brazilian international. Turns out that during his years coaching the New Jersey Wildcats to the top of the W-League tables, Naimo successfully recruited Formiga to play for his team - using a guy he met at local gas station who spoke Portuguese to facilitate their first discussions over the phone. (Naimo is standing second from the right in this picture of the 2005 championship side.)

This ignited my imagination - the Wildcats are based in Mercer County, NJ. [Note: I originally wrote this assuming they were based in New Brunswick, NJ - home to Rutgers, alma mater for me and my sisters -see comment below.] Naimo was at Rutgers from 92-94, and it was there that he met Denise Reddy, who worked with him on the coaching staff for NJ Sky Blue. She also played and coached with the Wildcats - and is now Assistant Coach for the Chicago Red Stars. Rutgers, as fans of the women's game know, proudly claims Carli Lloyd among its recent graduates. And we also know Alexi Lalas, too, as Rutgers guy (though he left one course shy of graduation - which is a very, very Rutgers thing to do). As we talked, I began to glimpse something of a New Jersey network...

We used to think of UNC Chapel Hill as the nexus of the women's soccer world, but as others have noted, times have changed and the women's soccer circuit has become more complex - New Brunswick (the setting for Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize winning The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) is clearly one of several sites from which movers and shakers emerge.

Thinking about what playing for this Wildcats team must have been like, I found myself wondering [mistakenly] where Formiga lived in the urban/suburban wilds of "New Brumfus." Did she ever eat at Szechuan Gourmet (the Chinese restaurant for which I worked as a hostess in the 1980s)? Did she ever hit the dance floor at The Melody? (Is that place, pictured here, still there?) What did (and do) the Wildcats do when they aren't playing soccer? What do their day jobs look like? What did French international, WUSA star, and Wildcats player Marinette Pichon think of New Jersey?

[Of course, I wrote the above willfully projecting the Wildcats in New Brunswick, which is about a 30-40 minute drive east of Mercer County - not all that far from Walt Whitman's stomping grounds, and closer to my family's home. I had strangely projecting the team along the line of my own commuting route between home and school!]

I digress. My point is that I was thrilled to learn that Formiga (who will probably be playing for the Bay Area WPS team) is practically a Jersey girl.

And Naimo, a North Brunswick native, is a Jersey guy. He definitely has a very NJ combo: matter-of-fact-friendliness balanced with a "don't fuck with me" vibe. (Think: Tony Soprano, or, even better, "Bruce" or Patti Smith.) You can see that balance making for a very competitive coach - soliciting a level of commitment from players with that approachability, but using that DFwM face to push players to match his level of commitment to the team.

And, well, his record speaks for itself. Every team for which he has worked is a well organized, well-funded group that ruthlessly slaughters its competition. I am not sure if I am reading this right, but it looks like in the past four or five years, his teams have had a combined 67-3 record.

Naimo was totally unapologetic about that dominance. He has little sympathy for other organizations that don't fund their teams adequately, and don't support them with professional training. What are you supposed to do? Play less aggressively? Of course not.

He is not much of a bullshitter, either. I especially enjoyed what he had to say about the challenges of soccer culture here in the U.S. But I'm saving that part of our conversation for another post.

Falling Down

If I ask myself how playing soccer has changed me, I'd have to say that I fall a lot more than I used to.

Coaches say "stay on your feet" before a game. They need to say this because falling is such a big part of soccer. Who says "stay on your feet" before a baseball game? Nigerian Faith Ikidi is pictured here surprising North Korea's Ri Kum Suk with a reverse kick. I have no idea if she stayed on her feet as she did so - but clearly she's not playing like that's her only aim.

Falling was not a part of my life until I started playing about five years ago. Tripping, sure. But falling? Flying through the air falling? These were bodily events to be avoided at all costs.

Falling was not a part of my life until I tried tackling Sojin.

This was at the start of my new formation as a soccer nut. I was one of those dangerous new adult players with no sense of her own physicality or how playing the game actually works. I was running full-on at Sojin, who had the ball. I had no plan, and I wasn't wearing cleats.

I don't remember what happened, but I ended up launched into the air like Superman, except of course I can't fly. I landed flat on my stomach - a very weird crash landing that knocked the breath out of me.

The experience was extremely bizarre for me. Totally mystifying. What had happened? Why did I fly through the air like that? What had I done? Was it my fault? Was it Sojin's? (I had a terrible tendency to want to blame whoever else was near me for whatever happened to me on the field.) Being a congenital theorist, I made everybody stop playing to process the experience with me. (I am amazed these folks put up with me during that first year!)

Sojin, a far more experienced athlete and certainly a better soccer player, was bemused by my confusion, and patiently explained that if you run full speed at someone - if you charge at someone like that - you are very likely to go flying. "Plus," she said very sensibly, "you need cleats." (That was the last time I played in anything but the proper shoes.)

Nearly a year later I had another memorable fall. In the intervening months I'd started playing pick-up games and had learned a lot. I'd learned to think less - or, more nearly, I'd learned to let my body do more of the thinking. This time I was tackled by a pretty big guy who meant me no harm, but physics dictated that I go ass-over-teakettle forward through the air - I'd been running, and somehow he got me from behind. I tumbled right over myself, and came up on my feet - ball still at my toes. I tried to play on, but my friends were all so stunned that they'd stopped to stare. They were rightly wondering if I was OK - as every other time I'd fallen, I'd been rattled to my physical and psychic core.

This time, however, I was relaxed when I went down, and so the fall didn't really take me down. It was, in fact, fun. I remember that fall in great detail - and a few others, too. A player nicknamed Barca slide tackled me in a training session last spring - she mistimed the tackle just a bit and clipped my feet. Everyone was mad at her, but I was thrilled that'd she'd considered me enough of a threat. Sure, I was sent a few feet in the air, but I was fine. And I'd won my team a free kick. In June, I played in a tournament staged over a rainy weekend, and the slide tackles were fast and furious - I know I took at least two hard tackles that had me kissing the grass. I found both bracing - like a splash of cold water. They were clean, fluid tackles, too - something I admire, even if they are directed at me. And I honestly think I played better that day for them.

As a defender, you often go flying because you are giving, not receiving the tackle. I am still to green to be working on anything but instinct, and so when I go flying it's out of a reflex. I don't usually know what has happened until I'm wiping the dirt off of myself. Still, I'm thrilled by the experience.

I am not yet at the level I most admire - the player who throws herself in the air to win the ball or score. My falls are reactive - and they are usually caused by something I am doing with my feet. I'm not the player who will dive to head the ball into the net - but I would very much like to be her.

I used to think that falling was synonymous with getting hurt. But I know now that that isn't exactly true. Falling awkardly, falling when you are tense - this will hurt. But play relaxed and fluid, and you'll be surprised by what your body can do. Somehow you fall, but you don't fall down.

Modern Minstrels: Sexist Jokes about Women Athletes

A popular youtube video poking fun at women playing basketball is in my view little more than a modern day incarnation of old-fashioned minstrelsy. Those lightly "comic" routines were once found funny by racist audiences who enjoyed having their attitudes confirmed in entertaining spectacles that should turn the stomach.These images and performances provided the gearwork by which a white supremacist culture rationalized its most violent and abusive practices. (Spike Lee addresses the love affair between American culture and minstrel performance is his brilliant satire Bamboozled.)

It may seem extreme to some to compare the "spoof" on the idea of a WNBA Live game with things like that, but....

Below we have a man in lesbian-drag (the straight guy's acceptable form of black-face), playing at being a WNBA star, introducing his bored friends to the new game - an abject out-dated and comically slow moving "virtual" basketball game, in which a lone female stick figure limps across the scene and makes a bad shot. The player then falls over, "injured" when she gets a "yeast infection."

There is, it turns out, a whole subgenre of youtube videos mocking the WNBA - not because the authors of these videos have a problem with the organization, but because they can't get over the idea that women play basketball, and that there are people who want to watch them. This came as a total shock to me. And not just because I love watching the LA Sparks in action (and think they were robbed in the playoffs). I just spent a year in England getting acquainted with Old World sexist attitudes there about women playing soccer. Silly me - I'd felt a certain national pride in the way that Americans seemed to at least not hate the idea of women athletes.

That was a really naive fantasy. Apparently, most (not all) guys here can handle women playing soccer (sport of girls and immigrants). But basketball? Professionally? Youtube hosts a range of these just plain offensive diatribes. These are made by guys who are so full of hate for this idea, they produce homophobic and just plain moronic pieces about how boring women's basketball is, how badly women play, how ludicrous it is that anyone should try to get anyone to watch WNBA games.

A few months ago I posted a comment to neXib's youtube video, which features goal keeping "errors" in the 2007 Women's World Cup. I expressed my outrage and pointed to Nadine Angerer's amazing record and highlights. He responded "that's because she's a shemale." And closed the comments.

The comments to neXib's "Female Goalkeepers" (which is often the first youtube video to come up under the search "female goalkeepers") do include a lot of angry fans of the women's game. Some highlights from NeXib and his cohort, as they field that outrage:

To another user (who wrote in agreement with the spirit of his video), neXib wrote:

"Well it has been like that for a long time. Maybe they are afraid of getting some balls in their face :P "

One of his fans:

"women shud take care of kids..these gals luk like half males due to heavy football play"

Other comments:

"Why are these women attempting to do something that they clearly do not have the physical or mental capabilities for? They are only embarrassing themselves."

"ha ha girls suck at football lol " and, from another: "soccer is for men.sorry."

"honestly... I think they should just get rid of women's keepers, and just let guys from the under 15 national teams play GK instead."

The video, which presents itself as evidence of how women keepers "are rubbish", features footage of the three keepers in one tournament (one loses out to Marta - FIFA's Female World Footballer of the Year twice over), and presents itself as a statement of both the women's game and women's abilities.

NeXib disabled the comments not because his video solicited the above sexist remarks from youtube users, but because, in his view, the women and men writing in to point out the sexism of the video had "no sense of humor".

I'm proud to have been the one to have sent him over the edge.

There's a line between videos showing "lowlights" of a sport, and videos which show such things in the service of a statement motivated by prejudice. You would not see youtube hosting videos that singled out errors made by black or latino male players (of any sport), in a manifesto about how no one wants to see them play professionally, because "they can't." And believe me, there was once a moment when people held those ideas and made those arguments - and they would have found criticism of their position humorless, too.

Why is it acceptable to post youtube videos like this about women? Why is that OK? (There is good writing about women & goal keeping see, for example, David James's "Keeping Up with Part-Time Rachel").

In any case, here is youtube's community guideline regarding hate-motivated material:

"But we don't permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, and sexual orientation/gender identity)."

How is a video which clearly singles out a few errors made by women goalies in early rounds of the 2007 FIFA world cup in the explicit service of an argument that women are physically incapable of playing soccer not an "attack" that "demeans" "a group based on...gender"?

Sports Illustrated links to the WNBA spoof with no comment. The comments on youtube largely react to its humor, with only a few tentative voices pointing to the offensiveness of the content of the joke and the comments it invites, like:

LOFL you dumb twat, its also about ball handling, jump shooting, defense, a post game, and alot of other things (none of which those dykes do well).

LOL@ even trying to compare the WNBA to the NBA. I bet the team I played on back in JR High could beat the womens olympic team.

Why aren't those videos censored for violating the standards of hate speech defined above? This kind of "humor" supports world-wide active and often violent suppression of women's interest in athletics - in no small part because it's a fast route to empowerment. If guys HATE the idea that women play basketball, soccer, whatever, it's because they HATE the idea that women might be strong, competitive, fearless, and aggressive. The video I've posted here (reluctantly) is, in my view, a clever and socially acceptable act of hate speech.

And I wish a joyless future of ineffectial layups on all the dudes involved with its production.