The Art of Missing Goals
The Football Striker Theory
*Please note that throughout this article we refer to football as football. Handegg is an entirely different sport, and we’re not talking about that one.
I suck at football. It’s taken me years to admit it to myself, cause you want to be good at it, you know? Nobody admires the kid who learned how to cross-stitch before they learned how to kick a ball (which I did).
I still played it though. God, I wanted to be good. I started off as a goalkeeper in 4th grade, mostly cause I liked the acrobatics they got to do when trying to stop a ball in mid-air. My career stopped soon after, still in 4th grade, cause kids tend to blame the goalie for every goddamn goal. It was hard not to take it personally when my peers were going “You suck” and asking the coach to take me out of the game.
Yeah, take me out. Replace me or use a sniper rifle but fucking do it already.
I decided I wanted to be a striker instead. They’d get yelled at for not scoring obvious goals (goals my grandma could make according to the general choir coming from the bleachers), but they’d also get to try again.
And I’m all about opportunities.
One thing I did not anticipate though, was the dissociation.
Stay with me, Jim.
I was never any good at football, so whenever I’d get to play at school, I’d find the worst possible position in the field and I’d stand there asking for the ball, looking like I was participating. In reality, I was great at positioning myself out of action’s way so that I wouldn’t be held responsible for fucking up if I ever got the ball.
If you’ve ever “accidentally” found yourself behind a large column at the night club, or on the side of the bar that nobody has a clear view of, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Introverts have this crazy ability to show up somewhere, and then disappear.
Like, people know we’re there, but they’re not sure where. Like a housecat. Or a missing sock.
So I was able to hide in plain sight 80% of my time in the field.
But every so often some misguided soul would find me and lob the ball my way.
Oh no.
Have you ever experienced the Vertigo Effect zoom? It’s that shot in movies where the background pulls away while the main character zooms in towards the camera.
Dissociating feels exactly like that. The world pulls away while you’re brought closer to the audience.
Your vision gets blurry, and everyone starts moving at 1000mph out of the corner of your eye. You know those black blurs that run past your eyes every so often? You‘ve never been able to catch them, have you? The entire world dissolves into those lightning fast slugs.
The audio shifts, as if you’re listening to a conversation 3 rows ahead of you in an airplane. It all becomes half words and reverberating sounds.
Your fingers start to tingle.
You taste metal.
During this whole time, the proverbial ball is still headed towards me. My legs would be scrambling to catch up with my mind. It would feel like I was inside a giant jello cube.
The ball would land. If I was lucky enough to be able to stop it before it bounced out of the field, my brain would go into overdrive. Accelerated palpitations, cold sweat, widening pupils, the works.
Let me pause here for a bit just to remind you that football, in this case, is a placeholder for any activity…any activity, you want to be good at.
For example:
- Video games — the moment you come face to face with the alien
- Work — the moment your boss “wants to talk” without previous warning
- Buying a house — the moment you’re signing on the dotted line
- Sex — the moment you come face to face with the alien
Cool, moving on.
I’d get sucked inside my own head so far and so fast, I’d get nauseous. The speed at which I dissociated still gives me vertigo. I have never felt g-forces like those, and I’ve been on the Millennium Force.
By the time the ball landed, I had about six different voices trying to control the broken down vessel that was my body, and every single one of them was screaming “Don’t fuck up!”, while at least half of them were going “Be a hero!”.
So I’d grab that ball, and make a run for the goal.
I missed every single time.
My high school football career is a perfect 0 goals scored, and maybe like 1 pass completed. I liked playing at home better cause most of my cousins were shorter than me and I’d have a size/speed advantage.
Still sucked though.
What Does That Have to Do With Anything?
I’m sure not a lot of us can relate to high school football striker fantasies.
But if you’ve ever felt your body go into this kind of fucked up shock, you know where I’m coming from.
“Do the thing you’re not good at,” the situation demands. And you either bail out or fuck it up.
Your brain is literally curling up into a fetal position, to brace for impact. And when it does, it pulls in all sorts of strings inside your body.
In certain situations, your heart will physically hurt while your brain is playing crash test dummy.
The only thing I found works is repetition. Preparation. Training.
Do the thing. Do it again. Pause, think, restart.
And then restart again.
Cause I have always played football the way I do. Badly. I never raised my level. So every time the ball comes my way, my brain does the thing.
And I fail.
I never learned how to learn.
Then again, this taught me something else about myself.
I don’t care about playing football.
I got really good at writing though.
Nobody tosses notebooks at you in hopes you kick them into an arbitrarily placed box.
