Storytelling – and World Cup Soccer!

I’ve been watching wa-a-a-ay too much soccer lately…

Well, no, not too much soccer! I love “the beautiful game,” and actually never get to watch enough of it, since my kids grew up and my soccer mom days are mostly just great memories now – and I love watching the World Cup!

You see, the World Cup is so much more than just soccer (which I enjoy so much) for me…It’s deep emotional history (formative life experiences in Ecuador; and travel and time in Europe and South America); and it’s bonding with my sons, past and present (they live so far away and I am RAVENOUS for anything that we can share); and it’s connected to my valuing of beyond-America activities and focus…it’s a deep thing for me, as well as great soccer-watching!! So…I’ve been letting it intrude into my life since it began June 12, which crowds everything else! (And I’m trying to get ready to present at 2 major conferences soon!)

It’s been great that this time ’round the interest in the World Cup, and in soccer in general, has really – finally?! – grown in the US.

Even though soccer has for several years been the most popular participation sport here, they tell us, Major League Soccer has nowhere near the audience that the other major league professional sports do (NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB…).

But I’m not one of the newcomers: my love of soccer has grown steadily since the 1970s.

When I lived in England 1975-76 at an international retreat center, “football”/soccer was the group-recreation of choice among the mostly-European staff members there. My first husband was Ecuadorean and a soccer watcher-and-player – and from the get-go our sons toddled with soccer balls as high as their waists in front of them (so cute!). We were living in Ecuador during the 1986 World Cup, and watched on live TV Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal in Argentina’s emotional win over England in the quarterfinals.

When a few years later I found myself a single mom in Colorado, I made the commitment to nourish my growing sons’ interest and involvement in soccer. There were times when I couldn’t afford much else but found ways to come up with needed fees and expenses (and became skilled at searching out scholarships and other expense-reducing tactics!) – because soccer is such a great team sport!  They both played for their high school varsity teams as well as club soccer – and they still play as much as they can. (They both play on the Google soccer team [yes, really!] and I love it when they have a game during one of my visits…I confess it can even trump a little granddaughter-time for me! :-O )

So while I’ve been neglecting some work while watching World Cup soccer since the tournament started June 12, I hereby compensate (to a microscopic degree…) by offering a few of the connections and similarities I see and love between soccer and storytelling…! –

Soccer and storytelling…Creativity, Intention, Perspective

Creativity

When you listen to commentators during a soccer game, they will often speak about “creating” – “They didn’t create many chances,” or “Look at that player’s creativity!” I don’t know about you, but I don’t recall hearing basketball or football commentators ever really saying that…

“But what exactly is creativity? By definition, it is the ability to create something that is considered different. It is essentially a surprise, but how does that even translate to the pitch?” – excerpt from this 2011 article on the creativity of French soccer player Zinedine Zidane. It’s a good discussion of what “creativity” means in soccer.

It goes without saying that creativity is at play in the arts in general and storytelling in particular – I love this vibrant and foundational commonality between soccer and storytelling!

Perspective, complexity, and making choices = The Beautiful Game!

These could surely be considered separately – but it’s the interweaving of these aspects that makes soccer fascinating, beautiful…and very like storytelling!

In soccer, if you have the ball you have 10 other teammates to be aware of…know where they are in relation to you, in relation to opponents, how many opponents, where everyone is looking, who they are aware of, how many opponents are near you… and every one of ‘em is moving! (Unless maybe it’s the 84th minute of an all-out game and the tired-out players have a little less movement on the field!) You need to see the angles of movement between the various players, teammates as well as opponents…your perspective is what you have to work with, yet you try to imagine the angles and distances from the others’ perspectives…and then you have to weigh all of this complexity quickly, maybe instantly, and make your choices! Do you dribble, pass, shoot, or even kick out of bounds-?!

In storytelling, you need to be aware of where you are in the story, where physically you are in the actual room, how your audience is responding, can they hear you well enough, are they too warm, what comes next in your story, how do you deal with that intrusive sound, embodying your internal imagery, making sure your eye contact and body language includes the whole audience, stifling that burp that’s suddenly there (!), where do you move…to list just a few of your complex considerations and choices… And all this is after all the complexity of preparing the story in the first place! – including choosing your perspective(s) (which can change…you can tell a story that includes both Red Riding Hood’s and the Wolf’s perspectives…or choose to tell it entirely from just one of their perspectives), and the multitude of other content and expression choices you make along the way.

This exploration can go long and deep – but this just a blog post so we have to keep it brief!

But one more: Intention

One of the things I’m still not good at as I happily watch soccer is discerning when and why a particular act is a foul that is awarded a free kick, or flagrant enough for a yellow or even red card to be issued – and sometimes a collision that looks heinous and awful to me is considered acceptable and play is allowed to just continue!

“Intention,” it turns out, can be an important consideration. A skilled referee exercises judgment as to the perceived intention involved.

For example, a ref might not blow the whistle for an obviously inadvertent hand ball (when the ball touches any part of a player’s arm from the shoulder on down) that happens in the midst of crazy action. But if the ref sees it as deliberate, depending on other factors involved the consequence can be anything from an indirect free kick awarded, to the offending player being removed from the game! In other kinds of fouls, the referee will make calls in response to whether it appeared the player intended to “go for” the other player or to go for the ball. (And if I have any of this wrong so far, I bet I can count on one or both of my sons to set me straight!)

And “intention,” it turns out, can be an important consideration for a storyteller as well…

Right now I’m preparing a new workshop on interfaith storytelling that I’ll be giving later this month at the National Storytelling Conference in Phoenix (July 24-27).  I gave a preview of the workshop here in Colorado last week, and  we found ourselves considering the interpretive and ethical issues involved if one chooses to tell a story from a faith tradition other than one’s own. The workshop group, in the very short time we had available, touched on a number of concerns and issues – nearly all of which are also involved in the common-for-storytellers issue of telling stories from cultures other than one’s own.

This is a deep, important, necessary conversation, one that I’ve been aware of since nearly Day One of beginning my storytelling career back in 1988. Over the years, much has been written, and debated, and included in conference panel discussions and heartfelt one-on-ones between tellers…an emotional, necessary and ongoing conversation.

I suggest that at least one important element here is the storyteller’s intention.

In this little space, at the end of this little blog post, I can only say this about such a huge and deep topic for now: A storyteller’s intention to learn and share and grow and contribute to communication and understanding, rather than to appropriate or profit from or twist or ridicule or reinterpret through an inappropriate and/or privileged lens (and nearly all of this is so subjective, and complex!) – makes a world of difference, I believe, when judging the ethics of telling an “other’s” story, and when considering learning and telling a story from a culture, and/or spiritual tradition, that is not one’s own.

Whew! – Soccer and Storytelling…Creativity, Perspective, Intention – The Beautiful Game, The Beautiful Art!

And now it’s time for World Cup 2014 semi-finals (Tuesday, July 8, Brazil and Germany; Wednesday, July 9, Argentina and the Netherlands), and the final championship game next Sunday, July 13.

Thanks for reading – Pam

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