Via XI Quarterly, a grand photo of FSU women’s soccer team from 1927:
XI Quarterly is one of many outlets working hard to shine a light on the US’s grand soccer history. It’s fantastic to know that FSU is part of that tradition. Oh yeah, and the recent iterations of this team ain’t bad either.
There is nothing not great about soccer on a golf course:
Via Dirty Tackle, Teddy Sheringham kicks off (BOOM!) the Golfoot Masters in Switzerland. The only thing that could make this any cooler is a Vinne Jones v. Eric Cantona skins game.
Football shakes off a couple months of rust. Baseball starts pounding mitts. Flowers bloom in western Georgia. And sportswriters dust off “hope springs eternal.” While Alexander Pope was describing an eternal human condition, the vernal reference in those three words has made the phrase easy pickings for sportswriters in the month of March. In the first act of its use, there is the attempt at sincere description of fans’ response to their beloved team returning to the game. In act two, it’s a sneering mockery aimed at those fans unlucky enough to follow perennial bottom-dwellers. I would like to propose a third act, wherein we can honestly set aside the phrase as it pertains to sports fans because, honestly, it doesn’t pertain to them at all. Spring, and the start baseball, major golf tournaments, and spring football practices, has nothing to do with hope, and everything to do with renewal.
Pope’s full quote, from An Essay on Man, goes like this:
Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home.
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Pope is talking about a constant quest for the better, and the essential underlying faith that there is a better to be attained. For Pope, this faith never wavers and the quest is unending. But that’s not how fans feel about their teams. If “hope” is the simple notion that a team will be better this season than last, or even the best, then it becomes a more complex emotion when applied to fandom. A fan’s aspirations ebb and flow not just between seasons but within them. Sometimes there is no hope to begin with. Sometimes hope is crushed early and cruelly. Sometimes it is lost and returned. Sometimes it is not hope at all, but expectation. There is no one goal, one course, or one narrative that describes how fans feel about their team at any point before, during, or after a season.
And the phrase is never trotted out for NFL, NHL, or NBA pre-seasons or college football practices in fall. Mostly because it has the word “spring” in it. But I’m hoping it is also because writers are implicitly aware that hope, in the Pope-ian sense, is a myth in the sports world. We choose to be fans, but we don’t choose Pope’s optimistic human condition. Fans are not so simplistic, naïve, or delusional for any single phrase to encompass their relationship with their favorite team.
What I think sportswriters are trying to describe when they say “hope springs eternal” is the idea of renewal; of the re-beginning of something; or re-imagining a future. As fans, we very rarely (if ever) have the opportunity to essentially start something anew. Each season for a team is a different season. It is original. And, most importantly, it always happens at the same time every year. The competitive season, the off-season, and the pre-season provide a rhythm to the year.
I admit all fans are not office drones, but most of us have jobs divorced from the earth’s natural cycle. Most of our work doesn’t change based on the season, and is no different in March than it is in September. I’m not going to romanticize our paleo, agricultural, or industrial roots – I happen to love the internet and appreciate the age we live in – but the fact remains that, unlike that of athletes, our work is invariable across days, weeks, months, and years. Just as sports become a proxy for so many other things in life, the sports season is our proxy for real seasons and for renewal: a way to feel that we, as fans, are beginning something new; starting fresh. Given the changes in nature, it is easier to feel this renewal in springtime, although most fans don’t really renew their passions until the fall and winter. Augusta National’s bucolic images and the sight of day baseball and all that green grass are uniquely refreshing, even for non-golf or non-baseball fans. No matter your sport or when it’s competitive season begins, the cycle of sports seasons stands in for the cycle of real seasons.
Thus we get “hope springs eternal.” When really we fans seek a signal of change. We long for a marker of time, a turning of pages, an ebb to the constant flow of life and work. It’s not always hope we feel in spring, or fall, or winter. It’s renewal. Renewal of history, of allegiances, of the pace and pathos of the world.
I haven’t covered the Saints bounty kerfluffle here because it’s a non-issue for me. Even with the new revelations of Gregg Williams asking players to target the head, I don’t care. I didn’t really care when it was revealed the Hurricanes had a bounty out on Chris Rix, other than to marvel at its ineffectiveness. My feeling is that football is an inherently violent and chaotic game, and bounties have a miniscule effect on that violence. And pictures like this demonstrate just how violent and chaotic the game can be on any given play.
(via Getty)
Let’s just inventory what we can see here, moving from left to right.
On the far left at the top, one of the very few players who seems to be sturdily on two feet. An observer.
Far left bottom: a prone tackler. Or, more accurately, his empty hands, contacting exactly no part of the ball carrier.
Center we have the ball carrier, Chris Thompson, in mid-air along the horizontal plane. Chunks of turf suspended around his knee, presumably where his feet very recently were and should probably still be. His right hand extends down, fruitlessly searching for the ground. (Given the ease with which a wrist fractures in similar situations, probably not a good idea.) At this point, Thompson remains in possession, though with the onrushing defender’s knee poised inches from the ball, that possession could be fleeting.
Also center we have the tackler, in stride, about to wrap up Thompson. Improbably (though it would be impossibly if there weren’t photographic evidence), while the defender is upright and only beginning the tackle, his head is turned down, chin against chest, facemask flush against Thompson’s horizontal back. Surely he’s lowered his head along with his shoulders to make the hit, but the crown of his helmet is so far below the trajectory of his shoulder pads, it looks unnatural. He actually looks an MMA fighter, crumpled and concussed from a blow they don’t know has already knocked them out. His head and hands are limp, like he just fell asleep on the ball carrier. Even if the tackler isn’t injured, the potential for him to be is substantial. Even Uncle Luke level bounties aren’t worth compromising one’s own safety with bad tackling form.
Far behind the tackle is another, seemingly upright defender. In front of him, however, is a blocker, unconnected with the earth. I know for a fact that Nick O’Leary (#35), while a big tight end, is not big enough to bend at the waist and still be taller than the defensive linemen around him. Plus, I believe that’s his left foot below, inches above the grass. How he became airborne is a mystery – he’s engaged with a defensive player to his left, but that player seems too far away to lift O’Leary.
That defensive player is, however, receiving a courteous foot to the ass from his own teammate, who is hitting the ground behind him. The prone defender is, in turn, engaged with a blocker, Jacob Fahrenkrug (#60), who appears as in-flight as his fellow Noles. With perhaps only his right shoulder on the ground, Fahrenkrug is curled around the upper body of the prone defender and looks likely to land on the defender’s head. How that particular defender ended up with his helmet on the turf and his feet in his teammate’s ass is anyone’s guess.
Again, this is one instant (of millions) in one game (of thousands) that, to my knowledge, resulted in no injuries. Look at it: it’s a snapshot of mayhem. It seems miraculous that five of the eight players pictured could hop up and walk around after a play like this. And plays like this happen all the time. With no bounties involved. As fans, we must come to terms with the fact that our favorite sport has the capacity and wherewithal to maim its participants. And with the fact that there is already a financial stake in being the injurer rather than the injured. It is silly to pretend that injurious capacity only arises when a few hundred or a few thousand dollars are floating around the locker room.
