Alone in the Woods: The Literary Landscape of Soccer's "Last Defender"

Abstract

ESSAY In suburban Maryland, at the birth of the youth-soccer boom in the mid-1970s, players of my acquaintance did not choose to be goal keepers. They were relegated to the position. Was one boy stouter than others? Was he slower afoot? Did he have experience as a Little League catcher, meaning he was accustomed to ignoring prickly comments from behind the backstop? Was he a loner at heart, not likely to lose friends that he did not have anyway? These souls found themselves in goal, their vulnerabilities open to inspection. Playing goal was like having the waistband of one's underpants exposed, which, in those days, would inevitably lead to humiliation by practitio ners of the wedgie arts. The only person to volunteer for the job on one of the sides I played on was dragged off midway through a match by his father, our coach. David tried digging his cleats in, but his dad wrapped a forearm around his neck and dragged him behind goal, where David sobbed on all fours, his back convulsing as if he were about to be sick. We were twelve-year-old boys. Still, I have not forgotten this Oedipal struggle, preserved in mind as a tableau of dust and rage. As a result, I learned to interpret all sports through a rubric of terror. A popular saying in Brazil accounts for the goalkeeper's sorrow: "The grass doesn't even grow where he stands on the pitch." The goalie, Alone in the Woods: The Literary Landscape of Soccer's "Last Defender" To writers worldwide, they are penitents, patriots, and paragons of uncertainty. Goalkeepers and their "eccentric art"hold an enduring attraction. from a literary perspective, embodies a separation that belies his integral importance within the team. Yet over more than a century, goalkeepers and authors have forged close ties. Some goalkeep ers?Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Mustafa Badawi?became writers. Another, Karol Wojtyla of Wadowice, Poland, became pope. Other writers enlist goalkeepers in their work as disaffected observers and outcasts, having discovered that these guardians of the penalty area transform rather easily into cisterns of introspection. To Nabokov, the goalkeeper practicesv'eccen tric art" In Conclusive Evidence(1951), Nabokov sketches the prototypical Russian goalkeeper: "Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. His sweater, his peaked cap, his knee-guards; the gloves protruding from the hip-pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender." Nabokov confesses to "daydreaming in goal at Cambridge University, "composing verse in a tongue nobody understood about a remote country nobody knew." Here, Nabokov creates a caricature of goalkeeping that shows no sign of fading. Even in exaltation, the goalie remains peripheral. The goalkeeper, as novice observers would recognize, stands at a threshold. Unlike the ten field players in association football?the official name for the sport codified, with thirteen laws, in London in 1863?the goalkeeper can handle the ball within a penalty area of roughly seven left A1958 picture of former Soviet goalkeeper Lev Yashin, who served as Nabokov's prototype July-August 2010 119 John Turnbull edits The Global Game (www. theglobalgame.com), a website of world soccer culture. He coedited The Global Game: Writers on Soccer (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and has written on soccer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, New York Times, So Foot (Paris), When Saturday Comes (London), Soccer and Society, and Afriche e Orienti. He lives in Atlanta and supports the Atlanta Beat and Arsenal (London). thousand square feet. Throughout the sporting universe, whether team handball, water polo, lacrosse, or ice hockey, tending goal demands presence and undivided attention. Writing about hockey in The Game (1983), Ken Dryden concludes that "the differences between 'players' and 'goal ies' are manifest and real, transcending as they do even culture and sport." In Dryden's goaltending career with the Montr?al Canadiens, he and his colleagues were called "ghoulies." Goalkeepers in this sense may be spiritual heirs to Mesoamerican ballplayers, who straddled mortal and immortal realms as they competed in sunken courts starting some 3,500...