06/28/19: soccer

I’m touch-typing this so I don’t have to take my eyes off the screen. The USA is playing France in the quarterfinals and I am stomach-butterfly nervous. The women—let us please never speak again of those who might call them “girls”—look calm, cool, and collected but I wonder if any of them have hands as shaky as mine. Probably not, tbh: it’s not like I get sweaty palms when I’m answering email.

Watching women’s soccer is when I finally get what it means when we talk about how important it is to see people who LOOK like you doing something you might someday aspire to do. Not that I resemble any of these fit young women, and not that I have any delusions about my potential to make the 2023 World Cup team (though WHO KNOWS), but I know what it feels like to tie on a pair of cleats, to stuff shin guards into socks, to feel the sweep of my ponytail across my shoulders, my mummifying sports bra resolutely sticking in place even as my shirt—that slippery satin-y material, why did we wear that, I am fairly certain it did the opposite of breathe—slides down over a shoulder, whoever making those things clearly unfamiliar with the actual size of a teenage girl’s neck. Or shoulders. Or probably anything: I distinctly remember our shorts weren’t cut to allow for hips so our hemlines canted up and out, cutting a diagonal across our thighs. Then again, we (just I?) wore them hiked all the way to my navel so perhaps there were a couple of different solves that might have made that whole situation a little more suave.

The women playing today have clearly benefited from a number of improvements in the twenty-some years since I have laced up anything other than…I don’t have any shoes with laces but you know what I mean. Their uniforms fit well, they’ve got all manner of really reliable-looking hair tie solutions (I was playing in the age of the scrunchie, which is not exactly performance equipment), and holy shit are they good at soccer. That said, many of them are still dealing with the one thing I was happy to hang up along with my cleats: the visible panty line. I am perhaps unreasonably angry on this topic, but really. Why are any of us going around with the cheeks of our butts outlined in high definition, drawing the eye to an area that is certainly a source of enormous power in terms of sport but also a part of the body that has been subject to tremendous, sometimes pathological, sexual fixation? Let’s not bring that nonsense onto the field!

One of the refrains about underserved public schools is that there is too often a terrific imbalance between the color of the teachers and the color of the students. This matters not because we need little kids to grow up to be teachers (though we do), but because there is a lot of research that shows that students do better in school when they have the experience of authority figures, mentors, and role models who look like them, who have some kind of shared lived experience, who can relate to and understand things that might be difficult or impossible to explain to someone from a different cultural background. This is what I get as I watch these women play—despite the many differences between us, there are certain things we have in common that I know could close that distance in an instant.

Now, of course, women are different from each other and I am sure there is someone on that field right now who I might despise in real life (I don’t know why I would but I have to admit it is a possibility), and there are men I have more experience in common with than many many women in the world. But as much as I have admired male sports figures over the years, the feeling I have when I get to watch Megan Rapinoe go coolly about her job, or when I see a slow-motion replay of a Julie Ertz header, or when Crystal Dunn calmly and efficiently strips an attacker of the ball then clears it to a white jersey—is a viscerally different feeling and I wish it happened more than every couple of years.

I’m watching the game at one of those insufferable Brooklyn places where I’m sharing a long wooden tables with a couple of families (and one annoying dude who is REALLY into this game, barking Awful, AWFUL over and over again, like, try a little positivity, yo, but then again he’s rooting for France so I don’t really care because it’s not like he’s daring to yell at MY ladies). Directly across from me is a couple with a little baby, like a baby so little it’s in a carefully covered and shaded in lay-flat pram-type situation. At one point the mom went to get a coffee from next door so the dad was alone with the baby for a few minutes. The baby appeared to be a very newborn, and I didn’t have a whiff of gender—it was all giraffe blankets and white outfits—but as I watched, the dad used his alone time with his child to press his face against the netting on the side of the stroller, smiling and whispering at what was likely about eight pounds of don’t-give-a-shit. I pretended that it was his newborn daughter, just for fun, and wondered what he might be telling her as she kicked her tiny legs in the shadow of some of the most outstandingly accomplished, confident, strong, proud, brave women I’ve ever had the pleasure to see go to work in person, and then—no disrespect to the dads, especially the amazing ones who have supported the women in their lives (it matters!)—I realized…whatever he was saying? It didn’t really matter. 

The words that will make a difference for that little baby someday are being spoken now, are being said here, and some twenty-ish years out, I do so sincerely hope s/he/they will find that we’ve made this world a better, an easier, place for them and so many others. These little tiny babies—all the ones living, all the ones dying—they should be considered not just our inspiration but our responsibility.

The women on the field look so hot right now. They’re dripping with sweat, they’re panting, they’ve got grass stains and flyaway hairs and dirt on their faces, and yet their movements are controlled and their eyes are focused. They’ve got miles to go and they look more than ready. As much as I’m rooting for the away team, the outcome doesn’t matter as much the fact that the game is being played at all—whatever happens, it’s been a good game, ladies, and thank you very much for playing. Let’s do it again, and soon.