Culture
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Eric Betts
Freelance writer and editor
United States
Soccer and other sports. Books and other culture. Biting insults on request.
ericjbetts[at]gmail.com
United States
Soccer and other sports. Books and other culture. Biting insults on request.
ericjbetts[at]gmail.com
Culture
What’s the point of helping your buddy achieve his deepest desire if you can’t make fun of him at least a little for it?
As I progressed through Second Quest, this disorientation grew more deep-seated, an assault on some base level of my memories akin to Proust pulling his hand from his mouth and finding he was really nibbling on a Dorito. This was a sensation of a ruined world far greater than those provided by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Final Fantasy VI because it was happening entirely in my head. It felt as though the ownership I had once claimed had been taken away.
Jumping in a Mario game allows the player to approach, ever so slightly, the ideal demonstrated by Jordan in the real world. Jordan’s feline body control allowed him to contort himself at Fosbury Flop-type angles in the air and still land on his feet, just as the invisible thumb of the player can nudge Mario forward or back to finetune the landing.
Din Djarin is a quick draw, a crack shot, and an impressive improviser of creative violence when the situation calls for it, but mostly he’s a tank. Once he receives his beskar armor in the show’s third episode, his primary skill becomes his ability to absorb punishment. The series does a good job making it clear that the blaster bolts bouncing off him are not incidental But that he can endure them sets him apart from nearly everyone else we’ve seen.
The only final sin in Adams’s galaxy is ego, and the only character able to transgress and emerge unscathed is Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed outlaw president of the galaxy who lives all but oblivious to the consequences of his actions, and whom the author eventually got bored with and abandoned.
The clock hangs over the player’s head constantly, more foreboding in some ways than the moon. Some events have to be completed by a certain time. Some require Link to be in a certain place on a certain day at a certain time, and if this appointment is missed, there’s no recourse but to restart the cycle...It’s an inordinately stressful gameplay mechanism, one that runs counter to Ocarina’s ethos of free exploration. Which is what makes it the perfect game for the current era.
But the most interesting, most oft-recurring explanations are those of the people who just couldn't be bothered, for whom avoiding the inconvenience of the disruption was, at least at first, more important than removing themselves from harm's way. The impulse was for normal life to go on, even in the face of mass evacuations and officials in suits and masks and soldiers all but scorching the earth as part of the clean-up efforts.
In addition to the degradation of fictional universes, this hyper world-building means we spend so much time in familiar (and ever-expanding) worlds that we don’t invest in new ones. Too many choices; let’s just watch something with superheroes in it again. The rules are familiar, and that familiarity creates the illusion of comfort and stability. Goodnight lightsabers. Goodnight wands. Goodnight Godzilla. Goodnight James Bond.
Soccer
What Pelé did was to codify the notion that a soccer player, that a sportsman, could be a genius, and that some level of genius was required for your legacy to stand with the all-timers.
Messi is the bowling ball in the center of the sheet of Spandex; the game spirals around him, his gravity warping vast tracts of the pitch as defenders attempt to keep track of him...Mbappé is irrepressible, a solar flare racing across the attacking half at speeds that probably round up to 300 million meters per second, ready to fry all your systems in an instant.
Note to self: It is better to commiserate over the disappointments of national team fandom than to try to celebrate its infrequent highs.
In the room where I watched the game, there was a guttural, window-shaking exhalation upon the final whistle. (I was the only person in the room.) It was the equal—but crucially, not opposite!—reaction to the jumping up and down and screaming of the goal against Algeria in 2010. Landon Donovan stands alone.
My favorite athlete in history has spent much of the past seven years as the public face of a propaganda machine designed to distract, diminish, and deflect public attention from a humanitarian crisis. It's not great. I don't recommend it.
Who would have guessed they’d be here now? Who would dare venture a prediction for where they’ll be then?
When your scheme for a plutocrat-driven exodus can’t even get Boris Johnson on board, something has gone horribly wrong.
"There is no one who more thoroughly overcame the most fundamental challenge of soccer: How do you make a ball do what you want it to do and go where you want it to go without using your hands?"
Today Manchester United is yet another nigh-inescapable modern brand that has thoroughly deluded great swaths of people into believing it stands for success while producing failure after failure. Like the Dallas Cowboys, Manchester United has become less a sporting concern than a luxury imprint, something that when plastered on a person or their property, communicates to much of the world that its bearer is a particular kind of front-running yet gullible person.
VAR is trapped in an uncanny valley between the objective and the subjective, close enough to the former that the slight remnant of the latter feels particularly frustrating.
No one in the history of the sport has ever controlled games like the diminutive Spaniard did; no one has ever been as good at the simple task of receiving the ball and knowing immediately where it needs to go next. He played as though he could see the future, as though the only input required for him to map out the rest of the game was the kickoff.
If you watched a bunch of France’s games during the 2018 World Cup, the idea that this particular group has been crowned the planet’s best international soccer team might leave you with some questions, among them: Really? These guys? France, which defeated Croatia 4–2 in Sunday’s final, had a stout defense, yes. It will also be years before anyone is allowed to say anything negative about Kylian Mbappé, who thrilled every time he touched the ball. Olivier Giroud played striker as if he...
Ibrahimovic is a soccer player as engineered by a fourth-grader: a 6-foot-5 Swede who looks like a cross between a pirate and a samurai, who dribbles like a pissed-off Baryshnikov, who has an (honorary) black belt in taekwondo and actually plays like a martial artist.
The final failure of the United States men’s national soccer team’s long, dark World Cup qualifying campaign of the soul is one of vocabulary. Disaster doesn’t seem to cut it. Catastrophe? Calamity? Cataclysm? What do you get when you go past double-plus-un-good?
What makes N’Golo Kanté such a dominant force? He is the mirror-world Lionel Messi, the immovable object to the other’s irresistible force, with the same otherworldly balance, timing, and Road Runner–esque ability to accelerate to top speed (or come to a dead stop) in a single step. The difference is that Kanté uses his skills in the service of destruction. He doesn’t just disrupt. He demoralizes.
Leicester City didn’t just make a leap. The Foxes triple-jumped, bounding past the midtable clubs and English soccer’s perennial top four to land right at the top.
Sports
Combine those hands with arms that appeared to distend like Dhalsim’s from Street Fighter and it’s no wonder so many of Hawkins’ available highlights show him spinning, sweeping, and scooping the ball in from impossible angles. He could freeze defenders by going one way with his body and the other way with his arms. He didn’t need to play powerfully because his control allowed him to remain one step ahead of what defenders could throw at him.
The trouble with building so much of your personal brand around being the Greatest of All Time is that, should you ever lose that title, the obvious landing spot for your legacy is “second-Greatest of All Time.” Could there possibly be a worse place for a man with Jordan’s legendary competitive spirit to end up? Once you’ve been the one, how could you possibly be the other?
It’s not just that there are easier ways to get two points; it’s that every other method of scoring two points in the history of basketball has been easier than the one Carter chose.
The competition itself was glorious, sports reimagined for the postmodern age: shorn from history and the complicated morality of fan loyalty, disassembled to their elemental components and reconstructed into some hyperreal, maximalist machine. What if slam dunks plus linebackers? What if sumo wrestling plus pinball? What if rebounding plus Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?
Lyndon B. Johnson as Larry Bird: "Cocky country boy who came in and ran the show."