“You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir…but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

Read Taylor Branch’s Atlantic essay for more on scandal, corruption, and exploitation in college athletics. It’s long but riveting the whole way through, even for those of us who can’t tell the difference between a basketball and a football.

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In one season, our City—Bill O’Reilly’s favorite punchline for everything fey and un-American—may defeat the nation in baseball and football. It almost makes me want to bring a rodeo to the Cow Palace so our Big Gay Rodeo can break records for team milking and bucking bronco.

Some people like sports, while I prefer to derive my sense of self-worth from my own achievements. But I don’t judge. I’ve studied sports fans. I speculate that what people really like is being fans. Once you start shouting at the television and talking up the achievements of millionaire athletes as “we,” you are not enjoying sports so much as the sensation of being a fan.

When the 49ers destroyed the Broncos in the 1990 Super Bowl, I watched the game at the now-defunct Scott’s Comics & Cards on 23^rd and Mission, pre-dotcom boom, when the Mission was still the domain of recent immigrants, artists, and punks. Scott’s was like Cheers for headbanger comic book nerds. The Victorian next door housed legendary thrash-funk band the Limbomaniacs. When the 49ers won, rather than rioting, MIRV pushed an amp onto the window sill to blast some face-melting guitar. Then commenced a mosh pit in the middle of the street uniting jubilant skaters and cholos.

Based on my limited understanding of professional sports, when your team wins a championship, you have a constitutional right to riot. I don’t know much about sports, but I do know about protesting and riots. I’ve been marching and protesting and gesticulating angrily at scabs and cops since I was in diapers. By which I mean high school.

Helpfully, Mayor Lee has established the obvious connection between corporate sports-related mayhem and anti-capitalist mayhem. As the Mayor says, my expertise in Occupy protesting obviously translates to sports rioting. So that everyone gets the most out of a 49ers Super Bowl, here are tips from a non-fan for rioting for sports fans:

• San Francisco police are on your side, and plan to start rioting with you as soon as they finish work. Unless you’re African-American, in which case they might shoot you. Or put you on BART so a BART cop can shoot you for them.

• Tired cops are more dangerous than rested cops. Before you scream at a pig to fuck themselves back to Novato (aka Copland-West), pause to ask how much overtime they’ve done. If they’ve been at work for more than ten hours, yell “Go Niners!” and find a cop who’s still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

• When confronting police, size does matter. If you’re a 104-pound malnourished vegan, adorable skinny jeans won’t suffice. Bulk up before the big game with a week of carbs and ribs.

• Stretch. Apparently a good stretching program is the secret to the 49ers’ triumphs. Don’t pull a hamstring and have to sit out the fun while suffering through a therapeutic soak at Kabuki.

• Hydrate, but pee first. Good rioting (and possible time in the klink) requires carefully calibrating your fluids. You don’t want to be blindsided mid-havoc wreaking by a dehydration headache. On the other hand, you also don’t want to load up on kombucha and have to ask politely to use the rest room at an Urban Outfitters you just razed.

• Wear layers. The weather can change suddenly, and on occasions like this we’re especially likely to get doused with prosecco. Stay warm, bring a beanie, and be ready to adjust for weather swings.

• If you must destroy property, make sure it warrants destruction. For example, leave the busted Corolla on Duboce alone and destroy a shiny SUV taking up two compact parking spaces. Don’t smash up local business or taxpayer-funded public assets like buses. Don’t trash your ride home. On the other hand, no one will cry if a foreclosure-happy bank gets a comeuppance.

• Mayor Lee is encouraging business to cut down on hard alcohol sales. This is a great opportunity to showcase our fantastic local beers and wines. They’re not just for pairing with grilled rabbit and duck confit. They can be for blackout drinking and berserker rage too.

• “The Pistol offense” and “shotgun formation” are metaphors.

• If you run out of things to smash, bike on by the tony new SOMA pied a terre condo towers or up to Billionaires’ Row in Pacific Heights. Politely ask the doorman if you can go floor to floor like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. He’ll say no and then wink knowingly.

• When flipping a car, lift with the knees, not the back. If you have any chronic pain or injuries that limit your ability to flip a car, try instead flipping a Vespa, Fiat, Segway, or fixed-gear bike. We riot in a manner inclusive of people with disabilities.

• Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo is the most vocal pro-gay marriage football player. In San Francisco, it’s totally ok to riot in solidarity with him, or to demand to make out with him. He’s CUTE!

• On this day only, when someone shouts, “Who’s got it better than us?” the answer is not, “The 1%!”

Or, you could not riot. Make a poem or cartoon about the rioting you would have done instead.

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Zinedine Zidane knows how that brand of shameful memorializing feels. Zidane, the former soccer star who led France to its only World Cup championship in 1998, became a French cultural icon in the ’90s. He led France’s national team from his position in central midfield, controlling the ball deftly, switching directions with superhuman quickness, displaying near-divine precision when he passed the ball. Thanks to all this, Zidane—whose parents were from northern Algeria—was the best-known player on a racially and ethnically diverse team that made many French citizens feel as though their nation had transcended its colonialist history. The son of immigrants became a hero to soccer fans all over the world, but in France Zidane’s biography made him more than a sports figure with a cool name.

In 2006, eight years after leading France to world football dominance for the first time, an aging Zidane powered the French team to yet another World Cup final. What he’d lost in youthful quickness, Zidane made up for with his ageless sixth sense for placing beautiful, curving passes at the feet of sprinting teammates. Zidane had come to occupy that hackneyed but irresistible sports archetype, the savvy veteran, with an extra dash of style and power. But throughout the final match of that 2006 World Cup, the Italian defender Marco Materazzi baited Zidane by saying nasty things about the French star’s sister. In the second half, an increasingly agitated Zidane—maybe forgetting that millions and millions of people were watching the match—lashed out with a ferocious head-butt, hammering his skull straight into the defender’s sternum, sending Materazzi sprawling backwards, shouting in pain.

This is the very moment that the French artist Adel Abdessemed captured in a giant bronze sculpture that now stands outside the Pompidou Center in Paris. The enormous sculpture captures the contours and wrinkles of the two players’ jerseys, the grounded, goat-like stance of the butting Zidane, the graceless backward flop of Materazzi. The imposing twinned statues are all dark metal, a bit H. R. Geiger-ish in their sleek violence (and also, as Scott Sayare nicely observed in the Times’ Artsbeat blog, the sculpture echoes some giant, bleak Soviet-era sculpture). Abdessemed, the sculptor, who claims Algerian heritage similar to Zidane’s, told Sayare that the soccer icon’s attack “offered us a rapture” because Zidane, in that moment of aggression, “expressed himself as a man.”

I remember just where I watched that World Cup final in 2006. I was standing in the backyard of a Brooklyn bar called Cherry Tree, holding a pint of beer. The game was being projected onto a mostly taut white sheet, and the moving images of the action were pale and sometimes hard to see in the summer sunlight. I was following the match in a distracted way, talking to friends, drinking, thinking how nice it was that people could bring their dogs. I’m pretty sure someone was trying to roast a pig in a shallow trench back there, which would have drawn some portion of my attention, too. But at one point I looked up at the screen and saw it—saw something: was that Zidane? Was that Zidane head-butting somebody? The ghosts on the screen were difficult to make out, but yes, the replays made it clear: Zinedine Zidane, one of the world’s most admired athletes and one of my personal soccer heroes, had violently head-butted an opponent and then been red-carded—thrown out—of the World Cup final. I was stunned.

Now, six years later, a gigantic sculpture of Zidane’s disgrace looms outside a Paris museum and library complex. What to make of this? I admire Abdessemed’s sculpture, or at least I admire its conceptual roots, because I think the artwork shows something about the mythical status we accord our most talented athletes. Maybe portraits of shamed or injured sports stars are as close as we can come to resonant religious images in our century. But the sculptor’s contention that this moment amounts to a “rapture” seems wrongheaded to me. Both men played their part: Materazzi’s weird, elaborate pseudo-Iago act remains villainous as ever, and Zidane’s response still seems immature and shameful. But beyond the sculpture, the rapture is still there—in the memories of Zidane’s play, the moves he produced impromptu, eluding and eliding, gliding around the field like a ghost who became more substantial (and somehow quicker) when his feet touched the ball. There is no easy redemption in Zidane’s story, nothing like Barry Zito regaining championship form for the San Francisco Giants after blowing it for so many years. But Zidane’s awful lapse of judgment is not an egregious Lance Armstrong-esque fall from grace, either. The rapture of the French midfielder’s play is still there in the collective memory of those who watched him; you can see it, too, in the documentary Zidane: A 21^st Century Portrait. This strange and strangely compelling film used 17 different cameras to record Zidane’s movement and stillness during the course of a single 90-minute game. The movie is slow at times, but Zidane’s transitions from expectant jogging to sudden bursts of skill are where the real rapture lies. And no one can bronze those subtle flickers of intelligent play, which is at least partly why they’re beautiful.

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–from On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates

The Morris Park gym stinks, its walls varnished with years of dried sweat. Even though the heavy metal door is propped open most days, the Bronx air, which seems crisp and clean in comparison, isn’t enough to cleanse the musty atmosphere. Inside, the small, windowless two-room gym exists on its own terms. Boxers wail on the leather heavy bags, their explosions in rhythm with one another. Two boys, about fifteen, skip rope in front of mirrors patched together by duct tape. Above the mirror a painted slogan reads: “It’s better to sweat in the gym than bleed in the streets.” All the words are black, with the exception of the word “Street,” which is colored by chunky horizontal stripes of red, white, and blue. But these kids aren’t on the street. They’re in the gym, a place where their aggression is welcome—and where, for one cathartic year, mine was, too.

***

I first discovered the satisfaction of throwing a punch at the age of twenty-five, when I stumbled into a boxing class at Healthworks, a fancy all-women’s gym in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, the gym-goers were mostly white women in their forties and fifties, the sort I imagined bought herbal tinctures at Cambridge Naturals and went to see Noam Chomsky every time he spoke at the local Unitarian Church. When Teanna, the slight teacher with a flame tattoo emblazoned across her calf, first appraised my boxer’s stance, she said, “You look mean.” This was high praise.

Riddled by people-pleasing instincts, I had spent years using my sympathetic persona to mask an inner aggression. Growing up, I watched as my mother projected her own sense of herself on all the females in our household, including beloved Bonnie, our golden retriever. “She’s like me, a lover, not a fighter,” my mother would say approvingly. Though I wouldn’t be able to articulate this for years, deep down I understood my personal equation of love and combat was different: I am a lover because I am a fighter.

Three years after my first boxing class, I moved to New York for graduate school. In 2004, once I settled into my apartment in the Bronx, I opened up my phonebook and started calling gyms in the neighborhood, excited. I was not finished reinventing my feminine side. Painted fingernails or not, I was ready to fight.

***

Besides being less than ten minutes from my house, Morris Park seemed to be the only gym in the New York metropolitan area within my budget. The monthly fee was thirty-five dollars. When I asked the man on the phone about the possibility of getting a guest pass, he laughed and said, “Look, look, this ain’t no Jack LaLane. This a ghetto gym. This where the tough people work out.” His voice spiked when he said the word “tough.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, my voice lilting. “I’m tough.” He laughed. Though he could not see my dangly earrings or charcoal eye shadow, he knew. Even over the phone, he knew. I was not the kind of “tough” that he meant. Nevertheless, when I told him I’d come in on Friday, he said, “Good. I’ll be here. You ask for Dudley. My name is Dudley.”

The first day, I throw my 10-ounce gloves into my flowery pink bag and drive ten minutes to 644 Morris Park Avenue, just near the Bronx River Parkway. The façade of the building is crumbling and above the entrance hangs a sign with faded paint that reads simply: “Morris Park Boxing Gym.”  As I lift the heavy metal door, I can already tell: no windows.

At Morris Park, the mats are old, pieced together with silver duct tape, and the floor is covered in grime. In the back room, dried drops of blood cover the faded blue foam on the floor of the ring. If you don’t keep your eyes on your own equipment, I am told, it will disappear. Someone broke into a locker and stole the Golden Gloves pendant of last year’s heavyweight champ. (It was returned because “someone heard something” and made a few “phone calls”.) This sounds very illogical to me, stealing from a heavyweight champ. Victor, the gym’s kind, short Puerto Rican owner, tells me to leave anything of value at home and to come to the gym already in my workout clothes.

“Listen,” Victor says, cocking his head sideways, his wide brown eyes alert. “Ah, this is not a women’s gym.”

Standing in the entryway, taking in the dirty floors, the poor lighting, and male gym-goers, I see what he means. I am definitely not in Cambridge anymore.

***

The first week, I’m jumping rope while Dudley is nearby, holding the pads for a stocky fighter, Dmitriy. Dmitriy is from the Ukraine and everyone calls him “the Russian”. Dudley backs up as the Russian moves across the ring, inching Dudley toward the blue ropes. Dudley is in his late thirties, with dark brown skin, a lean form, and well-shaved head. As I struggle for rhythm with the black plastic rope that he handed me, he looks back over his shoulder.

“Shit, she can jump,” he says to the Russian, but loud enough for me to hear. “Look out. She jump better than you.”

Later that day, when I am doing sit-ups with my feet tucked under the far side of the ring, a trainer runs up to me and whispers as I fold and unfold my body, “Hey, just had a thought. If you were the only guy in this place and the rest of us were women, you’d have a harem.”

Trying hard to focus, I turn to him after I have touched my chin to my knees. “Instead, you’re the only female with a bunch of eunuchs! Ha!” he says as I lower my head back to the dirty mat. I say nothing.

“Humor,” he says. “That’s, ah, supposed to be funny.”

The continual references to my sex are striking. On the one hand, they stand in stark contrast to the identity-digging that I am attempting. On the other, they resonate: trying on aggression for size is foreign territory. The experience of boxing has given me a deeper understanding of what it is to inhabit my own skin, even though I have also never in my life felt like such a “girl,” thanks to the constant reminders. Nevertheless, what I am experiencing in my body seems so different from this flat perception of women that I keep bumping up against.

Take Tony, for example. A handsome guy with dimples and long eyelashes, he said the first time we met: “How come you like to box?”

We were standing in the ring and I circled my arms, trying to keep warm for my rounds with Dudley.

“Because it’s fun.”

“Fun? Females aren’t supposed to be violent.”

I paused for a minute, thinking of the girl-led cliques in my junior high, the ones that passed mean notes and humiliated other girls. How is that not violent?

Tony continued, “You need to date a boxer, otherwise no guy could take you.”

Later in the week, I am standing in front of the heavy bag. My head is down and I am aiming for the bag’s center, which is marked by red duct tape. I take a deep breath and make sure that my feet are in the proper stance before taking aim with my gloved fist. After I strike, I hear murmurs behind me. A group of trainers have stopped to watch.

Victor says interestedly when the bell rings, “Yeah, I can tell you know something about hitting the bag. What was it you did now—martial arts? Kickboxing?”

I tell him that I don’t have the coordination for kickboxing and that I boxed before, just straight boxing.

The bell sounds again, a long ring to signal the start of the fresh three-minute round. As I circle the bag, pivoting on my left foot, I can hear the trainers talking behind me.

“She learning fast. She do this before?”

Victor whispers, “No, it was kickboxing or something.”

Above their heads there is a tiny close-up black and white photo—no more than two inches wide—of a woman with dark hair and fair skin. Under a sign that says “Golden Gloves Champs 2004,” the photo reads “Lisandra Velasquez.” Lisandra is a heavyweight and she is a woman and she works out here, at Morris Park. So why do the trainers find it so curious that I’ve boxed before? Maybe I’m too polite. Maybe they see shades of the selfless helper in me always ready—even if not entirely willing—to give her all. Or maybe, I realize after a few weeks in the gym, maybe, they’re just making conversation.

 ***

After a few weeks, Dudley starts telling me, “You can do anything that these guys can do. Anything. There been guys comin’ here for years who can’t hit the speed bag like you.”

Only once does he say, “Well you a girl. I can’t expect nothin’ more.”

I am doing sit-ups and he’s pushing me forward, with his hands below my shoulders. I was working hard (at my normal “Robo-cop” pace as one trainer has noted), but somehow I upset him. Sit-ups, however, signify the end of my workout, so by this time, I’m too exhausted for his comment to sting. Lifting my head off the mat one more time, struggling to bring my chin to my knees, I think, Keep moving.

***

The daily routine looks something like this: I get to the gym by 4:30pm, walk inside, say hello to everyone. I leave my bag in a corner after taking out the tangle of cloth hand wraps. If Dudley isn’t free to wrap my hands, another trainer helps. I then skip rope for fifteen or so minutes, lulled by the click-click-click of the rope hitting the linoleum floor. What happens next depends on which facilities are free. Sometimes, I head straight to the heavy bag, following Dudley’s instruction as he calls out punch combinations. I stop when the red buzzer sounds, putting my sweaty, gloved hands on my hips and throwing my head back when Dudley lifts my water bottle to my mouth. After, Dudley holds pads up for me to punch, as we dance across the ring. This goes on. (And on. And on.) Occasionally, Dudley and I will throw the medicine ball around. Despite our difference in size, he uses his full strength, which sometimes prompts other trainers to call out, “Go easy on her, man.” Then, I work out on the speed bag, followed by pull-ups, then push-ups, then sit-ups. By the time I stagger out, the clock above the door reads 7:30pm, sometimes 8:00pm. My clothes soaked, I drive home, shower, eat a bowl of pasta, and fall asleep. And then I dream. Boy, do I dream.

***

Children and youth fill the gym, especially in the after-school hours. Dudley is always yelling out to the younger guys, “Hey, you sizing her up? You think you can take her, don’t you?” It is an icebreaker that never gets old. The younger the kid, the surer he is that he can beat me up.

One day, a young boy with brown eyes and a dominating smile walks in. He can’t be older than eleven years old. Al tells the kid to stand at the front room, where Al watches him jump rope. I stand next to the kid, towering over him by at least one and a half feet. Dudley has stepped out of the room with the other trainers. It’s just Al, the kid and me when Al starts yelling at the kid, for no discernable reason: “This is bullshit. Why you looking around? Who you looking at?”

The kid says, “Jump roping is hard. I can’t do it.”

“Well you can’t stop either! Keep going!”

Suddenly, I find both my aggressive and nurturing instincts kicking in. I want to snap at Al. I want to pull the kid away and sit with him until his mother can come pick him up. But when Al yells “Bullshit!” one or two more times, I do nothing.

The other trainers come in from outside. Rubbing his eyes, the kid stops Wendell, a trainer. He is crying and Wendell leans in closer to listen. Just then, Victor comes in and asks what the problem is. Through his tears, the kid says, “He was cussing at me.”

Victor stands upright and turns to Al. “Were you cussing at this kid? He’s just a little kid.”

Just then, Dudley walks in and stands in front of me: “Keep going. Don’t pay any attention to this bullshit.”

When Al denies it, Victor says, “He said you were.”

“No. I wasn’t. I wasn’t fucking cussing at him!”

“Come on. I want to see you in the office,” Victor motions for Al to follow him.

As Al goes to follow Victor, he suddenly turns around and shouts, “You know what, kid? You’re a piece of shit!”

This is too much for my heart to bear, but I force myself to let someone else handle it. Dudley sees my brow and says, “You just keep working.”

Wendell takes care of the kid, telling him that Al didn’t mean it. Dudley looks over at the kid and says, “You know, I known him since I was your age…He ain’t a bad guy. He just drink too much.”

The kid is silent.

The commotion from the office quiets and Dudley sends me back to the speed bag. I am getting into my rhythm, moving side to side, and pumping my shoulders every time my fist hits the worn leather. Dudley assumes his usual position, with his arms overhead. He watches to make sure I don’t drop my hands and that I don’t go too fast, rushing my progress. In between, he says things like, “That’s what I’m talking about” or “I gotta force your ass to do this”. Usually with the latter phrase, his lower jaw is tight. Forcing me into new and uncomfortable positions is a core ethic of Dudley’s coaching style.

***

Two months into my experience at Morris Park, I am part of the team. The fighters are generally referred to by their ethnicity. There’s the Russian, the Mexican, the Italian, the Cuban, and the list goes on. I’m The White Girl. Sometimes, after a particularly tough session working the pads with Dudley, other fighters will comment on my progress. When I hear, “Oooh! Soon you’ll be knocking all those white girls out!” I take it as a sign of acceptance.

One day, Carlos, the Italian immigrant with gray hair, brings in a hip hop CD to play. “Hey, Dudley listen to this. This guy looks just like you.”

The music starts, I don’t know what you heard about me, but if you can’t get a dolla out of me…

I am sitting in front of the speed bag, standing on a small plywood lift. Dudley is standing next to me in that familiar place, his bare arms straight above his head as he holds on to the wooden platform from which the speed bag hangs. We are waiting for the bell to ring when Carlos, who has been shadowboxing in the ring, says, “Eh, you surprised? You surprised that I listen to this music?”

Dudley and I laugh while Carlos continues, “My wife, she says I am very deceiving. I may look white, but I have a black heart.”

Dudley shakes his head and says, “Look man, you ain’t from the crib. I know. You look at a guy you know whether or not he from the crib. Look at that little boy over there. He from the crib and he already look like a thug.”

Carlos doesn’t seem to get it. He bops off toward the other side of the ring, bouncing with slack shoulders.

The bell rings. I look to concentrate just below the hinge of where the bag hangs.

As I continue to giggle, Dudley snaps, “And you, what are you laughing at? You ain’t from the crib either.”

With sweat dripping down my face, I have to smile. This is one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard. No, I’m definitely not from the crib, but somehow, I still belong.

***

Six-year-old Anna Marie snaps big bubbles with her pink chewing gum as she rocks from side-to-side. As the bubbles come dangerously close to popping in her silky blonde hair, her weight shifts, first on the sole of her left mary jane, then her right. Anna Marie is the daughter of a girlfriend of one of the trainers. Although she has been out of school for at least three hours, she still wears her uniform: a navy blue jumper dress with a white short sleeve collared shirt. With one decisive chomp of her jaw, her latest bubble deflates. Snap! Her mouth stretches into a grin, revealing a large gap in her upper teeth.

I am standing tall on a small plywood lift in front of the worn two-toned speed bag. The buzzer rings. As I take my sixty-second break, I watch Anna Marie across the ring. Now she’s sitting on the ropes, rocking back and forth. She has massive blue eyes and her two front teeth are missing. I look at her outfit and think, She could be anywhere. But she is not anywhere. She is standing by the ropes in the middle of a particularly vicious sparring match-up. Her mother and her mother’s boyfriend watch from seats just a few feet behind her. When one boxer’s left hook makes his opponent’s mouth drip with bright blood, Anna is transfixed.

Blood from the mouth of one of the fighters continues to spill out onto the dirty faded blue mat on the floor of the ring. Drops of red stain his sweat-soaked yellow shirt. Anna Marie sways and dances, though her eyes are fixed on the fighter and his blood.

The other fighter aims again for his opponent’s injury: his left jab is blocked and then his right jab lands. More blood starts to gush. Anna Marie steps in closer to the ring. Her eyes grow wider and Dudley notices her.

“Whose baby is that? Someone get the baby out of here! Too violent for her,” he yells. Her mother doesn’t do anything.

“I ain’t jokin’,” Dudley says again. “Get the baby out of here.” This time, he waves his arms and leans over the top rope, as if to say, “I mean it.” No one responds.

The injured fighter spits watery blood into a plastic bucket in the corner of the ring. Some misses and falls onto the floor. The voices outside the ring get louder. Boxers are cheering, “Go! Go!” Sometimes a boxer outside the ring covers his lower lip with the collar of his t-shirt and says, “Man” or “Shit” when one of the fighter’s takes an exceptionally strong punch.

When the fight ends, the other fighters begin to move away from the edge of the ropes, moving back toward their workouts, but Anna Marie stays still. Her lips are glued together and her eyes look worried. They are fixed on a fresh pool of blood that is seeping into the foamy floor of the ring.

I move over to the blue mat, readying myself for sit-ups. My feet are nestled into the space between the bottom of the ring and the concrete of the floor and I begin. One, two, three. Anna Marie walks around the ring, ducking now and then for no reason. As I touch my chin to my knees, she stands at my side.

“You have blue eyes like me,” she says.

“And your mom, right?” I say, in a winded tone.

“Nope. Hers are green.”

“Oh.”

“Did you see the blood?” Anna Marie asks. “And the spit?”

I stop my sit-ups and look at her: “I did.” Pause. “Have you seen fights before?”

From the far corner of the ring, Anna Marie’s mother calls out, “Leave her alone, Anna.”

Anna Marie looks down at me, ignoring her mother’s gaze. She wants something from me, and turns her back to her mother, who walks away.

In a softer tone, I say, “It’s okay. You’re not bothering me.”

“I’ve only seen blood like that on tv. My mom watches it all night.”

I just want to do my sit-ups and get on with my workout. But her eyes hang with melancholy. Their look feels familiar.

In a flash I am Anna’s age standing over my mother as she sleeps on the couch. She closed her eyes immediately after dinner and hasn’t woken up yet. My father is sending me to bed and so I lean down to kiss her—and as I do I pause with my lips on hers. I’m waiting. She wakes up, startled and pushes me off of her. “My god,” she says. “What? What do you want?”

There is something in Anna Marie that I think I understand. And there is something in her that knows this.

Continuing with another set of sit-ups, I say, “Blood’s different in real life, huh?”

“Yeah. I don’t like it. I never want to go in that ring—scared me.”

“I’m sorry you had to see that today,” I say, though my words ring hollow. Anna Marie’s eyes are still pleading with me, “Tell me something good, please.”

Dudley was right when he said, “In the gym, you work out. Then get the f- out of here. Your problems, your life at home, they don’t come here.” The gym is a sanctuary, and when I am faced with interactions that would normally prompt me to act, like Al yelling at the kid or Anna Marie asking about the blood, I realize that I don’t have to do anything. And this realization has been an incredibly long journey—from my mother’s house to the all-female health club, to here, at this Bronx gym—of proving to myself that I don’t have to take care of anyone else.

But in this moment, I want to. I really do.

I rise and start doing jumping jacks. Anna imitates me. We count aloud together. When she says, “One,” her voice falls into a giggle. A boxer walks by and asks me if this is my daughter.

Dudley, who normally looks down on distractions, says nothing. He takes a noticeable step back and watches us from the other side of the room. He has that look on his face that I have come to recognize. The forehead is unwrinkled, though there is still something to say; I can guess what it is and he knows this. This look surfaces only after I’ve made a million mistakes and finally get a piece of the puzzle to fit. Usually it’s when I’m on the heavy bag and he is coaxing me to relax. “Just relax,” he says. “Everything better when you relax.” With this direction, the rules disappear. Gone are the hard and fast ideas about where my hands and feet need to be. I’m operating on another level, one that forces me to have some faith that all my practice and arduous training will have amounted to something. The confidence is mysterious and inexplicable, reaching through to the place where there is no difference between the girl who throws a good punch or the daughter who waits for a kiss from her mother. There is no distinction between the lady who grits her teeth in the ring and the woman who hopes that everyone around her will be okay. In this air, we are one and the same.

Every time I feel this freedom in my body, Dudley notices too, almost immediately, and he never fails to add his commentary, just to let me know that he sees. “Beautiful,” he says. “There she is. There’s the real Suzie.”

***

Below is an audio track of Suzanne Guilette reading “The Honesty of Aggression.”

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I moved to the Midwest from Mexico City in 2009 for graduate school. Since I was the only Mexican in my program, I was paired up with a Colombian-American fellow who’d been at the university for a couple of years and would show me “the ropes.” He and his wife—both very pleasant, if a little hard to read—took me shopping for a bed and a desk, gave me a quick tour of campus, and pointed out the local soccer bar.

It wasn’t long until I was visiting the soccer bar regularly to watch English Premier League games. Manchester United had just picked up Mexican superstriker Javier “Chicharito”[1] Hernández, so I enjoyed catching their games and clapping proudly when my young compatriot scored.

A compulsive people-watcher, at the soccer bar I paid attention to the other patrons almost as much as I did the actual games. I immediately realized that there was something off about American soccer fans. Like somehow they didn’t belong. Like they were faking it. American soccer fans, I discovered, gave me the same feeling as white guys with dreads.

The thing that struck me as the strangest about American soccer fans was how indignant they were about players faking fouls. “Flop!” they said accusingly. “Flop!” When a player pretended he’d been tripped or rolled around on the grass as if his shin had been cracked in half, everyone at the bar made the face I would make if I saw someone push an elderly lady down an electric staircase. They got mad even if the members of their own team flopped. When the phantom fouls were replayed in slow-motion, everyone—again, regardless of their affiliation—groaned and shook their head. They seemed to be thinking something along the lines of, How does he sleep at night knowing that he tricked the ref into calling a foul?

CLAVADO.

As everyone who’s ever lived once said, “Words matter.”

Flop was a term I’d never really been familiar with until I heard it at the soccer bar. In Mexico we call flops clavados. Dives. As in, That player dove in the box and tricked the ref into calling a penalty kick. If there’s a particularly conspicuous dive, the announcer, in jest, might say something like, Where’s the swimming pool? In the Spanish-speaking world, we compare faking a foul to something beautiful, almost artistic. Flop, on the other hand, is just a simple onomatopoeic admonition. There are no good flops and bad flops. The flop is inherently negative.

Lately I’ve been hearing people[2] talk a lot about flopping because the NBA playoffs are on and flopping seems to be a “growing problem” in basketball. Indiana Pacers coach Frank Vogel called the Miami Heat floppers. (And was fined $15,000.) Everyone seems to be calling Blake Griffin and the L.A. Clippers a flopping team. During one of the games even David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA, said in an interview that flopping was a very serious matter. Flopping is so shameful, says everyone. It’s ruining our sport. How can we put an end to it?

NUMBERS MEAN NOTHING

Forgive this horrible cliché: “Soccer is not just a sport, it is an entire mentality.” That was David Brooks in The New York Times Opinionator during the 2010 World Cup. Don’t roll your eyes at me. Brooks is right. And he gets even righter: “Soccer is a sport perfectly designed to reinforce a tragic view of the universe, because basically it is a long series of frustrations leading up to near certain heartbreak.”

The reason why soccer is such an anti-sport to American fans is that it’s tragic, incredibly frustrating and even melancholy.[3] I’m not saying there’s no tragedy in baseball, football and basketball, but those three sports ultimately espouse the worldview of a winner, while soccer preaches the gospel of losers. “We in this country prefer pastimes that are rational and quantifiable,” says Brooks. “Football plays can be drawn up in a playbook and baseball lends itself to statistical analysis.” While in soccer, “it is possible for a team to be outplayed for 89 minutes and yet still score one fluke goal and win the game. Superior performance often does not translate into victory.”

It’s no wonder losers are so drawn to soccer and winners so repulsed by it. If you’re better than everyone else, do you want the world to be quantifiable and rational or illogical and chaotic? What I’m saying here is not that soccer is a bunch of guys randomly kicking a ball. Soccer is, in fact, when played right, a game of subtle strategy and keen intelligence. But it’s also incredibly abstract. Too abstract to be quantifiable. All soccer statistics—except how many actual goals each team scored—are completely useless. Time of possession? Some teams play a defensive game and give their opponents possession of the ball. Offsides and corner kicks? I’ve never actually known if a high number of those is a good or bad thing.[4] Stats are given in soccer games only because stats are given in football and basketball games. We learned it from you guys. The only difference is that in football and basketball numbers actually mean something. If told how many passing yards, rushing yards and turnovers the Chicago Bears have at halftime, we can pretty much guess how the team is doing in the actual scoreboard. The same can be done with the Chicago Bulls if given the percentage of field-goals made. In baseball[5] some stats are part of the scoreboard itself.

I WISH I DIDN’T, BUT I HAVE TO MENTION KLOSTERMAN: A PARENTHETICAL.

Chuck Klosterman has a horrible essay on why soccer is bad for America in which he claims that outcasts like to play soccer because “it’s the only sport where you can’t fuck up.” Look, I know you probably like Klosterman, but that’s idiotic. I played soccer for most of my childhood and still remember some of the moments when I fucked up. Also, Klosterman’s argument doesn’t address the question of why outcasts like to watch soccer. This whole essay could be about why Klosterman is wrong on EVERYTHING regarding soccer, but that would be a very angry and self-indulgent essay to write. For example, I’d say things like, You know who else thinks soccer is bad for America? Glenn Beck![6]

WHAT DOES ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH FLOPPING?

Everything.

I’ve always been bored by writers describing every single detail of a moment in sports, so even though I need to describe a moment in sports here, I’ll do it briefly. This happened in Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium[7] during the 1986 World Cup. Argentina was playing England in the quarterfinals. The score was nil-nil. Diego Armando Maradona dribbled past two Brits, passed the ball to Jorge Valdano and ran straight into the box hoping to get the ball back amidst a bunch of confused and flat-footed defenders. Valdano then lost possession of the ball to an English defender who tried to clear it but instead kicked it awkwardly—lobbed it—into the box.

Now, running furiously toward the ball was poor little Maradona, at 5’5”, and against him Peter Shilton who’s not only about half a foot taller than Maradona but, as the goalie, is permitted to use his hands. If you know anything about anything then you know what happened next. Both Maradona and Shilton jumped for the ball and Maradona, that little trickster, raised his arm and knocked the ball in with his fist while pretending to hit it with his head. The ref was fooled. Argentina beat England 2-1[8] and went on to win the 1986 World Cup trophy.

That goal is famously known as the Hand of God because after the game, Maradona said it was scored in part with his head and in part with the hand of God. Yes, Maradona was basically calling himself God. Both of those things—the cheating and the grandiosity—would be reviled in all the big three American sports, but not in soccer. The Hand of God is not seen as a shameful stain for the sport. There is no asterisk next to Argentina’s 1986 World Cup championship. Maradona is regarded by most as the best soccer player in history. There’s a religion called The Church of Maradona. Not even the English are bitter about the Hand of God. Peter Reid, a midfielder for the 1986 British team, even kissed Maradona’s hand on TV. Besides, England had won the 1966 World Cup with their own famously dubious goal.

But of course that type of thinking hasn’t caught on in the United States. Why? America is Peter Shilton, taller than everyone else and the only one able to use their hands. The rest of us relate to the tiny forward running into the box. That’s why we like to see David coming up with a crazy plan to beat Goliath—and getting away with it! (As any loser will tell you, we’re always fantasizing about crazy plans to upend the world’s logic.)

There’s also the concept of fooling authority that’s appealing to losers. America, the perennial winner, likes their sportsmen to respect authority because they identify with authority. (This is, after all, the country that decides who gets to have nuclear weapons.) In the NBA one gets a technical for no more than giving the ref a dirty look. Arguing with the refs is almost unheard of in the NFL. And in baseball? Sure, every once in a while the manager will come out of the dugout and scream at the umpire, maybe even kick a little dirt here and there, but that’s permitted because it’s part of baseball’s tradition. It’s institutionalized dissent—even duller than the lack of dissent. That’s why flops are so abhorrent to American fans, they symbolize the authority figure losing control, which is what this country fears the most.

IT’S NOT WHETHER YOU WIN OR LOSE, IT’S WHETHER YOU COMPLAIN WHEN I WIN, WIN, WIN: A NOTE ON SPORTSMANSHIP.

Now, I must confess, I’m an extremely unsportsmanlike sportsman by anyone’s standards, but I have played youth and non-youth sports in both Mexico and the U.S. and I’m certain that sportsmanship is 6,000% a bigger thing here.

Youth sports is a perfect way for Americans to teach young Americans that the established hierarchy is the right hierarchy and that authority is never wrong. That way they’ll grow up thinking that 1) questioning authority is wrong, and 2) America is a superpower because America is meant to be a superpower.

WE DON’T NEED NO CELEBRATION.

Before I leave, I just want to get this out there: Americans always complain that there aren’t enough goals in soccer. Members of a culture that idolizes winning and winners along with immediate gratification, they want to celebrate constantly. Well, as it turns out, soccer is a game for adults. You sit there and you watch and you’re content with the beauty of how it plays out. Sure, the goal is, of course, the goal of the game, but as a stoner once told me, the important thing is the journey. That’s hard to sell in a country that lets its grown-ups act like children. (Just think of the superhero movies and animated movies that are marketed “for adults.” I’m fed up with people trying to convince me to watch Toys 3 or some other cartoon bullshit. As I write this, Charlize Theron is promoting a PG-13 monstrosity called Snow White and the Huntsman.)

People who complain about the lack of goals in soccer don’t seem to realize that the harder it is to get something the more gratifying it feels to get it. Just look at how a soccer player reacts when he finally scores a goal. I like basketball, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that most games seem to be relatively close in the last five minutes. So what was all that scoring during the previous forty-three minutes for? Just to keep us entertained between commercial breaks?

To appreciate soccer one has to understand that there’s beauty in failure. Which brings me to my last point:

AMERICANS WILL LEARN TO LIKE SOCCER.

That’s good news for me and other soccer fans who happen to live in the US, but not really. The reason for America’s jumping on the soccer bandwagon is that we’re transitioning into a post-American world. No longer will this country be the world’s boss/policeman/CEO/parent. The head of the world will be, in the near future, no one.

That means that America, the tall goalie who always gets the ball, is going through the painful transformation of becoming a short midfielder who needs to figure out how to upend the system to get his way. Basically, and I think we’re seeing this already with movements like Occupy Wall Street, America will be forced to sympathize with losers. Something that goes against everything it’s ever believed in, but that goes surprisingly well with soccer.

Welcome.

[1] “Little Pea.”

[2] I don’t mean just people here, I mean the media. Maybe it’s sad, but most of the conversations I have happen in my head and my interlocutors are journalists, TV personalities, writers, etc.

[3] Every time I watch an important game in the company of Americans, they always seem to be surprised to see the losing players cry, sometimes on their hands and knees, at the end of the game. But in the world of soccer it’s the most normal thing. Soccer players cry. A lot.

[4] Recently, Chelsea beat Bayern Munich in the 2012 UEFA Champions League Final with a very defensive style of play. Here’s a quote from the LA Times about stats in that particular match: “…the Germans dominated every statistic but the final score, putting more than twice as many shots on goal, drawing nearly twice as many fouls and taking 20 corner kicks to just one for Chelsea.”

[5] It’s no wonder that baseball, a game of statistics, pioneered the fantasy-sports phenomenon. There’s nothing more boring in this world than fantasy soccer.

[6] From Media Matters: In an extensive rant on the June 11 Glenn Beck Program, Beck purported to explain how President Obama’s policies “are the World Cup” of “political thought.” Beck stated, “It doesn’t matter how you try to sell it to us, it doesn’t matter how many celebrities you get, it doesn’t matter how many bars open early, it doesn’t matter how many beer commercials they run, we don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.” Beck stated that likewise, “the rest of the world likes Barack Obama’s policies, we do not.”

[7] El Azteca, or as it is sometimes called “The Colossal of Santa Úrsula”—Santa Úrsula being the neighborhood it’s in—is a truly imposing setting with its capacity for 100,000+ spectators.

[8] Argentina’s second goal was also scored by Maradona, this time legally, and it was the most beautiful goal ever scored on a soccer field.

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“As I prepare to immerse myself in another season of ill-fated devotion, there is a question I can’t shake: Why? Not why do the Raiders keep losing, but why does anyone follow an incompetent, perpetually failing team? It’s a question that resonates across an entire nation of fanatics, from the frigid Cheeseheads of Wisconsin to the yodeling herds of Texas, from the mile-high multitudes to the bellowing masses of New York.”

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“I started scoring events in terms of what they’d offer in a human-annihilation-type scenario. Offensewise, archery skills seemed like an obvious asset at first. But the archers’ high-tech bows wouldn’t survive a day of jumping off roofs, tromping through sewers, and escaping cannibal hordes.”

(Via The Millions)

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Jones, who placed fourth in this Olympics’ 100-meters hurdle competition, has been a figure of debate since the New York Times wrote an scathing article about her reliance on image to win endorsement deals and garner national attention. Mac McClelland comes to her defense in an article for Reuters, shifting the blame from Jones to the media.

McClelland writes: “Even if she’d come in dead last, she wouldn’t have deserved the narrative framing that Longman gave her. She’s a victim, indeed, but of double standards and sexism – sexist double standards so culturally ingrained that even the newspaper of record will unabashedly print them.”

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We hope you’ve been supplementing your Olympics intake with some poetics, courtesy of the Los Angeles Review of Books. The LARB Poetic Olympic Team’s fourth round begins as Erika Meitner weaves poetry and trampoline, and A. Van Jordan brings Virgil to boxing.

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Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Gabrielle Calvocoressi is drawing our attention to an unlikely pairing: sports and poetry. The poet and Rumpus contributor gathered the voices of a diverse group of poets and poet-critics to provide readers with a different kind of Olympic coverage. Over the course of the coming weeks, these writers will share their artistic renditions of dismounts, podiums, synchronized swimming, and all things Olympian.

To find the LARB Poetic Olympic Team and Calvocoressi’s introduction to the project, click here.

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