Do You Like Sports?

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait opens on a TV. Well, not exactly a TV but a video from a camera pointed at one. It’s a bit disorienting but stay with me. In the video, blown-out white and yellow blobs run around a pixelated blur of green, and somewhere off to the side a Spanish commentator rattles on from a tinny-sounding speaker. I have the urge to squint or find a familiar word in the play-by-play. Anything to help parse this football match twice removed.

But then, five minutes in, the film rips through these two screens and places me in the middle of the roaring stadium, locked onto the famed (and infamous, re: headbutt) French footballer Zinedine Zidane. The cut is both jarring and a relief. I have great vision (sorry!) but I imagine this is how it feels to put glasses on for the first time. Like, this is how things are really supposed to look. It’s slightly overwhelming. The work of seventeen cameras shooting Zidane and only Zidane for 90 minutes brings him impossibly, uncomfortably close to me. Closer than a fan in the stands, closer than any broadcast I have ever seen. I am transfixed by his brooding angular face (“as gaunt as an Easter Island statue,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, which is strange but undeniably accurate), by his cleats as he kicks them absent-mindedly into the grass, and by a bead of sweat dripping off his ear. Around the six-minute mark, Zidane sprints with the ball and he pants and grunts right next to me. (It’s just a little bit horny.)

I realize then, if not before, that I was not twice but thrice removed from the game in those opening scenes. This newfound intimacy reminds me that there is watching the game at home, or, a step closer, in the stands, and then, the closest step of all, there is, of course, playing the game. Zidane is powerful in part because it illuminates just how little access I have to the raw physical and psychological experience of playing a sport at that level. How little our paltry sports media is able to convey. How starved for feeling it all is.

Most of the film oscillates between a grainy video of a video and this high-definition hyper-surveillance. But at halftime the film cuts briefly to news clips from the day of the match. In one shot a group of people stand amongst the wreckage from a car bomb in Iraq, one is wearing a Zidane jersey. I drift. I question if there is any meaning to sports or to anything at all. This lasts for a couple minutes. But then the camera cuts to Zidane and we’re so back. Sports are amazing, they’ll save me, or the world. I’m transfixed but I also want to move, to run, or scream, or send a ball sailing through the uprights. I want to punch someone (for sport, or not?), I want to lick the sweat from Zidane’s neck, I want to feel my body, or somebody else's. Why does nothing else feel like this?

But, of course, other things do feel like this. Just not in the world of sports media which, I should note, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is definitely not a part of. The film, a work of both documentary and conceptual art, premiered at Cannes in 2006 and was subsequently acquired by the Guggenheim and the Palais de Tokyo, among other galleries. This ain’t no 30for30 production.

But, what if it was? 

While watching the film I gained access to a feeling of what it might be like to be Zidane. It did not try to tell me what his actions meant, or why he might have made them (though, admittedly, I was searching for foreshadowing of his career-ending blow-up from July of that same year). The film is spacious and spartan and, sure, not every minute is riveting but the ability to study an athlete that closely for that long without any external interpretation was a rare gift. Invoking Sontag I could even say it was an “erotics of sport.”

An erotics of sport is a massive departure from the sports media landscape at present. Sports pages, publications, shows, and whole networks are packed with interpretation. Advanced replay technology, voice-over, injury speculation, deal talk, post-game interviews, pre-game interviews, half-time interviews, and incessant round-the-clock commentary systematically grind feeling into content till you forget that there were even bodies at the beginning of all this. (Safe to say, I definitely do not feel like licking anyone’s sweat, except maybe Travis Kelce’s but that’s for other reasons.) Apart from this circus, sports media is also bestowed, with increasing regularity, five(or ten)-part Nike propaganda Netflix docuseries. These are oftentimes executive produced by the athletes themselves, but are, all of the time, much-discussed and compulsively watchable (no matter how good they are, though some are actually quite good!). Regardless, I find all forms guilty of chewing up what was once an invigorating physical experience into a cud so thoroughly pre-digested that it leaves the spectator both satiated and stupefied upon consumption: Yes, I am still here, I tell Netflix in a daze, and yes, I want to keep watching the 10th hour of The Last Dance.

At one point in culture it was magical to have technology reproduce and distribute sports en masse. Television broadcasts were such a compelling medium for sports coverage because games had simply never been seen like that before. Watching a race track from a bird's eye view or following a quarterback down a field in a tight tracking shot was seductive because it was not physically possible for sports fans to do themselves. But now our lives are so digitally mediated that spectating is our dominant mode of engagement not only with sports but with life in general. A sports media that constantly reinstates the divide between spectator and athlete only adds to this culture of disembodiment. It is now generally understood that asking “Do you like sports?” refers to the ones you watch, not the ones you play. 

In my utopian daydream, I imagine sports media operating like a funnel pushing people from spectatorship into participation. Publications would run essays and videos that help you fall in love with, say, the feeling of actually boxing. Till, eventually, you grow so enamored with the impact of the heavy bag reverberating through your body when you hit it that you stop watching fights altogether, dissatisfied with all that sitting around. Then, you joyously toss your remote in the closest body of water, renounce capitalism, and reconnect with your body and the bodies of others in a pugilistic commune somewhere. Sensational!

But yes, thank you, I know. This is not an economically viable content strategy. The tangle of leagues, media conglomerates, broadcasters, venues, and betting companies that profit from maintaining your viewership are trying to keep butts in seats, not out doing Rocky-style workouts. ESPN would be cannibalizing their own business if their production of the Eagles vs. the Chiefs inspired you to get up off the couch to learn how to play football. So, as a consolation, becoming a country of spectators who look but cannot act is sold as a convenience of modern life when it is really a casualty of it. How lucky you are! You don’t have to grow your own food, make your clothes, or build your own home, and now, for $1.99 a month, you can get unlimited access to The Athletic so you, too, don’t even have to play your own sports!