TEAM SPIRIT Statement
The Mayans played a type of soccer that symbolized a battle through the Underworld by twin forces, the Sun and Moon/day and night/good and evil. Members of the losing team were sacrificed to the gods.
To quote a famous author: So it goes.
The Americans bombed countries most couldn’t find on a map, proclaimed it a struggle between good and evil, and showered a type of fruit pie onto the heads of the vanquished.
Above all: Love our foes.
But to quote a famous punchline: Thar she blows.
Which brings us back to the American basics: God, baseball, and apple Pop-tarts.
The increased isolation of our cultural lives as a result of privatized, customized consumer sects of five hundred channels and a million different chat rooms has pushed our devotions into the privacy of our homes. Our primary communal spaces are privately owned shopping malls. Communities only come together consistently to shop. Or to pray. Or to watch a game.
A Clash of Titans on Holy Sunday, worshipping our idols as we call out The Glory of Our Team, wearing the devotional socks we can’t wash until we inexplicably fall from the grace of a winning streak… A seemingly inexhaustible supply of extended metaphors streams from the lips of bad sports commentators the world over…
In terms of mass appeal, sports and religion function as twin fountainheads of shared narrative and experience that are most fully realized through the collective effervescence of being physically part of a like-minded crowd of bodies. Whether it is the hand of a god or of a foam finger, the point of ecstatic contact between flesh and spirit feels the same. It is that feeling of a power we create and yet overwhelms us, have faith in and helps gets us out of bed in the morning that we, as social beings, crave and constantly pursue.
The conflation of helmets with halos creates a surreal landscape of epic myth that makes the underlying currents of aggression, eroticism, and yearning of both practices absurdly obvious. But by wallowing in the absurd, we begin to find absurdities everywhere we look. And we begin to understand how our lives are composed of coveting gods and balls and pies sailing through the sky. And we breathe. And allow ourselves to laugh. (2003)
