Norman Einstein's
ISSUE 05 (10/09)
"White Lines: the Imaginative & Regular Fields Of Hans van der Meer"
by Fredorrarci
[Fredorrarci is based in Ireland. He blogs about sport in almost every of its beautiful forms at Sport Is a TV Show.]
1.
Lessons, the stuff of hack sitcoms and life itself. Sport has taught me several: how to practise something relentlessly yet remain utterly mediocre at it; how to become irrationally emotionally involved in something of no real consequence happening thousands of miles away; how life is a giggling, teasing beast which offers you the gift of hope wrapped in a bow of optimism then drops upon that gift the anvil of reality, smashing it into shards of hideous despair. That kind of thing.
Something else it taught me, and my childhood friends, was resourcefulness. At least, it taught us enough initiative to stage an impromptu game of football in the most inauspicious of circumstances. Example. No football? No problem. In my time I've played football with tennis balls, golf balls, basketballs, super-bouncy rubber balls, stones, empty drink cans, empty food cans, rolled-up newsprint, teddy bears, balloons, severed dolls' heads, and other of life's jetsam.
This ingenuity stretched to the area in which the game was to be played. No space was too unpromising or irregular that it could not serve as a venue. No surface too unyielding or unforgiving to the falling knee. No patch of ground -- grass, concrete, gravel, dirt -- was too closely situated to single-glazed window panes, no living room too lovingly decorated with delicate ornaments.
Simon Kuper, in his book Football Against the Enemy, wrote: "The Brazilians say that even the smallest village has a church and a football field - 'well, not always a church, but certainly a football field.'"
In our own small-scale way, my friends and I were doing the same thing, marking our territory in a necessarily ad hoc fashion. Verily did the god Televisuos say, You can do anything if you put your mind to it. Especially if that mind is of the one-track sort.
There happened to be a proper, full-size pitch yards away from where we lived. Yet despite this facility, we preferred to stage our small-sided kickabouts in small spaces bounded by walls and trees and hedges. In part, our games were a way of living out our dreams before the idea of their realisation seemed foolish. Our mini-Maracanas were, therefore, entirely appropriate venues. The professionals we sought to emulate were an exotic breed, they were non-existent in our parts. They resided on posters and television screens, in newspapers and magazines. They were beamed in from without, the grandiosity of the spectacle condensed to fit, doubtless with some loss in transit. It was easy to imagine that we were them - they had already been shrunk to our scale.
The real pitch was not. It was built to grown-up scale. What may as well have been a boundless expanse to us was finite and manageable to the adults who played there. There real teams played real games in real leagues. There people could cover yards in a single stride, shoot from the eighteen-yard line without the ball scuttling along the turf (well, usually). There sport was revealed in its violent beauty. That is, violence and beauty in an incidental fashion: the brute but civilised physicality of contact sport amid exhortations and angry shouts; passes connecting and moves forming by design rather than haphazardly. This was something beyond our capacity. It was glorious.
My first formal football experience was an under-8s league. We played eleven-a-side on full-size fields. You could get lost on them. One of them belonged to a rugby club. Its long grass would slow the play down further. All that was missing were some Shetland ponies and we could have had ourselves some chukkas.
Of the pitch on which we played our games, one half sloped precipitously towards a busy main road. For us on the second worst team in town, Sunday mornings involved trying to defend our goal by using our tiny, cold, seven-year-old legs to propel a ball up what seemed like a one-in-three gradient. You can guess how that went. One probably ought to be charitable and assume that the folk who ran the league did so out of enthusiasm and a sense of civic duty, and that making us play in such unsuitable conditions was a mistake made in earnest. Perhaps, though, we were unwitting participants in some kind of sadistic theatre project. Each seems equally plausible.
This piece of municipal pasture was known as Little Wembley. The slope has since been levelled. Spoilsports.
2.
I apologise in advance for giving the sport-as-religion cliche a spin, punchy as it is from forever being wheeled out for one more fight. But, to use another cliche, every cliche contains a kernel of truth, after all. And the frequent description of sporting arenas as "cathedrals" warrants some consideration.
We can afford to ignore the similarity between the commercial function of the two types of building, their customer processing capabilities. (It would be cynical to do otherwise. I'm surprised you mentioned it, really.) We can even overlook the architectural aspect: how they are constructed as ostentatious statements of worth and power. What is more interesting to us here is how their interiors distinguish them from their immediate surroundings. They establish their dominion over their patch of land.
A pitch in a football stadium is a small miracle of urban landscape. It is an oasis in a concrete desert. It is not covered in floorboards or linoleum or patio paving or dismal office carpeting. It will remain untrammelled by pedestrians and unconquered by motorists. A grass sports field is different to other surfaces. It is nature circumscribed and managed, a small token of man's control of his environment. It is a giant mowed lawn. Within a stadium, it has a sacrosanct quality. It is kept hidden until such time as we are permitted to see it, by the holy grace of the league schedule. We are never allowed to tread upon it. That this stems from private property laws and professional possessiveness of grumpy ground staff is irrelevant here. It is the effect that matters.
A pitch on public land is different. There is no mystery. It is forever visible. It is an amenity, a centre for informal japery, for bicycling children, walking dogs, defecating dogs, copulating dogs, cider-drinking youths (all at different times, one hopes). It is just a park.
Except it isn't. The white lines of a sports field mark it out as something other, wherever it is. They denote that here is a place with a distinct, if occasional, function, one which necessarily separates it from the otherwise identical grass around it. This is the thread that connects it with the 80,000-seat megaplex - it's a place for play in earnest. And just like its besteroided cousin, it is a place of congregation. The group of people that gathers here for a couple of hours at a time may have various roles: player, official, coach, habitual spectator, hungover pal, bored girlfriend. But they're all doing the same thing. They are particles whose nucleus is the ball.
Sometimes it's a curious thing to walk across an empty football pitch. It feels unlike anywhere else. Even if it's surrounded by open space, it feels claustrophobic. Even if there's no one else around, it feels like you're being watched. Even if there's no game taking place, it feels like the centre of the universe.
3.
We all - if I may lasso the reader into this sentence - have our personal sporting creation myth. Something that explains how we were introduced to sport, or a particular sport, or a particular team. I got into sport very early in life, so early that I cannot remember it happening. There was no epiphany I can recall, no story I could later wistfully relate. My theory is that I was drawn to the sheer drama of it all, the delicious tension of having no idea what was going to happen next. At least, that's how I relate to it most primally now, so that's the instinct I project backwards to my prehistory.
I wonder, though. Could I realy have been tuned into this so young? I half-suspect it may have been something more elemental. Perhaps it was the visual quality that held the attention of my still barely-formed mind. Not a beautiful goal or a delicate winner, rather the shapes of the playing area. The unfussy football pitch. The somehow logical mess of lines and rectangles of a Gaelic games field. The concentric circles. The twenty segments. The red, the white, the black, the green of a dartboard. The military precision of a gridiron. There is beauty in this order and symmetry.
(By the way, if you read that last paragraphy and though "Wait - darts isn't a sport!," go tell it to Cliff.)
As I say, I half suspect that this is what was going on. The other half of me wonders whether this may all have been purely associative: that the love the games came first, with that of the lines on the ground following. No matter. The beauty is still there. It's the beauty of human ingenuity.
What are the most impressive elements to me about the photographs of Hans van der Meer are the backdrops, or rather, the contrast they present. The background changes from picture to picture. First, a mountain, then some chimney stacks, then some scrubland or a housing estate or a harbour. The foreground, however, is the same each time. The marking is identical. The game is identical. It's all the more remarkable when you remember how recent the idea of mass organised sport is. It's impossible - try as some might - to imagine a world without it. Yet it took people not so many generations removed from our own to conceive of these games, or to take existing games and properly codify them and give them form. It took the endeavour and enthsiasm of people to spread the games. It's easy to take sport for granted, like a river or a mountain, but it didn't just happen. It wasn't always there.
The universality of the games makes them even more astonishing. In a world in which we are determined to define ourselves and each other by our differences - by what we are not - we have still been able to reach and maintain consensus on the rules of play. And this consensus spans continents. Football is far from the only example of this, of course, though it is the most notable. The breadth of its popularity is unparalleled. Yet far from being unwieldy, it is played to common rules everywhere. (Well, almost everywhere - hi, NCAA!) The beauty of football, or any sport, is that within this shared legislation, there exists the scope for variety of style and expression. It's a universal language, as someone once said, spoken with different accents. The rules are its grammar, its basic structure from which masterpieces, doggerel, and everything in between can be constructed. And Law 1 of football pertains to the field of play.
Sport is not pure, any more than, say, anthing else in life. But perhaps we can say that its foundation is pure. That is to say, it is firmly rooted in the instinct for play. It is so much more than that, of course, because on top of that foundation sits something incomprehensibly complex and forever mutating. But strip that away and what remains is play. Play is simply human, belonging to no one more than anyone else. The Gaelic Athletic Association makes clear, front and centre, that they subscribe to the atavistic superstition that the sports they administer embody - that any sport might embody - a unique sense of national identity inherently absent from other games. Indeed, for almost a century, it barred its members from consorting with football, rugby, cricket, and hockey: "English" sports. That's "English" as opposed to English, for these are no more English sports than the English language is an "English" language; that is they belong to the English, but they belong equally to whomever chooses to play them. The global spread of football was a consequence of empire. It was not an agent of empire. The difference is chasmic. People played the game not as an act of devotion to Britain, but because they wanted to play. They learned the rules and proceeded to make the game their own. It became a medium of self-expression, both collective and individual.
Because that's what sport is. A medium. It's a vessel for beauty, brutality, generosity, selfishness, vigour, decrepitude, innocence, cynicism, and whatever you're having yourself. It is whatever you make of it. The infectious popularity of organised sport in the last two centuries demonstrates that it has tapped into something essential in us. Sport is not the opiate of the masses. It is not about determinism of subjugation. It's about liberation.
It's a good time to be alive. It's so simple: some people, a game, and a space to play. That's all you need. There's your truth.
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