v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

The Kobe I Remember

Though I was troubled when I heard the news of Kobe's passing with his daughter when we were in Puerto Rico-feeling sad for the family and the premature death of a sports icon, at the same time the hype and exagerated grieving made me think of the other people who had passed who had actually progressed the culture. I read this article in the New Republic which echoed my memory of his legacy which lots seemed to forget:

Bryant’s death was one of those moments that seemed to stop the world in disbelief. Tributes poured in attesting to how much he meant to basketball, to Los Angeles, to black Gen Xers and millennials who came of age with him and watching him. People shared video clips of his cameos on Sister, Sister, rode waves of nostalgia by chucking wadded-up balls of paper at the trash, yelling “KOBE!” They eulogized him as a father and advocate for women’s basketball, the devastation of those losses compounded by the fact that Gianna Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter, died in the helicopter crash alongside him.

And in what felt like a parallel conversation, there was a remembrance of Bryant as he existed for so many others: another man who hurt a woman and moved on, untouched. They remembered the 19-year-old woman who said that Bryant blocked her from leaving a hotel room in 2003, groped and choked her, then raped her. They recalled the subsequent trial and coverage, how his accuser’s name was leaked to the press while her sexual history and mental health were dissected.

Quickly though, these stories began to collide. As the posthumous hagiography machine began to whirl, there were familiar conversations about respect, legacies, mythmaking, and the “right time” to bring up sexual assault. Obituaries hinted at a “complicated” legacy or made oblique references to “Colorado.” There were mentions of the rape case, maybe, in a quick and tidy paragraph. Anything more would have made the narrative incoherent. Uncomfortable. Distasteful.

The story of Bryant’s life had been written over the course of decades, largely along the same parallel lines. As with so many other powerful men, it was rare to see these two things—beloved men and the harm they’ve done—held in tension for very long. So this ended up being a story about Kobe Bryant and a story about us. How we compartmentalize the people we love or admire. How we don’t know how to talk about sexual violence, and cling to myths about “monsters” and “good guys.” How victims so quickly fade from public view, while the men who victimized them rise in status. We can hardly talk about the strange pain of knowing someone in these ways—a loving father, a supernaturally talented athlete, and an alleged rapist—in life. Why should it be different in death? 

Survivors are not a monolith, but for many, the rape case and its reverberations are still incredibly painful. By the time Bryant called a news conference, sitting next to his wife and publicly contesting the charges, the case had already become a national spectacle. It played on historically dangerous stereotypes of black men raping white women and perpetuated harmful ideas about false rape accusations. Ultimately, the woman decided not to testify in the criminal trial, and prosecutors dropped the case. Bryant and the woman would eventually settle a civil case out of court. 

This is when we were told to move on. When Bryant retired from basketball, it was seen as “not the time” to talk about the rape case because it was a moment of celebration. It would never actually become the right time, which is a lesson you will learn repeatedly when trying to talk about sexual violence. And so the force of Bryant’s celebrity was relatively unchanged, just usually marked with an asterisk. He was the star you knew, on ESPN, in GQ, on Showtime, but there was also that other thing—a matter to be addressed and quickly moved past. 

It can be hard to imagine what better would have looked like. We live in a carceral state that routinely disposes of people, locking them away and calling it justice. So it’s difficult to conceive of atonement outside of carcerality, both from the people who have hurt others and from the media and other ecosystems trying to make sense of them. Restorative justice seeks to bring those who have harmed and those affected by the harm—including the victim, their families, and their larger communities—into conversation with each other, creating processes to rebuild and heal. But these are often smaller, community-led efforts. Victims in high-profile cases often don’t know what to ask for in terms of healing because there is no real map to follow. What does an amends—a public amends—look like at this kind of scale? 

More

Black Quaterbacks Rule

From an article in the Undefeated on why black qbs have had such a difficult time breaking through:

The encoding of quarterbacks as white leaders is an agreement that was birthed with the sport that emerged from mid-19th century Ivy League culture. Quarterbacks call plays that direct other players’ assignments, touch the ball the most and are the most visible players on the field. Even as football migrated South and became more blue-collar, the quarterback position retained that association with intellectualism. The positions of center, inside linebacker and especially quarterback were held out as thinking positions, too complex for black athletes to master.

As 20th century black athletic achievements destroyed racist myths about the physical superiority of white men, and the civil rights movement helped open professional sports to black athletes, white team owners, coaches, media and fans clung to myths of black intellectual inferiority.

“There’s so many stories of black quarterbacks in college who get forced to play wide receiver and defensive backs,” said Mark Anthony Neal, chair of the department of African and African American Studies at Duke University. Even Jackson, a Heisman winner, was doubted as a quarterback and criticized for not running a “pro-style” offense, which called for remaining in the pocket and reading coverage, before this standout season finally quieted that noise. Hard to ever imagine a white player with Jackson’s gifts being told to switch positions.

The question became whether black men, who were already leading black churches, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and their own communities, “had the capacity to lead white men and white institutions,” Neal said.

That question becomes particularly acute when you take into account the improvisational nature of black culture and how that shapes black leadership, especially in sports.

“Underlying that message really was that not only was the league fearful of the leadership potential of some of these men — and this is of course applicable to corporate America also — but they were fearful of the way that black men could improvise,” said Neal. And that means they could change the game in ways that were not intuitive or immediately replicable for white quarterbacks. (Not so much physically, but culturally, though with constant practice, the two go hand in hand.)

Black improvisation is best understood as a kind of creative problem-solving that stems from the dynamics of black life that often require you make a way out of no way, said Neal. “How do you problem-solve lack of resources? In another context, it’s Big Momma in the kitchen with a small amount of resources and a family of 10 to feed. And how does that get done night after night, week after week, year after year?” Neal asked.

Improvisational leadership gets encoded as “genetic” — as “natural” athleticism in sports — but it’s more specifically political, environmental, economic. And it’s smart. There can’t just be one way to get something done, because that way often ignores black people or works against them. In 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened with a permanent exhibit called Making a Way Out of No Way. The off-ramp thinking required to outwit challenges or gain advantage for black people in myriad aspects of American life gets stylized, and celebrated as a bedrock of black culture when it works. And when it works repeatedly, it changes the game — music, politics, science, sports —whatever the game is.

Some Scenes from the Convent in Arequipa

Vallejo nocturno 2019- Convento de Santa Catalina en Arequipa

Galeano and futbol

From The Atlantic on Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer who loved soccer:

As a boy, Galeano loved football, but he didn’t play well. “By writing,” he explained in Soccer in Sun and Shadow, “I was going to do with my hands what I never could accomplish with my feet.” And so he drew political cartoons as a teenager and went on to become a journalist, a newspaper editor, and a celebrated social critic. His pioneering 1971 book, the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, implausibly landed on Amazon’s bestseller list in 2009 after Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, gave President Barack Obama a copy, calling it “a monument in our Latin American history.” (Despite its influence, Galeano appeared to renounce the book later in his life.) In the 1970s and ’80s, Galeano was forced into exile in Argentina and then Spain by Uruguay’s right-wing military regime. During that period, he wrote most of his ingenious historical trilogy, Memory of Fire, an epic retelling of 500 years of conquest, myth, and rebellion flecked with humor and invective.

As a literary writer on sports, Galeano is akin to Norman Mailer, who found poetry and politics in boxing; but where Mailer was inclined to fight, Galeano leaned toward love. His inimitable style was to write his narrative in vignettes (“story windows” he called them)—concise distillations of grand events and ordinary goings-on. The story-window approach runs all through Soccer in Sun and Shadow, which moves chronologically across the fractured history of the sport—from a Chinese leather ball filled with hemp in 3000 B.C.E. through news crawl–style reports of modern World Cup matches. Pelé, Diego Maradona, and Franz Beckenbauer make cameo appearances, too, scoring famous (or infamous) goals.

In his book, Galeano showed soccer intersecting with world history, as in the 1934 World Cup, held in Benito Mussolini’s Italy: He called it “an elaborate propaganda operation” in which fans celebrated the country’s victories with the Fascist salute. He set soccer chronology against the cultural backdrop of Adolf Hitler’s rise, Bonnie and Clyde’s bank robberies, and Mao’s Long March. From the 1960s onward, he inserted into each account of a World Cup a sly voice-over about the history that did not change: “Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.”

An instinctive social critic, Galeano saw soccer as a pitched battle between good and evil, a choreographed war in which “11 men in shorts are the sword of the neighborhood, the city, or the nation.” On the pitch and in the stands, “old hatreds and old loves passed from father to son enter into combat.” Local roots run deep and unite and divide fans, and whole nations, accordingly. Soccer’s participants are archetypal figures. The goalie: “Whenever a player commits a foul the keeper is the one who gets punished: They abandon him there in the immensity of the empty net to face his executioner alone.” The referee: “Everybody hates him.” The manager: “His mission: to prevent improvisation, restrict freedom, and maximize the productivity of the players.” For Galeano, the struggle for power was everywhere. About Argentina’s Maradona being expelled from the 1994 World Cup for having ephedrine in his urine, the writer remarked: “Maradona committed the sin of being the best, the crime of speaking out about things the powerful wanted kept quiet, and the felony of playing left-handed.”

Soccer, in Galeano’s vision of it, isn’t just a war between teams or countries: It’s also a war between humanity and technocracy. He called himself “a beggar for good soccer” and in later years found himself frustrated by the hyperprofessionalization of the sport, which “negates joy, kills fantasy, and outlaws daring.” He saw the influence of corporations (with their logos emblazoned upon the players’ uniforms) and the power of television executives to determine “where, when, and how soccer will be played.” Such standardization, he argued, caused players to “run a lot and risk little.” Readers can hear his indignation rise as he writes, “Audacity is not profitable.” Although cancer kept him from writing about the 2014 World Cup, Galeano watched as Brazilians took to the streets to protest the lavish spending on new stadiums rather than on education and infrastructure. In a statement released the year before the tournament, he said that the Brazilian people “have decided not to allow their sport to be used any more as an excuse for humiliating the many and enriching the few.”

More

Best Sport Soiled by Corrupt or Incompetent Refereeing

Incompetence or corruption, the results are the same. Incredibly bad and sad as the Panamanian team that fought undermanned due to a putrid call by the American referee and then completed with a false foul in the 88th minute-ugh. Makes one lose confidence in soccer organizations especially after Copa America's Chile disaster.

From The Washington Post:

Late Wednesday night, as soccer-writing colleague Brian Straus noted, only “Sharknado 3″ was trending higher on Twitter than the Mexico-Panama match.

To which I say: One was a fantastical, shameless disaster hoot littered with violence and scary objects flying through the air. The other was a cheesy movie.

By the time Mark Geiger was hurried off the Georgia Dome field surrounded by yellow-jacketed security officials — and presumably into the witness protection program — the first CONCACAF Gold Cup semifinal was a foggy memory. The Americans had lost to the Reggae Boyz of Jamaica, had they not? Yes. Yes, they had.

The second game eclipsed everything else, but almost entirely for the wrong reasons:

Geiger red-carded Luis Tejada when a yellow card would have sufficed. This, after Mexico’s Carlos Vela was lucky not to be sent off for elbowing a Panamanian player in the stomach.

The penalty kick decision in the 88th minute that sent Mexico’s Andres Guardado to the spot under controversial circumstances late in a match for the second time in four days.

The Panamanian fans tossing plastic bottles and cups onto the field in protest.

Mexican fans joining the fray by firing bottles and cups at Panama’s bench.

Fans ignoring the pleas by both teams’ reserves and staff members to stop.

The players who began barking at one another in the area between the benches.

The melee that ensued.

More garbage, some from the upper deck, which, at Atlanta’s domed marvel, is equidistant to earth as Charon, Pluto’s largest moon.

Guardado tying the match in the 10th minute of stoppage time.

After Mexico’s penalty kick in extra time — which Geiger got right — a Panamanian player kicking the ball into the stands — twice.

Mexico’s delay tactics.

Panamanian players, on the field and sideline, raising their arms over their heads and mockingly applauding Geiger.

Panama’s mad dash at Geiger when the final whistle sounded.

Geiger in danger of being assaulted.

More Panamanian-Mexican scuffles.

n the coaches’ postgame news conferences, Panama Coach Hernan Gomez used the word “robbery” several times and said he was “disillusioned” by the sport. His Mexican counterpart, Miguel Herrera, agreed that the late penalty was incorrect and that he felt bad for the Panamanians.

Guardado said he didn’t celebrate the tying goal because Geiger’s decision left him with “a bad taste.”

More

Related articles

Mexico fans so mad at Panama goal, they shower players in beer

Panama vs. Mexico: Score, Grades and Reaction for 2015 Gold Cup

El Zen del Tigre

From El Pais de Espana:

La reacción de Ricardo Gareca (Tapiales, provincia de Buenos Aires, 1958), seleccionador de Perú, a la expulsión de Carlos Zambrano en las semifinales contra Chile (2-1) es una fiel estampa del carácter que ha llevado al Tigre, un potente exdelantero con 208 goles en su carrera, a ser uno de los entrenadores más respetados en una era dominante de la escuela futbolística argentina. “Yo entiendo, yo mismo he sido castigado 15 fechas en mi etapa en Boca Juniors. Estuve suspendido casi un año. A veces pasan esas cosas”, indicó Gareca con suma tranquilidad en una rueda de prensa celebrada en Concepción, donde esta noche contra Paraguay intentará revalidar contra Paraguay el tercer puesto obtenido en 2011. El preparador, en una entrevista concedida a ESPN, añadió posteriormente que Zambrano “hizo una excelente Copa. Él sabe que hay cosas que no se pueden repetir nunca más. Para mí es uno de los mejores centrales del mundo, no solo de este torneo”.

Gareca, relativamente desconocido en Europa, es un hombre de perfil bajo y currículum ganador que como jugador, cuando pasó de Boca Juniors a River Plate, revolucionó el fútbol argentino y a punto estuvo de provocar una huelga masiva de futbolistas. “Me significó mucha gente en contra y muchos problemas en mi carrera deportiva”, afirmó tras retirarse como jugador.

Un gol de Gareca (precisamente a Perú) en junio de 1985 clasificó a Argentina para el Mundial 86 de Maradona, pero Carlos Bilardo no llevó al Flaco a México (“fue un golpe más duro”, ha dicho años después). Fue ídolo en él América de Cali y terminó como campeón en Independiente de Avellaneda. De niño jugaba de portero, hasta que fue adelantando su posición y llegó al nueve, el límite. Fuerte, rápido e incisivo, tenía un carácter explosivo: una vez recibió siete partidos de suspensión por tirar de un manotazo la tarjeta roja que le mostraba un árbitro en Argentina.

El bloque logrado por Gareca en cuatro meses de trabajo ha insuflado esperanzas para las eliminatorias sudamericanas a un país que no visita una fase final de una Copa del Mundo desde 1982. El trabajo de Gareca es constante y unánimemente elogiado por sus futbolistas. Un entrenador argentino que tomó un café con él tras la derrota contra Chile dice seguir sorprendiéndose “de lo tranquilo que es…”. “Le pregunté si no pensaba que habían perdido por la expulsión de Zambrano, y me dijo: ‘Y, no sé, era difícil… Lo único que sé es que hasta ese momento fuimos superiores”.

La prensa del país se ha rendido al trabajo del Tigre. El diario deportivo Líbero tituló tras la derrota contra Chile: “Tenemos equipo... y un gran DT”; “no hay nada que reprocharle”, escribía en páginas interiores: “Una tonta expulsión fue el punto de quiebre de la ilusión peruana”. El Comercio, por su parte, tituló: “Perú cae dando máxima pelea”, mientras que El Diario resumía: “Grande Perú; 10 contra 12 y solamente nos ganaron con lo mínimo”.

“Quiero que este equipo mire cara a cara a los grandes”, dijo Gareca después del primer partido contra Brasil, cuando sólo aquella genialidad final de Neymar tumbó a Perú. La inyección de confianza a sus jugadores, obsesionados con el Mundial de Rusia, es patente: jugadores como Vargas o Advíncula ya dijeron antes del cruce contra Chile que habían jugado varias veces contra sus mejores jugadores y que no estaban impresionados. La elegancia en la derrota ha sido también elogiada por la afición chilena, muy sensible tras el escándalo con Uruguay: pese a la entrada de Zambrano, el clásico del Pacífico no tuvo episodios de violencia y sólo al final Paolo Guerrero, el vigente pichichi del torneo, se quejó del arbitraje y “de que en la FIFA pasan cosas muy raras que convendría investigar”.

Serenidad y ambición

Gareca llegó al banquillo blanquirrojo avalado por su esplendorosa etapa al frente de Vélez Sarsfield entre 2009 y 2013: cuatro títulos y semifinales de la Copa Libertadores. El Tigre, además, es reconocido por haber organizado el club desde sus divisiones inferiores hasta la Primera. Conoció el fracaso inicial como preparador técnico después de un buen inicio en Talleres de Córdoba, hasta que 10 años después, en 2008, arribó a Universitario de Perú y dio un giro a su biografía. Allí ganó su primer título. A partir del año siguiente consiguió su doctorado cum laude en Vélez (su breve aventura brasileña posterior en el Palmeiras no fue exitosa).

Serenidad, mucho trabajo y ambición. Así dirige Gareca a una selección a la que apetece ver jugar por primera vez en mucho tiempo: agresiva, valiente con una transición vertiginosa en ataque y calidad de tres cuartos hacia delante. En su primera rueda de prensa tras aterrizar en Chile, cuando nadie daba un peso por Perú (actitud que los propios futbolistas han recriminado después de llegar a semifinales), el Tigre reconoció tranquilamente: “Por las noches sueño con ganar la Copa América”.

Xavi Farewell

Galeano Gone

From Columbia Journalism Review:

Legendary writer Eduardo Galeano of Uruguay died of cancer on Monday at age 74. While he is most well known for his critical books on Latin American colonial history, he also wrote one of the signature books in all of sports literature: Soccer in Sun and Shadow. First published in 1998, it traces the history of soccer as a sport and, more pointedly, as an industry. It wrestles with the inherent contradictions of fandom: how manufactured spectacle can spark deep emotional realities, and how a timed-out match can become timeless.

Composed as a series of elegant vignettes, stamped by ink silhouettes of footballers, and peopled by archetypes, this is not your ordinary sports book. But that doesn’t mean Galeano doesn’t have a great deal to teach modern sports writers. Here are four lessons his rich legacy leaves us.

1) Longform isn’t the only way to write an epic sports story

Galeano wrote in short vignettes. They effectively function like shortform longform, if that makes sense—a fusion of an immediate story with a sweeping sense of historic significance. So, for example, the section of six small paragraphs titled “The Player” begins with a classic action moment: “Panting, he runs up the wing. On one side await the heavens of glory; on the other, ruin’s abyss.” Then, Galeano shifts quickly into a look at the off-field context, turning the action into a character portrait: “He’s the envy of the neighborhood: the professional athlete who escaped the factory or the office and gets paid to have fun. He won the lottery. … He started out playing for pleasure in the dirt streets of the slums, and now he plays out of duty in stadiums where he has no choice but to win or to win.” And then Galeano widens the scope yet again, looking at the industry of sports through the lens of this archetypal player: “Businessmen buy him, sell him, lend him … .”

These quick pivots show how a sports story doesn’t need the padding of rhetoric to be about large things. It is a welcome contrast to the legions of journalists who believe that the only way to go more in-depth with a sports story is to write long. No doubt that feature-length work can be extraordinary—Grantland and SB Nation Longform are two of the most welcome additions to the sports media landscape of the last decade. But too often, word count is seen as a shortcut to substance. As Galeano reveals, sports writers should take account of all their storytelling choices before automatically opting for a 4,000-word think piece.

2) You don’t have to choose between cynicism and idealism

Guileless coverage that buys into easy, feel-good narratives, without any serious wrangling with the societal context of sports, is tiresome. A taste for this sort of trope can even be journalistically dangerous, with reporters publishing stories that prove to be false or overlooking unhappy facts about particular players, teams, and leagues. But the counter to that habit isn’t straight-up cynicism—the everything-is-terrible angle that logs rampant corruption and exploitation in sports and, explicitly or implicitly, suggests that fans are fools at best and enablers at worst. That approach, too, distorts reality.

The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.

Idealism and cynicism are not the sports journalist’s only choices. Like Galeano, reporters can detail problems in sports with clear-eyed rigor and revel in the extraordinary beauty of a well-played match. “And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it,” Galeano writes at the end of the “Author’s Confession” that opens the book. Then, on the very next page, the first sentences read: “The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots.”

More

Our Guy

Strange Polling

Looking like the the 1972 elections. And who should have won?