I love what Landon Donovan told CBS News about the goal he scored at the end of the U.S. – Algeria match last Wednesday in the World Cup. “When that ball came to me, the net looked like the ocean,” Donovan said. That’s an improvised lyric about how it feels to be good at scoring goals.
The U.S. team’s victory over Algeria was one of the great thrill-rides thus far in the 2010 World Cup, but I didn’t see the end of the match. I had to unglue myself from the television midway through the second half to make it to a sonogram appointment with my wife, so I didn’t see or hear about U.S. soccer hero Donovan’s dramatic winning goal until several minutes after he scored it. By the time the sonogram was underway (my wife was lying on her back, her belly frosted with blue gel; I was sitting next to her in the dark room, holding her hand) I still hadn’t seen the goal, but I’d learned who scored it from a phone conversation with my brother. I was quietly ecstatic about the news. During the sonogram I looked at a big flat-panel monitor while a technician with a Russian accent skimmed the sensor over my wife’s globe-like tummy; we saw the child’s face in clear, orange-colored 3D. In that miraculous moment, I seriously considered naming our coming child Donovan. Or Landon. Well, more like Donovan. But I could tell that my soccer-fan furor was spilling over into another, more important part of my life.
Really, though, is Donovan such a bad name?
It’s a big decision, naming a child. We don’t even know if we’re having a boy or a girl yet, but my wife and I have been through lists of names for either eventuality. Naming a new human being is a serious responsibility, an opportunity to contribute to the child’s happiness and sense of self, or that’s what it feels like. I want my child to be his or her own person. Yet before the kid is even born, here I am, picking out names.
Of course a person can change their name if they really want to. There can be reinventions, second acts, self-creations. Take Lady Gaga, for instance. In 2003, Lady Gaga was a first-year student named Stefani who had just enrolled at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (or so Wikipedia tells me). Now she’s an international celebrity of such rare importance that when she shows up at a Mets baseball game in her underwear and gives everyone the finger, she’s escorted to Jerry Seinfeld’s luxury suite. Then, if she does the same thing a week later at Yankee Stadium (sans the obscene gestures), she’s allowed into the Yankees locker room after the game. Despite the intensity of their cross-town rivalry, Mets and Yankees fans seem to agree that Lady Gaga, at the tender age of 24, has become the most obnoxious, mind-altered pro sports spectator in memory. Coming from Mets and Yankees fans that may seem like praise, but it’s not.
When these stories broke, it crossed my mind that Lady Gaga’s parents must have been horrified by their daughter’s New York baseball stadium scenes. “What is Stefani doing?” they may have asked each other. “What’s wrong with her? Did we do something wrong as parents? Is it because she hated the name we gave her, and then felt like she needed to change her name?” But it goes way beyond a name, into a set of existential concerns that Nancy Bauer confronts succinctly and searchingly in this wonderful Opinionator piece about how Gaga’s persona “epitomizes the situation of a certain class of comfortably affluent young women today.” Is Gaga a subject or an object? Is she in control of her persona or trapped in the gears of celebrity-making machinery?
Finally, where was Lady Gaga when Landon Donovan scored his game-winning goal against Algeria last Wednesday? And what was she wearing? Probably not a soccer jersey, because soccer jerseys don’t have buttons, and that would mean Lady Gaga couldn’t show off her studded brassiere by opening her shirt. If she wants a primer about how to watch sports with joy and abandon without getting arrested, she might take a look at this string of videos from the Times’ Goal blog. It shows soccer fans in several different American cities reacting to Donovan’s late, great goal against Algeria. It’s an interesting document of collective ecstasy. These fans are truly forgetting themselves in the moment—something Lady Gaga has forgotten how to do.
