Since 2003 John Turnbull has produced The Global game, a web site of world soccer culture. He is coeditor, with Thom Satterlee and Alon Raab, of “The Global Game: Writers on Soccer,” published in 2008 by University of Nebraska Press.
The Writers’ Ultimate XI seeks balance by region--with authors from five FIFA confederations-- and genre. With a Continental core and forward-looking approach, the team lines up according to the tactical norms of interwar Europe with three in defense, two linking players and five in attack. The team fields three Nobel Prize winners (Pamuk, Oe, Mahfouz) with a fourth laureate (Camus) as physical therapist. Fusing self-expressive qualities will be a challenge in a polyglot side shouting at each other in seven languages.
Goalkeeper-Vladmir Nabokov (Russia/United States): Well before he became a celebrated novelist and lepidopterist (O.K., you’ll have to look that up!), Nabokov learned the goalkeeping trade at the Tenishev School in Saint Petersburg and mused about the “blessing of the ball hugged to one’s chest.” After the 1917 revolution, he continued playing at Cambridge University. Anticipating Lev Yashin, revered goalkeeper for the Soviet Union and Dynamo Moscow, Nabokov (below) admired the “gallant art” of tending net and cherished the importance of the position to Russian history.
Soccer pops up regularly in Nabokov’s work. In “Pnin” (1957) the title character is put out when, on requesting a “football,” a sales clerk hands him the American version: “No, no … I do not wish an egg or, for example, a torpedo. I want a simple football ball. Round!”
Left fullback-Orhan Pamuk (Turkey): “Football is faster than words,” Pamuk says in a Der Spiegel interview before the 2008 European Championship, meaning that literature will always struggle to keep up with the visual medium of sport.
Soccer flavors Pamuk’s memories of growing up in Istanbul. When his father took him to Fenerbahçe games, the child saw players that in their bright yellow jerseys resembled canaries — he “can still recite the entire lineup of the 1959 Fenerbahçe team like a poem.” In “Istanbul: Memories of a City” (2005), Pamuk remembers inventing a parlor variant of soccer. He and his older brother flicked backgammon pieces or marbles across the carpet and added play-by-play: “Like people who have no trouble telling their beloved striped kittens apart, we could distinguish our marbles with a single glance.”
Center back--Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt): As a child Mahfouz played street soccer in Cairo’s Abbassiya section on land also used to stage Islamic festivals commemorating the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, with Egypt under British occupation, he says soccer had special allure, “It was the only thing in which we could beat the British without anyone complaining.” At some point, though, “I switched from football to reading,” Mahfouz (right) tells Al-Ahram Weekly.
Nevertheless, he continued to attend matches involving Cairo rivals Zamalek and Al-Ahly and regularly met friends at a neighborhood qahwa (café) to talk about soccer. He named a collection of stories, “Qushtumur” (1988), after the establishment. Two years before his death, in 2006, he publicly backed Egypt’s unsuccessful bid for the 2010 World Cup. In his final months he rejoiced in Egypt’s fifth Africa Cup of Nations championship (the sixth came in 2008). “Now we play to forget our sorrows,” he said.
Right fullback--Osip Mandelstam (Russia): In the back line Mandelstam stays within hailing distance of his fellow Tenishev School graduate Nabokov. A poet who died in 1938 as the result of Stalin-era purges, Mandelstam was one of the first to regard soccer as a creative activity suitable for literature. According to Anna Akhmatova, from a rented room on Vasilievsky Island in St. Petersburg the slightly built Mandelstam would watch children play on a nearby field. He communicates the experience in “Football Again” (1913):
Heavy morning-fog fades,
day walks in barefooted,
and little boys play football
in the military school-yard.
Left wing half--Ana Maria Moix (Spain): A longtime Barcelona supporter, Moix has been able to draw on first-hand knowledge for short stories about fans’ obsessiveness. “In reality, rooting for a team is irrational,” Moix says. “It brings out the irrational forces we have inside.” A character in “Of My Real Life I Know Nothing” (2008) who suddenly loses interest in soccer must undergo psychotherapy. The therapist tells him that renouncing his lifelong passion amounts to “self-mutilation.”
In a series of essays for El País during the 2006 World Cup finals, Moix (left) pleaded for more touchline elegance from the former Spain Manager Luis Aragonés. She cites the national reputation for haute couture and appeals for a designer “to improve, with all due respect, the Spanish coach’s attire.”
Right wing half--Anna Enquist (Netherlands): Completing the distaff midfield twosome, Enquist--poet and story writer, classical pianist and psychoanalyst-- since 1995 has contributed to the Dutch journal of soccer literature, Hard gras. With a therapist’s sensibilities she explains the Netherlands’ underachievement in major competitions as an extension of the country’s Calvinist heritage. In David Winner’s “Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer” (2000), Enquist refers to Clarence Seedorf’s penalty miss in a Euro ’96 quarterfinal as part of a national “death wish.” His teammates knew he would miss but felt inhibited, “They should have stopped him, but they didn’t.”
Her collection “The Injury: Ten Stories” (2000) has soccer as leitmotif. In the title entry, Enquist narrates an 18-year-old’s recovery from a potentially career-ending tibia break. The character’s depression is so deep that “he didn’t even want to come downstairs for Ajax-Feyenoord.”
Outside left--Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay): The poet laureate of world soccer. “In Soccer in Sun and Shadow” (1998), Galeano confesses that he reserves for the page what he could not, as an “irredeemable klutz,” manage on the field. His short meditations emphasize soccer as beauty over business and celebrate players such as the Colombian goalkeeper René Higuita, who in 1995 committed “unpardonable mischief” by unleashing his scorpion-kick save in a match against England.
Galeano suggests in “Voices of Time: A Life in Stories” (2006) that soccer of the future may be exemplified by the team of humanoid robots that computer scientists hope by 2050 to guide to the World Cup trophy:
The robots … are powerful on defense and quick on the attack. They never tire or complain. They carry out the coach’s orders without kidding around, and not for an instant do they ever entertain the lunacy that players are supposed to play. And they never laugh.
Inside left--Jorge Valdano (Argentina): Every team needs a ringer--after all, Franz Beckenbauer turned out for the German XI against Greece in Monty Python’s international philosophy match. But Valdano, who lifted the 1986 World Cup trophy with Diego Maradona and Argentina teammates, and also managed Real Madrid, fits into a long-standing Latin American tradition of writing about soccer’s place in everyday life. “Very few footballers have ever shown an active interest in their cultural surroundings,” Valdano tells FIFA.com. “Because I’ve always been a bit of a thinker, the media, in their wisdom, decided to give me the nickname El Filósofo”--the philosopher.
Valdano (left) has edited collections of short stories on soccer and writes his own. Along with fellow attacker Galeano, he emphasizes that soccer fulfills deep-seated needs in societies and individuals, “To make the ball obedient, to understand its effects, to make our speeds agree, that’s what the game consists of.”
Center forward--Barry Hines (England): Like Valdano, Hines brings a soccer player’s awareness to writing. He played for Barnsley, the South Yorkshire side he still supports, and partly based his first book, “The Blinder” (1966), on his own aspirations as a high-achieving student with sought-after soccer talent.
Most English schoolchildren are familiar with Hines’s “Kestrel for a Knave” (1968), a standard of the national curriculum. The novel features Billy Casper as a pugnacious sprite cheeky enough to tell his football-obsessed PE teacher, Mr. Sugden, “I don’t like football sir.” Relegated to goalkeeper, Casper climbs onto the crossbar “to scratch his arm pits, kicking his legs and imitating chimp sounds.” Hines has also written soccer-themed plays, “Two Men from Derby” and “Shooting Stars,” set in similarly gritty middle England milieus.
Inside right--Kenzburo Oe (Japan): One of Oe’s early novels, published in English as “The Silent Cry” (1974), appeared in Japanese as “Man’en Gannen no Futtoboru,” or “Football in the First Year of Man’en.” Oe structures the book so that soccer helps connect seemingly unrelated events 100 years apart. Teammates passing a ball to each other demonstrate both reciprocity and connection to the past. The narrator, Mitsusaburo, fails to appreciate soccer’s gravity and suffers embarrassment when asked to return the ball at a training session, “My foot contacted mostly air and the ball spun frantically before coming to rest only a short distance away.” We’ll hope for better from Oe as he takes aim at goal.
Outside right--Yury Olesha (Ukraine): Olesha completes a troika from the former Soviet Union, illustrating both the dynamism of Russian literature and soccer’s influence in the Eurasian steppe. Present at the “dawn of soccer,” he played on the right wing for an Odessa gymnasium and, with a victor’s savoring of detail, recollects a district-final triumph when his socks were “black and green and rolled down over my calves like donuts.”
In Moscow, Olesha covered international matches and befriended Andrei Starostin, cofounder of the Spartak workers’ sporting society. A keen observer of the dynamic between players and fans, Olesha sets part of the novel “Envy” (1927) at a match between Moscow all-stars and German visitors, providing a glimpse into early Soviet sporting culture. “In the stands people were arguing, hollering, quarreling about trifles,” Olesha writes. At halftime a brass band entertains with marching music; spectators buy ice cream from a “refreshment kiosk on a lawn under the trees.”
Manager--James Joyce (Republic of Ireland): According to “Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners,” the football match spanning the first few pages of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916) is Gaelic football-- the 15-a-side rugby-soccer hybrid. Therefore, Joyce fills the tactician’s role mainly for sartorial reasons. Managerial in aspect in fedora, spectacles and cane, he delivers stream-of-consciousness team talks and conducts postgame media sessions in brogue. His facility with Gaelic, Latin, Norwegian and numerous other tongues allows him to translate sideline instructions as needed.
Most tellingly, Nabokov reports that Joyce never flinched when in 1937 he found himself surrounded by Hungarian soccer players in a Parisian salon. “In the middle of the Hungarian soccer team sat Joyce — he was a rather small man, you know,” Nabokov recalls, “and he sat there with his dark glasses on and his cane and paid perfect attention to my lecture.”
Physical therapist--Albert Camus (Algeria/France): His soccer career cut short in 1930 after contracting tuberculosis, Camus--another in a long list of writer-goalkeepers — is pressed into service as a sideline dispenser of salves and healing sponges. He strapped his boots on again 10 years later for l’Association Sportive de Montpensier in Oran, Algeria, but, writing in France Football in 1957, Camus remembers that “before the end of the first half, my tongue was hanging out like those kabyles dogs that one comes across at two o’clock in the afternoon.” And that was in goal.
Despite ill health, soccer continued to sustain him even as he created characters alienated from their surroundings, those who “are here without being here.” With cigarette dangling, Camus supervises stretcher bearers for the Writers’ XI while reciting these words from “The Fall” (1957), “Even now, the Sunday matches in an overflowing stadium, and the theater, … are the only places in the world where I feel innocent.”
Edit: Man, I am just finding all kinds of goodies today. So as a postscript to the writers XI, I have included the piece below, which was originally published in The Telegraph on January 6, 2010. The title is "Albert Camus, thinker, goalkeeper."
Never mind Gerrard or Rooney, there is only one name appropriate to decorate the replica shirt of the thinking football fan. Each year Philosophy Football, perhaps the only company in Britain founded in homage to a Monty Python sketch, sells more than 5,000 of their goalkeeper’s top with the name Albert Camus embroidered across the shoulder. On its front is his famous saying: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.”
Camus died in a car accident 50 years ago this week, aged 47. As is often the way with those plucked prematurely from their thinking posts, it was a violent death that sealed his mystique. In the five decades since, he has come to be recognised as many things: roué, novelist, drinker, resistance hero, one-time friend but later sworn enemy of Jean-Paul Sartre. More to the point, he is now recognised as a man who understood the true profundity of football.
Part of the Camus mythology concerns his own facility at the game. He has been widely credited as having played for the Algerian national team in the Thirties. There are those who even claim he even wore the No1 shirt for France. Sadly, the truth is more mundane: he was rather better at spinning grand aphorisms about football than actually playing it.
He was born into poverty in Algiers and never knew his father, who died in the early exchanges of the First World War, when Albert was one. Brought up by his mother, his was a strict, maternal childhood. His grandmother used to beat him regularly, which explained his early penchant for playing in goal in street games: there was less scuffing of the shoes in goal, and if there was one thing that set grand-mère thrashing it was scuffed shoes. But there is something appropriate about a philosopher like Camus stationing himself between the sticks. It is a lonely calling, an individual isolated within a team ethic, one who plays to different constraints. If his team scores, the keeper knows it is nothing to do with him. If the opposition score, however, it is all his fault. Standing sentinel in goal, Camus had plenty of time to reflect on the absurdist nature of his position.
After playing for his school team in Algiers, Camus continued in goal for the Racing Universitaire Algerios (RUA) junior team. It was here that his career ended. In 1930, aged 18, he contracted TB, was confined to bed for several months and, after he recovered, his lungs were too damaged for him to play again. But he continued to love the game. In the Fifties he was invited by the RUA alumni magazine to contribute something about his time at the university. His essay included the line now carried on the Philosophy Football goalie’s jersey.
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