After
having read the two articles involving violence in hockey and the religious
experience of Southern College Football, I felt compelled to offer an
unorthodox version of an ‘academic’ blog. I have decided to combine both
articles and apply them to my personal experiences as a former semi-professional
soccer player in Canada and my experience playing in Europe. Hopefully, this
will be an appropriate segue into the topic of Sports and Muscular Christianity
for our next lecture.
Last
year, after making the decision to end my playing career, I was unexpectedly asked:
What were your earliest childhood
memories? My response was picking as many dandelions as possible during one
of my first ever soccer games to give to my mother. My dream of being the
world’s greatest dandelion-picking soccer player was abruptly ended when I
discovered all 20+ beautifully handpicked dandelions in the garbage two days
later (not sure if I will ever forgive my mother for that).
Now,
where to begin? In retrospect, it could be said that soccer constituted my
life. For 18 years, give or take, my life involved family/friends, church, and
soccer. As a semi-professional player, we were paid $300 for a win, $200 for a
tie, and $50 for a loss. Training was 6-days a week, with pre-season workouts
occurring twice a day. Competition to crack the starting 11 was fierce and
often times violent as the salaries for bench players were drastically reduced
as compared to the aforementioned standard pay. We (myself including) would
undergo extraordinary physical pain and would sacrifice our bodies in order to
achieve success, as in winning. This was our mindset. As Trothen (2009)
describes, from the perspective of the coaching staff, we were regarded as
commodities and our talents were commodified to achieve production. Concussions
from head butts, a kick to the face, or an elbow, were hidden from therapists
and painkillers were routinely used to conceal injuries from broken ribs to
sprained/fractured ankles to missing teeth; all of this done out of fear of
losing our starting spot and, ultimately, to win. As teammates, our actions to
conceal injuries etc. were done out of pressure and as a means to uphold rigid
masculine ideologies that were socially constructed and that dominated the
typical male athlete. Our coaches glorified “self-sacrifice and pain and
suffering” found in traditional atonement theories (Trothen, 2009). This sounds
really similar to hockey right? I know! However, when you’ve sacrificed a great
portion of your personal life to play an elite sport, the end justifies the
means, to some extent.
I
was someone’s teammate, a member of a family! I spent more time with my ‘soccer
family’ than I did with my own ‘real’ family. From 5-hour road trips on buses,
to plane rides, to sharing rooms, we were able to establish an everlasting
bond, a friendship. Unlike the article written by Bain-Selbo (2008) I was able
to establish an ‘emotional bond’ with soccer, not as a fan, but as a player.
Words used in his article such as ‘friendship’, ‘community’, ‘love’, and ‘hope’
are all words that I can appropriate to my experiences with soccer. I have
certainly experienced Bain-Selbo’s outlined emotions (joy, passion, and
intensity) that “arise typically in religious contexts” (2008). As a player in
Northern France, it was mandatory to undergo mental training sessions with a
mental training coach (sports psychologist). We learned how to deal with
setbacks, adversity, and the anger/outrage that builds when an opposing player
or fan makes a racist or rude remark to you or your fellow teammate (these
things do happen). The phrase “fire in your heart…ice in you head’ was
something I will never forget and, for me, is the epitome of mental fortitude. I
believe that my ‘religious experiences’ associated with soccer, thus, came as a
result of my ability to solely immerse myself in the game and not get carried
away or distracted by external events. I was 100% IN the game to the point
where I was able to forget about everything and anything outside of the soccer
pitch, including my own personal life. I experienced, what Csikzentmihalyi (in Bain-Selbo, 2008)
calls ‘flow’. Soccer provided me “with a sense of belonging and an opportunity
to express powerful emotions” (Edwards as cited in Bain-Selbo, 2008, 242).
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