12 Questions for Rory Smith
The New York Times Global Sports Correspondent on his relationship with God, being a husband and parent, English soccer fans, his bizarre relationship with memory, and more.
Ever notice the owner of a soccer team sitting in the stands, watching ‘their team’ play with the look of a mind existing in at least a hundred places at once; deals to negotiate and contracts to be signed and stocks to be divested and enemies to crush and ex-wives to be tempered and kids to get out of trouble and colleagues to fire and underlings to consider and taxes to be evaded and then oh, would you look at that, we’re losing three nil, this team I’ve invested five hundred million dollars in isn’t doing too well, how’d we get here in the first place? I don’t know, I wasn’t completely paying attention, just signing checks while nodding and saying ‘don’t let me down,’ but wow this sucks. They can’t really lose themselves in the youthful spirit of the game, these owners, it’s beyond them, never again possible, not even with a bout of high-dosed ketamine therapy. Thank God I’m not a rich owner of a multibillion dollar soccer team, I think every single day, as one naturally does.
Ideally, unlike the rich, I’m able to indulge in the simple pleasures of life, losing myself like a child in the drama of sport, in gamified luxuries, the hyped-up arena of latent homosexuality. With delight, I might add; the sheer beauty of a middling man’s dream coliseum. But, unfortunately, that’s not entirely true. I’m regularly miserable and unable to be happy or exist in the present, and to boot (sorry), I don’t even own a sports team, never mind an apartment or a car. Moments of joy are rare but they come alive now and then; I try to grasp them when the opportunity becomes available, here and there, for a few minutes per week, which sometimes occurs during the duration of a particularly exciting game. Existential dread dissipates, a volley from thirty yards nestles in the top corner. I might’ve even had sex that morning. Life isn’t so bad; sport (and sex) plays its role. It puts everything into perspective, the most popular leisure activity in history, as Rory Smith puts it. Another thing that’s recently made me happy: the gorgeous way this lengthy interview unfurled, how Smith made himself vulnerable, easing in to the material, allowing soccer to serve as the catalyst to make himself become known.
***
My Dad was a writer, in some sense a great one who only found minor success. I’m a writer, too. You’d think my youth was filled with much writerly conversation between father and son. But the reality wasn’t so. While he's an emotional, delicate artist with much to say in an aesthetically poignant manner, he’s also Scottish, born in the mid-50s to Jewish parents, Jewish parents who survived the destruction of World War II. This didn’t exactly make my Dad the most capable of intimate discussions with his immediate family, never mind the inherent complications that exist between father and son. Since art, literature, and film served as imperfect destinations for my father and I to bond, we were left with nothing else but the gamified zone; soccer.
Growing up in lower-Manhattan, he’d walk me several days per week to a sprawling field on the Hudson River called Pier 40, where the majority of my travel team’s practices and matches took place. On the off days, we’d go there together to kick the ball around. He enjoyed watching the games, sitting far behind the other hysterical parents, observing and contemplating from a healthy distance, providing feedback on our way home. You’re improving, your touches are getting better, you need to look up a little more though when you have the ball. Stop looking down for no reason, why do you do that? I got older and moved out and gradually played soccer less and less, due to injury, not choice. My father and I would still get together on Saturdays and Sundays to watch the Premier League, maybe throw in some words about Martin Amis or Mike Nichols and whatever’s been nominated for the foreign language Oscar. Did you see the Arsenal match? It was incredible, son. Come over and watch the United City game with me at three next week, alright? Good game this, isn’t it? Have a girlfriend? Doing OK? That was an amazing cross, Lukaku’s gotta score that, with all the money he makes. I was gonna say, that Bong Joon-Ho, he’s brilliant, isn’t he? The stuff he has to say about disparate class politics is really genuine, powerful. Wow, what a goal that was. Oh you’re moving, again? To what neighborhood? Can you believe they scored in the final minute? Are you still writing, son? Working on anything good? By the way, I love you, Gordon. Christ, Chelsea have sacked their manager, that club’s in complete shambles. Oh, what’s that? A new tattoo? Soccer is the buffer, as they say. Why is it sports, the place of competition and adrenaline, that gives way for the father/son relationship to develop and prosper? Is this a crutch, or a normal form of development? A real lifeline, that’s for sure. I don’t know where my father and I would be without soccer, despite how we ended up doing the same thing in life, essentially writing stuff on paper, hoping others would be interested.
In our interview, Rory Smith discusses the anxiety after becoming a father, constantly worried of something happening to his children, of a love that’s overwhelming (my father was also constantly anxious of something terrible happening to us, it was extremely annoying). With that much care and responsibility, I can understand why a leisure activity that’s both entertaining and casual can serve as a form of enduring white noise, everlasting background, one that keeps such a powerful and odd relationship from consuming itself. The bond between father and son is almost too strong. Something like sports could in fact be a necessary element for its survival; an entity altogether competitive, relative, a little bit senseless.
***
I’m drunk on the supposed strength and capacity of my argument. I reach out with a question to the writer Christian Lorentzen: ‘For an intro to an interview with Rory Smith, why is sports such a common mediator between father and son, in that consistently bizarre dynamic and the theater of the relationship? What does this have to do with the theater of sport itself?’
‘My father wasn't into sports.’
‘What was your relationship like?’
‘It was fine.’
‘Do you think it’d have been better if you both liked sports?’
‘It would have been better if we were rich.’
For a while I don’t ask why. And then I decide to ask why.
‘Because we would have had more money and he wouldn't have had to work as hard.’
To avoid being a nag, the question I choose to not respond with goes as follows: ‘Well do you think if he were into sports it’d have been a little more than fine? Perhaps have made up for the deficit of the crushing economic factors that are out of our control?’ I don’t think Lorentzen would have enjoyed entertaining that one. Asking another man about their relationship with their father is an assault on their senses. I may as well have asked Christian to send me a photo of his rectum. In fact, I think he’d have preferred that.
Lorentzen, in his fatherly disposition to the writers coming up around him, has become a de facto guardian in his quasi-mentor role. Garrulous and dependable, cigarette dangling off his lips, Lorentzen carries himself with natural authority. But as soon as someone becomes a proxy father in even the slightest way, as soon as that line is crossed, the ability to ask everything and anything, to broach all uncomfortable topics in search of insight and perspective, goes completely out the window. The hierarchy and ensuing respect create an environment of unease, even if said respect exists merely out of habit, as opposed to being earned (with Christian it’s earned). I think, though, this is why I prefer mentors who are female. There’s more room to ask whatever you’d like, the environment feels to a greater degree open. Sure, I suppose having a male mentor makes it easier to discuss masculine literary topics like sex and aggression and the despair of having a penis and not being able to successfully procreate among ourselves, but I’ve found that the most impressive female advisers take on these themes with nuance, offering an outside perspective that a man just never could. I guess this is all not a universal truth, but more a testament, as they say, to my own fucked up shit.
I did wish, over our WhatsApp conversation, that Christian and I could turn on the TV, put on a sporting event, create a zone of distraction where our synergetic intensity could brew. Perhaps I could say something like, do you think you ever exported your nascent economic frustration onto your father, onto your parents? Did you place your disdain for society all on his shoulders? That must have been overwhelming for him, your father. Woh, what a shot, did you see that? Ah, Dad, Daddy, I mean Christian, now I think I understand what you mean when you say that your relationship with your father would have been better if you were rich. There’d have been more room for love, less distraction over petty garbage. Hm, this is lovely, this match, this tournament, this game, the dynamic we’ve created. Do you think I’ll die alone or will I live a successful life? I can’t help but think that I might be gay, or at least now and then have an urge to touch a man more intimately than normal. It’d be easier to ask Mom these things, an unconscious voice in my head not so subtly screams out.
So much can be attributed to one's enduring love for sport.
***
There’s trouble in ceding authority to any soccer writer, never mind Rory Smith. Since art and personal matters were an almost non-starter, soccer was the place where my Dad was on the pedestal, not that he had many unique or interesting theories on the game in the first place. The tragedy is that he had far more fascinating opinions on society, art, and literature, so as long as there was an environment where he felt comfortable enough to be vulnerable, susceptible to his emotions (if alcohol is an environment). I keep saying had and am regularly mixing up the past and present tense. Let me explain. My Dad’s still alive, just incredibly sick and no longer himself. Depending on how I’m trying to describe him, it’s difficult to discern whether an aspect of his persona still exists, it’s a game of constant, immediate weighing — yeah, I guess he can still do that, OK, present tense — but then a week later it changes and that mode of behavior is consigned to the past, like an item that’s expired. So one thing is dead but another is alive and an attentive interlocutor can be forgiven for possibly saying: I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m confused, is the man in question still around? Not really, I’d respond.
I still long for my father’s moments of cerebral normalcy. Now that I’m an adult, I’m filled with regret. Despite him still being alive, there’s so much to mourn, so many opportunities not taken and topics of conversation never encountered (scrolling a web-forum late at night designed for support, here’s something I came across, paraphrased from memory: ‘A family member with Lewy Body Dementia will cause you to encounter the strange feeling of grieving someone still alive, a lot of sorrow that seems possible to fix, as your relative’s pulse still beats, but in fact never will be. This is a feeling similar to a disease that you’ll have to learn to live with. When one person gets sick, so too does everyone around them, each in their own way’). Strange thing, illness. I think my readers must be tired of me talking about my Dad. Is the adage what’s personal is the most creative finally getting old? I too wish for a time when I can begin to write more about topics other than the mystery of grief.
Rory Smith is the only soccer writer I read on a regular basis. Scanning the past, aside from Smith, I’ve read a Knausgaard book on the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, Sam Knight’s coverage of Football Leaks, and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch when I was in high school. Sometimes I’ll read Tariq Panja’s deep dives, but I see them more as geopolitical thrillers; ‘soccer does have a habit of finding new and interesting ways of surprising you, and it remains probably the best way to explore quite a lot of subjects that might otherwise be dry and uninspiring,’ Smith says in our interview. Not only is sports a buffer, but also a gateway drug to the more mystifying, actually interesting elements of life. And again, fascinating that men need this buffer and gateway drug while women, on the other hand, have the intrinsic quality of getting right to the point of the emotional matter — and apologies in advance for the binary and over-generalization, I’m merely writing from the standpoint of my experience, it’s the best I can do. So Smith, Hornby, Knausgaard, Panja, Knight, all second fiddle to my good old man. I do sometimes wonder, though, after he passes, whether I’ll begin reading soccer writers more intensely, consistently, a useful form of grief, a surrogate for the inevitable void. Or if, following the inevitability of his death, I give it all up entirely and cease to find it interesting. I’ll find out at some point, but please God not soon. I hope soccer prevails for as long as it can.
They can be constructive, these leisure activities.
GG: As a Liverpool fan, what are your thoughts on your new manager, Arne Slot?
RS: I have done a very bad job of keeping my allegiances secret. When I started out in journalism
