“Eulogy”

And there's the Barça I fell in love with. It's good to be home.

—
nick (@vossbrink) April 24, 2012

I'm naturally most comfortable as a fan when I can expect heartbreak, make dark fatalistic jokes, and truly relish the rare victories.

—
nick (@vossbrink) April 24, 2012

Guardiola: "What do I say against the Barça fans who cry for the first time tonight? Welcome to the club... (smiles)" #fcblive

—
  (@barcastuff) April 24, 2012

Guardiola is a delight. You don't really know that you love a club until it makes you cry for the first time.

—
Kevin Williams (@kevvwill) April 25, 2012

@fcbfandrivel End of the aura. We're mortal again. Not that I'm complaining.

—
nick (@vossbrink) April 25, 2012

Winning is hard.

Repeating is harder.

Being the favorite is even harder.

Expecting to win everything is irrational and impossible.

And it takes the fun out of actually winning. It’s not the end of an era. Yet.* But this Barça season has felt like a return to form for me. The Barça I fell in love with was a great team which constantly came close and specialized in breaking fans’ hearts. Yes, it did win a lot. But not nearly as often as it came close and lost.

*That comes when Xavi and Puyol retire—yeah, I don’t want to think about it either.

The double-whammy of effectively losing La Liga and then getting knocked out of the Champions League in back-to-back games is especially harsh—especially to new followers who aren’t used to the spastic panicky Barça which broke/stole my heart so often a decade ago.

Many of those followers are now leaving. To those that stay, welcome to the club. This season is much more in-line with expectations. Compete well in everything.* Play beautifully. Break our hearts anyway.**

*That the Senyera symbolizes everything Barcelona is perfectly fitting. Its origen may be a myth but the club’s colors represent the blood, sweat, and tears that come from competing fully.

**Though to be honest, that everyone is despondent after a season where we’ve won three trophies and are in the final for a fourth goes to show how spoiled we all still are.

I’m pleased though to see so many fans who are reacting to the losses with pride. They should be proud. We should be proud. The past week of Barça soccer has put the past four years in perspective. It reminds us how much we should remember and enjoy this team. We’ve been so dominant and played so beautifully that people have forgotten how hard it is to maintain that quality.

Any fan would kill for a period of success like we’ve had.

Despite all the eulogies we’ll see in the press this week, it’s not like things are over. Next season just got really really interesting. The rivalry with Madrid will take on a new face where Barça may be the underdog. Similarly, we’ll be playing the entire season with a chip on our shoulder and something to prove.

There’s nothing like losing to remind us how good winning is.

I’m looking forward to next season. A lot. Fewer bandwagon fans. More dark humor where expecting the worst isn’t considered patronizing. And another chance to make history.

Anti-Duke

Always always enjoyable watching Duke lose.

—
nick (@vossbrink) March 17, 2012

I used to really like March Madness. I was lucky enough to attend Stanford when its men’s team went to the Final Four. And I was smart enough to know that that success wouldn’t stay around forever. So my interest has waned a bit as my rooting interests have stopped being competitive. Coupled with Taylor Branch’s article last October, I was half expecting to not be interested in the tournament at all this year.

But as always, once the brackets came out and games started being played, I found myself lapsing into old habits and following the scores, supporting the underdogs, and rooting against Duke.

This year though, I found myself questioning why I’m anti-Duke since, in many ways, Duke embodies what I like seeing in the teams I support.

At the same time, there’s something which turns me off. Still. To the best of my understanding, it’s a reaction to how Duke is constantly portrayed as having the best coach, best fans, and what the sport should be about. Which makes me realize that I would probably root against Barcelona now had I not jumped on the bandwagon before they were the “greatest team ever.”

This isn’t just about gloryhunting or being a sports hipster. It’s about the sense of entitlement and expectation of success which accompanies certain teams* and their followers. And I’m disappointed to see that Barca is one of those teams now. When a fanbase takes on the persona that it feels entitled to victory, I instinctively root against that team. Same thing when the media hype machine seizes on a team or athlete.

*e.g. The Yankees, or Real Madrid

@runofplay Does rooting for someone to fail because we enjoy comeuppance story lines still amount to a trial by combat impulse?

—
nick (@vossbrink) October 25, 2011

In many ways, I think this encapsulates a lot of my approach to all sports. I tend to root for the comeuppance storyline. People feeling entitled to a win?* Root against. People making the storyline about something bigger which has nothing to do with sports?** Root against. Big time media hype? Root against.

*This includes conspiracy theorists, referee blamers, and the irrationally angry since those are all manifestations of entitlement—i.e. we only lose unfairly.

**Basically any story except plucky underdog (e.g. Jeremy Lin) or redemption (e.g. Ghana’s 2012 ACN)

Especially with those sports where I don’t care as much about the style of play. I would have a hard time truly rooting against the current Barça team because of how they play the game. Ball movement, the use of space, pulling defense out of shape, etc. are all what I consider beautiful about soccer.* It’s what I like about hockey too. And what I enjoy when I watch basketball.

*I used to dislike North Carolina even more than Duke but I don’t anymore. I’ve found myself enjoying watching UNC play, mainly because the secondary break is closer to what I enjoy watching.

With basketball though, things too often degenerate into one-on-one play, impatient three-point shots, and tunnel-vision fast breaks. It’s too easy for one player to take over. So my interest wanes and I end up rooting for the team in dark jerseys.

I suppose this also explains why I can’t stand watching the NBA.

Enjoy it

The score never interested me, only the game

—May West

Other teams win and they’re happy, but it’s not the same. The identity is lacking. The result is an impostor in football. [...] There’s something greater than the result, more lasting. A legacy.

—Xavi

Expanding a bit on my comment to a post on the Barcelona Football Blog about how we should take the time to enjoy the team as it is right now.

As a college sports fan, I know that great teams only last a couple seasons before everyone graduates. And I know how infrequently the truly great teams come along. I’ve learned to enjoy the teams as they come and not rue any lack of ultimate success. Winning championships is great. But so are cinderella runs into a tournament. Upsets hurt. But they don’t negate a great season. They can’t. There’s never a “next year” with a college team. Each year is always a new team to appreciate and remember.

In the professional realm, we live in an age of mercenary players with international fan followings who support the players rather than the teams they play for. Having a dynasty of a team with a core of long-term homegrown players isn’t how things are done anymore. Fans of big teams expect success immediately and don’t tolerate anything less than winning everything. And the method of achieving that success often doesn’t matter. In fact, lack of success is often taken as an injustice rather than a legitimate sporting outcome.

Yet for the past 6 years, the Barça universe has existed in its own stolen season outside of the typical professional sports world. The core players and philosophy have been consistent and the style of play is a joy to watch. I know that it won’t last. It can’t. It’s not how sports works. Xavi and Puyol will retire soon. Messi and Iniesta will age. Others will take their places but the magic is doomed to eventually go away.

This is a team I’ll be telling other people about in 20 years. I’m glad I’ve recorded a couple games for posterity since I’ll want to be able to pull them up and demonstrate why people are still rhapsodic about FC Barcelona from this time period. Did they win? Yes.

But they’re remembered for how they played the game.

Beautiful Game

While sports photography may be too functional to be considered art the way that Gursky’s soccer photos are art has me realizing how much of why I like soccer is due to its abstract beauty. With most sports—as in photography—zooming in, getting close, and cropping out a lot of the distractions allows you to better appreciate the correct details.

Soccer is almost the exact opposite. Only after zooming out until I can barely make out the players do I end up seeing the details which excite me. The details which are key to most sports are distractions in soccer. Individual skills are impressive. But the movement of players, space, and the ball are beautiful and, when executed well, are the kinds of things that take my breath away.

Which is why I can watch and rewatch Richard Swarbrick’s Gareth Bale video over and over again. It removes all the details and leaves just space and movement. It’s much easier to watch the rest of the field instead of being distracted by the location of the ball. While it’s about a specific event, it’s generic enough to evoke the best of any soccer game.

@runofplay Okay. I've figured it out. All sports are boring. American sports just control the boring so you know when to tune out.—
nick (@vossbrink) January 18, 2012

Brian Phillips’s tongue-in-cheek column about embracing soccer’s boredom also gets at this point. It’s the dance of movement where “nothing” happens which is boring yet at the same time, much of that nothingness is actually seeing ideas form and watching how teams develop their strategies on the fly. I appreciate the clever ball which fails to find a runner or the brilliant run which doesn’t receive a pass and enjoy seeing how those first attempts pay off down the road as teams figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Are there truly boring times? Absolutely. But we never know when they’ll occur or when they’ll end.

The rest of the time is all potential. We watch how the tactics develop and see how the players match up. When something exciting happens, the excitement is as much due to the seeing-everything-come-together aspect as it is the fact that goals are rare and special things.

Yes, I know this makes me a sports purist.

Sports Photography

With all my thinking about functional photography, I couldn’t help but think about sports photography and whether or not it could ever be art. Sports photography, almost more than any other form of photography, is tied to specific events and is tied down by the requirement that it be true. We look to photographs to settle on-field controversies and stop motion so that we can see the detail of the action.

There’s a reason why the only sports photographs I’ve ever seen in an art museum are large-scale Gursky prints which, while they show action, aren’t about the action on the field.

EM Arena, Amsterdam I, by Andreas Gursky

While I wouldn’t call Gursky’s soccer shots functional, they do demonstrate my previous conclusion about how functional photography has to lose enough details so we can fill in our own. It doesn’t matter what game the photo is of,* as a fan’s-eye view, we can fill in our own experiences.

*Though I do remember studying and identifying the players—yes, the big bald Dutch center back is Jaap Stam.

Besides the Gursky photos, I can’t think of any sports action photo which would be considered art. Heck, even non-action non-portrait is tough. Nat Fein’s Babe Bows Out which won the 1949 Pulitzer is close since it requires almost no supporting text or context for most Americans to understand and, while not technically* a portrait, it’s pretty close to being one.

*For many people, portraits are strictly posed photos of people’s faces. These people have never seen Avedon’s portrait of Andy Warhol.

Now, I have seen plenty of artsy* sports photos. I tend to notice them more during the Olympics where photographers of the more obscure events often end up favoring more graphic compositions or exposure experiments** which don’t tell a story but serve more as examples of what makes these other sports interesting. I’m not sure why I haven’t seen these kind of photos become art yet. Maybe it’s because the sports are so obscure that most of us can’t fill in the missing details. Or maybe it’s just bias against functional photography.

*Artsy in this case meaning that the photo is taken for aesthetic reasons and not to tell a story. 

**Longer exposures, deliberate over/under exposure, or anything else which is technically wrong for sports.

As with government documents, I suspect that the correct edit could result in a fantastic exhibition of sports photography as art where, instead of reading stories about specific events, we experience a different trip through the athletic world.