Recently, I came across a set of undated photographs that I can say with certainty were taken in August of 1999. I can situate the images precisely because my hair is straw-like, bleached platinum blonde, and I have on a shirt that I only wore once in America. I purchased it that July from a shop in Tokyo during my final tour as a model; it stopped making sense as soon as I got home. I look happy to be back in New York in every single image, drinking beer with my childhood best friend, Pokey, and often gesturing ecstatically towards an enormous and shoddy outdoor wrestling ring that had been erected in the middle of Frost Street in Greenpoint.

I wouldn’t say that we ended up at this event to support a friend, but we did know one of the headliners: he was 

 at the Bushwick strip club Pokey danced at, a man who at the time seemed relatively unremarkable outside of his ability to remain seated for extraordinarily long periods as he surveilled the club from a lawn chair. I remember thinking it was outlandishly weird when we found out this man had a second life as a wrestler, though I couldn’t tell you why now. I must have thought it was seedy in a way that was hard to relate to, but if it were a cynical sociological fascination that inspired my attendance, you would never know it from the photographs. Most of the documentation I have of that day shows a version of me who is young and thrilled and almost 

, arms raised, mouth agape, eyes widening, as I register the split-second a bar stool makes contact with the bouncer’s head. I don’t find it difficult to understand why ultraviolent wrestling appeals to people. I remember how satisfying it felt to witness the flash of ignition, to encounter the moment when our barely suppressed death drives stopped wandering aimlessly and finally found purchase in the atomized dust of an exploded fluorescent tube. The match reminded me of the hardcore matinees I attended in the early 1990s, and if the ring here supplanted the stage, the circuit between the action and the audience was absolutely analogous. 

For as much as we like to qualify this type of entertainment as a subcultural expression of classically masculine transgression, it also functions as an important release valve, subverting the surveillance of our collective superego by probing the membrane that quarantines real-life mayhem from its make-believe proxies. Looking through the images in photographer Nick Karp’s new book, 

 I remembered how thrilling it can be to watch, how life-affirming it is to believe without calculation that we are witnessing a person exposing their interior, stripping bare the parts of themselves that we are not supposed to see.

Karp’s images provide an intimate glimpse of the men and women who joined Game Changer Wrestling’s post-pandemic performances at Tokyo’s legendary Korakuen Hall, a space that accommodates all kinds of wrestling but that many identify as the non-plus-ultra heart of the death match. I learned during a cursory investigation of the venue that it has served as the primary host for gorescapes since the mid-1990s, which means that its reputation as a no-holds-barred forum for blood sport began during the grip of the AIDS crisis and has continued through every subsequent public health disaster since. Though 

 certainly offers an intimately panoramic perspective of fans and wrestlers both in and out of the ring, part of the power that rattles through its pages is the service it pays as a document of displaced public anxiety. The percussive quality of Karp’s images is both underscored and redoubled by the historical moment in which they were taken: immediately following mass public trauma, state-mandated lockdowns, and the panic that fomented in the wake of Covid, these photographs deny death by showing bodies unafraid to cozy up to its perimeter.

 lurid depictions of theatrically ruptured flesh, one photograph, in particular, comes to mind. In this image, a man stands with his back teasing against a slat of particle board accessorized with a menacing tendril of barbed wire. Though his body is not yet bleeding, it is thick with evidence of past matches, a latticework of keloid scars that covers every visible area of his skin. I suppose this particular frame sticks with me not only because it conjures and immediately negates all of the doubt people cast about the legitimacy of the sport but because it seems to hold inside itself all of the complexity wrestling addresses about inside versus outside, folklore versus war, 

 Karp’s work feels important to me, not just because it tells me something about fandom or violence but because my reactions tell me about myself.

I’ve written a lot about how culture mitigates its relationship to fear through spectacle. It seems clear that we engage with mediums like true crime, horror films, and tales of peril as roadmaps for negotiating how to stay alive, and the continued popularity of boundary-testing wrestling slots neatly into the theory. Wrestling has always been an expression of performative public violence that touches on legitimate brutality, a choreographed double of our own worst intentions. We activate another kind of séance when we get the chance to engage with the kind of theatrical rupture that brushes up against genuine carnage; we watch so that we can feel what it’s like to be a ghost so that we can trespass on a mortal boundary without actually having to die.

At that match on Frost Street all those years ago, it didn’t occur to me to question if the blood I saw spilling from the bouncer’s bald scalp was real or not, though I suppose now that it was. It didn’t matter in the moment—it looked believable enough, which was all the crowd required. We wanted to witness something that reminded us that we could all be split open, too. We wanted to witness something that confirmed to us that, for the moment, we were all still whole.

will be on view at the Trunk Hotel in Shibuya, Tokyo on August 12-14, 2024. Buy the book 

Alissa Bennett

...So that we can trespass on a mortal boundary without actually having to die.

Folklore Versus War

My first figure skating coach once told me that discomfort was a distraction. Though that wasn’t exactly how he put it, since his limited, Russified English forced him to explain things in a looping kind of way. My fluency was a sign of the hours I had spent with him over the years. This was in an inner-city suburb of Sydney, where developers converted an airport hangar into an Olympic-sized rink. Through the summer, its cavernous interior billowed with fog, and when it rained, we placed buckets on the ice to catch the water: the drips formed craters that—if they caught your toe-pick at the right angle or speed—could possibly end your career. Though, of course, the fog, which clouded over everything, was easily just as perilous.

You had to learn to skate in any condition. And no matter what kind of day it was, my coach was stepping outside in his worn-down skates for another cigarette, saying something like: I’m going to go to the canteen, where I will ask them for a styrofoam cup; I’m going to take that styrofoam cup to the stands, where I will beg every person for a dollar; I’m going to use that cup of dollars at the gun store, where I will buy myself a pistol; and with that pistol I will finally shoot myself. By which he meant that practice was going badly that morning.

I guess around that time, I’d adjusted my leotard during a competition. It was during those moments spent waiting by the boards before they call your name to begin. Once that happens, you have thirty seconds to assume your starting position before the judges, shortly after which the music and the stopwatch begin: two minutes and forty seconds for the short program, four minutes for the free skate that follows. Any regular person would be forgiven for thinking that the competition happens within those defined periods of time. But in fact, the opposite is true: you quickly learn to assume that you are constantly subject to judgment. Later in my career, I’d attend scheduled “practices” before competition, for which full costume and make-up were basically required: officials would circulate through the stands to judge if you made a mistake. By then, I’d moved to Michigan to train at a more competitive rink, where the locker room was exposed by an internally-facing glass panel: from any part of the rink, our coach could look through that window to judge what you were eating. I learned this all in some capacity back in Sydney when my first coach told me that he’d noticed my finger pulling the lycra down when it should have been resting gracefully by my thigh instead. This all makes him sound like a man of dictatorial inclinations, which he was not, certainly a rarity in the sport; in fact, he was a kind-hearted man and incredibly insightful. But seeing me adjust my leotard in competition had made him want to ask the canteen for a cup.

That rink is closed now, I heard, underfunded like the rest of them. I assume this has something to do with the fact that—except for every four years at the Olympics—hardly anyone is really watching the sport. Even at championship events, skaters perform in stadiums that seem mostly empty, except for the judging panel—but even they aren’t really watching, as it turns out, at least once you count the reports of corruption and score fixing. There is no comprehensive explanation for this decline, only signs that the sport feels outdated to younger viewers; this year’s 2024 Prevagen U.S. Figure Skating Championships bore the name of its primary sponsor, an over-the-counter supplement that claims to “improve memory” in cases of “normal aging.”

As part of an ongoing attempt to make the sport more engaging for younger viewers, the International Skating Union—the sport’s governing body, composed of the judges, officials, and administrators from each country’s federation—periodically updates its rules and regulations. In theory, departing from tradition allows skaters a greater degree of artistic freedom. It recently ruled that women could wear pants, for example (provided that fifty percent of their body remains costumed; “clothing must not give the effect of excessive nudity,” reads the ISU handbook, meaning that “illusion,” or nude-colored flesh, does not count towards the percentage. For the several years that I competed internationally in ice dance, every season would begin by studying the latest edition of this handbook with our coaches, as if we all had to learn the sport over again: the Union started experimenting with the given “rhythms” that were usually adapted from ballroom—instead of waltzes, tangoes, or the quickstep, we were gradually subjected to styles that the Union called “street dance.” I’ve seen that next year, each team will skate a “dance party.” All of the disciplines once required that skaters perform the “figures” from which the sport derives its name, moves that trace circular patterns onto the ice; now these, too, have been deemed out of style. In their place, skaters are permitted to perform certain moves that were formerly deemed “illegal” in competition but, for years, have proven popular on the commercial show circuit: they can now touch the ice, for example, and the boards. They can also skate to music with lyrics.

Perhaps its commitment to modernization has led it to believe that, when it comes to figure skating, viewer “engagement” can be boosted in the same way that it is on social media: by manufacturing a product that is in every way more spectacular, commanding attention. But even with these revisions, the sport feels terribly antiquated. That feeling was especially hard to ignore as I watched the rhythm dance events this past season, in which every ice dance team was required to skate to music from the 1980s: some women wore unitards, yes, but also a lot of pastel eye-shadow, side-ponytails, and spandex treated to look like studded leather. World-class athletes, making the best of the Union’s rule changes, slid on the ice while thrusting in a manner designed to recall 

; they leaned on the boards, close enough for the judges to feel their labored breath, and simulated the motions of a Jane Fonda aerobics class. Watching them, I thought of something that Mirai Nagasu, the first American woman to land a triple axel in competition, had said in a 2022 interview: when asked about the relative scarcity of women figure skating in pants, she suggested that skaters were wary of deviating from convention. “I think, as athletes, we’re all people pleasers,” she offered.

Admirers of figure skating usually defend it on the basis of its artistry. But there is a limit to the latter, I think, when it is contrived—and specifically contrived for the kind of judgment that fundamentally values, above all else, the sustainment of illusion. In most other sports, the struggle of endurance is made plain: footballers grunt through the scrimmage, tennis players heave while they hit, and swimmers gape their jaws open for air. But in figure skating, athletes are awarded not only for the difficulty of a certain motion, but also their success in concealing the struggle it took to perform it. I think of Michelle Kwan’s defeat by Tara Lipinski at the 1998 Nagano Olympics. 

 painted the difference between them this way: Kwan, “all business,” had opted to stay with her parents in a hotel near the stadium, where her father unambiguously reminded her of the “job” she was there to do; meanwhile, the “relaxed and cheerful” Lipinski, who had been to Disney World fourteen times, treated her time in the Olympic Village with a sense of touristic adventure. Her winning skate was an extension of that “joyous odyssey.” Whereas with Michelle, a sense of struggle pervaded; the pressure visibly bore down on her, in her skating. “It was not the feeling of flying,” confirmed Frank Caroll, her coach.

Gymnasts and cheerleaders know about this, too, but the fact of blades in figure skating only augments its capacity for illusion: the ideal skater, in a state of suspension, conceals the forces of earthly reality—gravity, inertia, and every other kind that isn’t accounted for by physics. She endures the falls as she does the men, the politics, the hunger and the pressure, and the concussions; she endures and is sometimes awarded if she can make that struggle look like the feeling of flying. That in itself is a kind of art, but one that feels closer to being art

, embroiled in the duplicity that illusion requires.

Three years after I’d retired from figure skating—at what felt like the tragic age of twenty-two—I found myself in New York, where I’d moved to try and write, confronted by a canvas at the Whitney. Almost expansive as a sheet of ice, I thought, and marked in the way that ice tends to look after any session: etched with figures, perhaps pockmarked by rain, mauled by toe-picks vaulting skaters into flight. I later learned that the artist, Joan Mitchell, had been a “Figure Skating Queen of the Midwest” but retired from competition at seventeen after placing a “disappointing” fourth at Nationals. Reading about her, I was alarmed at how it seemed that she carried the sport with her: in her later years, she struggled with lung cancer, arthritis, and two hip replacements but continued to extend herself, literally, to paint her enormous canvases. When asked about the physical strain, she replied, “I just got up on that fucking ladder and told myself, 

I had once fallen in love with the sport and stayed in it, believing in its artistry. But standing in front of Mitchell’s 

, I saw the struggle—the kind of scene typically smoothed into glass by a Zamboni, as if it had never happened.

Kim Hew-Low

The ideal skater, in a state of suspension, conceals the forces of earthly reality—gravity, inertia, and every other kind that isn’t accounted for by physics.

Figure Study

From all-stars and merch to the necessary personalities of a starting five lineup, we're talking shop on basketball and its followers with two dedicated fans: writer Ben Detrick and artist Andrew Kuo. The pair have made a name for themselves by moonlighting as sports commentators on their podcast

, which has its multiverse of merch, texts, and events. Recently, the duo connected with Cultural Counsel Account Executive and amateur baller Rachel Roberts to discuss the joy of basketball.

: I've become a sports fanatic, a.k.a. a basketball fan, as of about three months ago. But I also played a bit of the sport in middle school. So I’m a connoisseur. I’m even wearing my 

merch, so thank you, guys, for my new favorite hat. On that note, I want to hear more about what inspired you to create 

: Chronologically, Andrew and I’s relationship began in the bowels of Max Fish arguing about basketball. We didn’t really know each other on a personal level other than by face, but we would argue about the value of coaching. If it mattered, we’d talk about the Knicks or whoever. So that was how we first met each other.

, a pirate radio station in Chinatown, where I had a show with my buddy. First, it was called 

, and then Andrew joined it full-time. It was on 

 for a little while. This shifting synthesis ended up with Andrew and me under the banner of 

 else has grown out of that, whether it was the clothing line deciding to do 

, going to All-Star weekend, signing books, and any other subsequent projects. It all emerged from this morphing of several art projects and long-term basketball-pilled friendships.

: Having a book just made sense because Ben is a writer for the 

, and I added a visual component, and it just was too tempting not to do. The project of 

 is interesting to me because it is not only about friendship, but it’s also a way to talk about big ideas with small things, such as basketball, basketball players, statistics, new ways of looking at pretty rudimentary visuals or things that could be either talked about in simple terms or broader terms.

: Some people want to think about basketball or sports in a smarter way, and that has a certain appeal. You see guys like 

 that speaks to more of the nuts and bolts strategy of the game. There have been people like 

 who wrote about basketball more insightfully or philosophically. When Andrew and I were trying to pin down what we wanted to say, 

 as a title made sense because at the root of what Andrew and I love about the sport is that it is a conduit for happiness—a lot of the punditry veers towards negativity. You don’t need to be mawkish, saccharine, Panglossian, or any of these ways of looking at the sport uncritically, but at the root of it is that this sport is awesome, and these players are amazing. Just the feeling you get from watching someone like Kyrie [Irving] or Steph [Curry] or LeBron [James] or Luka [Dončić] ply their trade on the highest level is what gives Andrew and me joy.

: Therapy. It’s positive. It’s all these new age ideas, whatever you want to pull from the ether into this thing that has a villain, a hero, a loser, a winner; it is an open canvas.

One thing that Andrew has made me do more of is accept the phrase 

That's very Kuo. I’ll say something, and he’s like, “Are you sure?” And I’m like, “Hold on, maybe [I’m not].” That was the approach we took to the retrospective elements of the book and talking about players from the past who have these calcified reputations and narratives that basketball has just accepted as a written-in-stone truth. It’s this little bleating Kuo voice repeating, “Are you sure?” And our book did that. We went back and looked at the past and said, “Did we get that right, or was it wrong, and we have another idea?”

Coming from a fine art background, and as a fan of fine art in general, the next painting or sculpture is always in reaction to the previous one. Every time someone adds to that story, it changes the history of everything before it. That's how I feel about every game, every season, every career: 

 Because it then colorizes yesterday differently.

: The constant re-evaluation of basketball is what I love about it. Some ideas were on the bleeding edge and became modern and then became retrograde, and you’ll see that process. That applies to life in general; something that you believe is entirely ahead of the curve within no time is the most boring concept ever.

In the book, you guys discuss how fans interpret the game, and we're also getting there in this conversation in talking about the romanticism of basketball, but also as it relates to psychology. As you said earlier, basketball fandom can be therapy, but it can also be a day-ruiner. Let’s talk about how we obsess over these moments relating to pop culture. And it's not isolated to just basketball; it can go across any sport or any fandom or art, whatever it is.

One’s interest in something has an arc, right? We have certain built-in ideas and projections when we’re young, middle-aged, and finally done with something. Putting your desires and needs into something that doesn't need you is a realization you come to in your middle age of fandom. In the beginning, you believe in superstitions.

 I wear the same shirt and the same hat, and I eat the same thing

. And then, in the middle, you realize you're not involved, and in the end, you just love it more than ever, hopefully. Our book talks about how you have to come out on the other side of your lifetime of being a fan of something. The goal is not to win a championship but to have a good time.

 The beauty of in-person fandom is that you can glaze over the idea that it’s parasocial because when you’re at Madison Square Garden, and the crowd is roaring, you’re the sixth man, you’re part of this, you’re spurring these guys onward.

: We feel like we’re a part of the game, and the outcome relies on our participation. There’s some value or weight to being a fan, showing up, and giving support. Speaking of that, I wanted to talk to you both about fan merchandise and this collecting universe that revolves around sports—the impulse to consume in a more materialistic way for our fandom.

 I've spent my whole life collecting and creating junk. It is a way for people to attempt to make sense of something magical. And I’m not even talking about sports. I’m talking about time. I have to buy this tour T-shirt if I’m at this concert because it’ll never be 2023 again. I need to make sense of why I'm here and what I’m doing—that is the emotional explanation of it. But the basic description: We like cool shit. I like cool stuff, and I like to wear cool stuff that invites other people to try to discuss this stuff with me. It’s a sense of community.

The compulsion I’ve always had to make things in my professional life has been a blessing in 

s because it’s a way to not only fold a corner of a book page over but also to keep track of this thing that moves so fast, whether that be basketball, New York City fashion trends, or just years; at this point, Ben and I have been at this for longer than I think.

I like Andrew’s point about bringing people into the merch itself because last night I played pickup ball. A lot of the guys were younger than me, and I was wearing a shirt that Andrew made pre-

, which was like a 2016/17 Knicks championship shirt. Now, you may not be a huge basketball fan, but let me tell you that the Knicks did not win a championship in 2017. The guys started looking at the shirt and realized that it was an odd novelty item for a championship team that had never existed. They started pointing out the obscure fringe players on the 2017 Knicks. There’s Kuzminskas. There’s Ron Baker…people just started talking about that team and this shirt. That’s the greatest example of what Andrew is great at; his shirts inspire a reaction and thought.

something to be said about this new wave of fans, the alternative fan, and this kind of approachable community. Obviously, you guys are contributing to that with something like 

. You can also disagree if you’re like, “No, this generation's always been around,” but I wanted to hear your thoughts on this moment in pop culture as it relates to the fandom.

I think it has been going along for a while. Most famously, Bill Simmons, who Ben used to write for at 

, which is no longer around, was known as a fan voice. But everything has a delay, and it takes time; he [Simmons] eventually becomes the establishment because he’s excellent at this, and his interests involve getting bigger and bigger, and he’s produced a pretty incredible thing, but that leaves a vacant seat. Ben and I try to occupy that space—we’re weird, we’re New Yorkers, we keep weird hours, and we enjoy a Knicks game as much as we enjoy eating at a strange restaurant. That mentality is helpful when talking about a thing that everyone’s watching simultaneously.

I can’t think of when basketball has felt this much like a part of New York City and the larger culture than it is right now. I ran into a guy from the neighborhood on the street yesterday. I talked to him for a second and as we gave each other a quick pound, we both said, “Go Knicks.” At the same time. And after I walked off, I was like, “What just happened? What was that? Are we using ‘Go Knicks’ as a goodbye now?”

Dude, I passed a 60-year-old man on Broadway in Brooklyn yesterday, and he was wearing this pretty basic but odd outfit, and he caught me staring at his fit, and he stares at me and goes, “Go Knicks.” And I’m like, “Go Knicks, buddy.” It was incredible. But to your point, we are also doing the main character thing, and sometimes I think everyone lives the most incredible sports life ever lived, right? And currently, we're in the best era. But if you talk to Michael Jordan fans, they live in the best era. Or Clyde Frazier fans, Dave DeBusschere, whatever. Is what we're talking about now unique because of technology? Isn't 

 a technological discussion? Isn't all sports now a reaction to social media?

 The prior era was a reaction to the internet and League Pass and being able to watch all the teams instead of just the ones on TV. And the prior era was a reaction to it being on cable-

Then it goes back to radio. And now they're writing about the sport in the newspaper, well...

AM radio must've been crazy when that dropped.

It’s hard to tell if it’ll be observable or not, but it is safe to say we’re in the post-statistical embrace era, and there’s a pushback to that now, and I’m glad for it. We end up with a more enjoyable thing if we can talk about rivalries, emotions, villains, heroes, and the story that we know and understand before we get into metrics. That evolution has happened in the last five or six, ten years post the 

We’re not going post-metrics in terms of how teams operate. They have these numbers; they’re going to use these numbers. But Andrew makes a good point: that, in some ways, a war has been waged between metrics and gut instinct. Generally speaking, everyone arrives at the same place knowing that if stuff is quantifiable, it is valuable, and we can find out what those data sets are. But there are also a lot of moving parts; what creates them? That’s up for debate. Is it just a skill set? Is it having more dawg?

 Thematically, how we talk about something procedural like 82 NBA games will reflect what collectively we think about politics or our concerns out in the real world. We saw the NBA cycle through an era of player empowerment, social justice, and the worker versus the owner, and these echoed ideas we were talking about in other places. Where the NBA goes in the future is dictated by elections, policy, and supreme justice rulings. In small ways, that unrest informs how we talk about a black-and-white idea of winning and losing. It was no accident that we had a reality TV real estate mogul as president, and all we argued about in the NBA was authenticity.

 Is this person playing the right way? Are they playing ethically?

 This was a theme throughout that era in real life.

There’s something to be said about the performance aspect that we’re talking about. There are so many more variables that people are paying attention to as the game itself advances. Going back to this “Caitlin Clark effect,” there was 

 where he was talking about how she's a performer like him. I think that in itself, dare I say, makes it an art form.

If you look at the OKC versus Dallas series right now, you see Luka [Dončić], Kyrie [Irving], and SGA [Shai Gilgeous-Alexander]. You can observe these very distinct styles of play, but they do things that are magical and anomalous—you don't see them from other people. That’s where I would draw the parallel to art in that way: when you watch Luka throw a weird pass behind his head, or you watch Kyrie float in midair and switch hands and flip the ball around two defenders, or SGA do this hyper-advanced footwork. Those are the brushstrokes, for lack of a less obvious analogy. This is their art. And that’s why some of them are virtuosos. They have a signature look and a signature sound, and the things they do are not replicable by other players. If they are, we know what they did. Like, “Oh, that's the Dirk one-footer.” We all know that move. Dirk popularized that. And now, if you do it, that’s “the Dirk.”

There’s a difference between aesthetics and art. Art discusses time, context, intention, or movement towards something. Of course, you can make a beautiful painting of a sunset, but when I think of these magicians—and Ben used that word—like Steph Curry and Caitlin Clark, they capture our imaginations in ways that are hard to put into words. But that is different from art to me. Is an old Italian grandma making ravioli an artist? What she does is beautiful, but it’s not necessarily art. If we pull back far enough, we can turn aesthetics into meaning always. With basketball, I try to resist that. To be present as a fan and to get as much as I can out of a game or a season is just to appreciate stuff on its aesthetic level, which is powerful and beautiful, but it’s not necessarily art.

It’s interesting that you said all that just to get back to some more of your anti-Italian food takes.

Chinese food with tomatoes and cheese. Prove me wrong.

All of that just to say that Chinese people invented spaghetti.

That was inspiring. My last question for you guys is: if you were to draft your own team and you have a starting five, but the team itself is made up of cultural figures, who're you putting on that starting five?

I’m picking five Andrew Kuos. The team is called The Tall Kings, and I am the mascot.

All right. Ben actually needs some time to think about this because this is a lot to process. We're talking about our favorite chefs, painters, and fashion designers, that kind of thing?

So, what makes a great team? You need a little of everything. You just can't have five scorers because there are not enough shots to go around. Let's make a team together, Ben. What would produce the most wins?

If you start with a point guard, you need a general worldview person, like a philosopher, someone with a great understanding of the landscape. An ASAP Yams could work in that example.

Oh, I was going to say José Andrés, but ASAP Yams, okay. Backcourt, Yams, and Andrés.

That is a very strong backcourt. Then, for the wing and the three, you need a specialty guy who has some advantages size-wise but can do specific things. You don't need him to do everything. Call out a fashion designer.

You want an Antwerp Six guy. Is that what you're saying?

I love it. Dries at the three. All right. All right. Four?

Four, they need to be a little more substantial, secondary rim protection.

Ben Detrick and Andrew Kuo

Rachel Roberts

One’s interest in something has an arc, right?

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Fandom

I’m at the pub watching football. It’s the semi-final of the FA Cup, the world’s oldest football (soccer, if you prefer) competition, between giant team Manchester United and second-division Coventry. I’m a neutral, feeling quite sleepy like the rest of the pub. An hour into the game, United are 3-0 up. For Coventry to reach the semi-finals is already unusual, a triumph of narrative over the foregone conclusion by which the wealthy top-division clubs dominate over the poorer, lower-ranked teams that lack the resources to employ world-class players and managers, a system based on a regular influx of money that keeps those on the top where they are. For Coventry to stage an upset would be something special. And perhaps things are changing. It starts with a beautiful, unexpected shot from Coventry’s striker in the 71st minute. 3-1. A few minutes later, Coventry’s midfielder takes a shot that hits the back of a Manchester defender and deflects straight into the goal. 78 minutes in, it’s now 3-2. The entire pub is watching the screen, incredulous, amazed. This may be history in the making.

A football game lasts 90 minutes, and the clock doesn’t stop. At the end of the game, the referee might add a few minutes to make up for time lost over injuries, player substitution, and so on. In this game, six minutes are added, and at the 92nd minute, the same United defender who had the ball hit his back now accidentally plays a handball. Coventry are given a penalty shot, where a single player faces the keeper uninterrupted. Coventry forward Haji Wright takes it on and scores, the 3-3 score line sending the game into 30 minutes of extra time as a tie-breaker. In the 119th minute, the absolute last minute that can be played, Coventry scores. It’s Wright again. The entire pub erupts with incredulity and joy—everybody loves the little guy.

Only wait a minute. The goal is to be reviewed by video-assisted referees, or VAR, as they are casually referred to in conversations about football, who suspect Wright was offside (offside means that the most forward-attacking player was ahead of the last defender at the moment the ball was passed to them; it sounds complicated because it is.) The pub moans in unison. I know that sound, that groan—the sound of displeasure, the sound of a narrative cut.

Video-assisted refereeing is new, introduced across major football leagues around the world in the past five years, and it has been unpopular with fans, pundits, managers, and players. It was first trialed in the 2019 Women’s World Cup, using the largest occasion in women’s football as a testing ground for a new technology, which was even then severely criticized for inconsistency and lack of compatibility with a high-pressure, quick-moving game. VAR referees monitor the game from an office away from the pitch, examining decisions in real time. When VAR recognizes an infringement, they can either inform the on-field referee of a mistaken decision or instruct the referee to look at a pitch-side monitor where he can reassess his call.

It’s a visual system. The referees pause and rewind; they draw lines to see players’ positions in relation to each other. They watch the players’ motion without context—a foul is only the moment of contact, a handball a question of the “natural position” of the players’ arms. On television, viewers see the three video-assisted referees in the VAR rooms in Stockley Park, a business center near Heathrow Airport, drawing each other’s attention to multiple screens. It feels intimate—these people watch other people up close, their action stops another action, their rewinding and pausing a form of paying attention to other humans.

Wright was offside, and the goal is rescinded. At the pub, everyone puts down their drinks with a collective sigh. We all resent this decision, whether or not it is correct. Football refereeing has always been subjective. The rules are the rules, but the referee and what he or she sees is always the only authority. For a long time, the idea of using technology to correct this was very popular with fans, who were used to seeing replays on television and couldn’t understand why the same medium couldn’t be used in-game. Until it was actually introduced.

VAR has inalterably changed the relationship between fans, players, and referees—all the people who participate simultaneously in the event. While fans watching on television can see what the video-assisted referees are looking at, in the stadium, the screens just read “VAR check.” When VAR was introduced, an executive decision was made to not show the process in the stadium to protect the referees on the pitch and their authority. But the result is that the stadium audiences don’t know what is going on, whereas the TV audiences do.

, asks: “Why? Why love sport?” And gives the simplest answer: “First, it must be remembered that everything happening to the player also happens to the spectator.” VAR severs this bond through doubt. There’s a doubt in the audience: Did something happen, or will it be taken away? They saw it with their own eyes, but somewhere in an office away from the ground are a few sets of eyes on a monitor whose version of the event may be more accurate, more technical. That doubt also reaches the player’s mind. A goal could be ruled out for offside or for something in the buildup that the player had not noticed. This same hesitation is translated to the fans: Do you jump, hug, and shout when a goal is scored, or wait for VAR to confirm the player wasn’t offside first? VAR breaks the flow of the game and the live event. That empathy that Barthes describes is one of my favorite things about watching football, about watching sports: that to pay so much attention to another human being in real time is a form of connection. To watch is to tell a story about emotion—glee and surprise, coming together, feeling the same thing as the people around you.

What happens when you break a narrative? Something happens in the game, but then it needs to be confirmed. “A football match immediately ceases to be interesting as soon as we know the final result,” suggests author Jean-Philippe Toussaint in his book 

. “As soon as the invisible thread connecting soccer to the passage of time is broken, as soon as it is stripped of its dimension of irreversibility, its grace and brilliance immediately vanish,” he writes. The invisible thread connecting football to the passage of time is also a system of representation: it’s television cameras that follow the ball, it’s the way the game is mediated through language and punditry, it’s the sense of occasion, the event.

The visual conditions of watching football on a screen already change this thin thread of time. I once watched a game at a pub with two televisions unsynchronized by one second, ruining anything just before you knew it could be ruined. The same goes for watching big games at home, hearing people cheer from other houses, where their connection may be a tiny bit better, putting them just ahead of you. With VAR, that thread of time becomes ever more knotted. Time expands and contracts, repeats, and shifts our experience. VAR is a specific kind of media experience: the screen often splits to view the replay and the players, the referee, or another version. It splits time, too: the replay is already the past, and the referee and players are living in the present.

It’s a story often told: be careful what you wish for. One day, I’ll say I am old enough to remember football before VAR. And I will sound like a Luddite who thinks technology ruins everything. But I will know: I will know how, for a while, when a goal was scored, fans could cheer or shout, never doubting that the decision could then be overturned by someone watching a screen somewhere. Everything that happened to the player happened to the viewer, and no line drawn across the screen, no check, could challenge it. You saw it with your own eyes.

And I know, from art, stories, and sport, that the meeting of time and narrative is a rich place. That legend builds through recounting. That I could say it a thousand times: there was a moment at the pub when there was a hush because all of us were having the same feeling—a could-it-be, a sense of the impossible—and then it was replaced by a whimper. The more I describe it, the more incredulous I am that legends don’t always work and that life gets in the way. Here is when it ceases to be interesting: Manchester United won.

The referee whistled to end the game immediately after the VAR call canceling Coventry’s last-gasp goal; the tie was then broken with a penalty shootout, where the team with the best of 5 penalty kicks wins. United won 4-2. The ending is unromantic: the rich, successful, famous team won. They won by the rules. Still, their win feels unjustified because it went against the narrative, against the story all of us at the pub wanted to tell. Where were you when Haji Wright scored that 120th-minute goal to send Coventry to the final of the FA Cup? “Oh, I was at a pub in North London, complaining with everybody else.”

Orit Gat 

I know that sound, that groan—the sound of displeasure, the sound of a narrative cut.

Seeing Is Believing

Issue 5

Endurance, determination, perseverance, performance, luck, failure, ardor, technique, practice, repetition, drive, force, ambition: the lexicon rooted in the worlds of art and athletics, one so ubiquitously borrowed from that presently it evokes the nebulous ideals of a VC-backed monoculture, distilled in advertisements for productivity software, electronic appliances of increasingly slender profiles, the backstory of any given startup. Worn thin, in other words. Cliché. And for good reason: its narrative potency is indisputable.

The appeal is in the inherently active, participatory nature of this lexicon; the stock figures it has borne—the jock-artist, the savant-athlete—natural protagonists in the primal wholesomeness of their being, body moving in tandem with intellect. But, of course, none of it would be the subject of fascination if nobody was watching. Perhaps the best way to eschew cliché is to look towards where it emerges, so we turn our eyes to the spectator. 

In thinking about what the relationship might look like turned inside out, our starting point is the performance on the cover of this issue, which we had the fortune to witness last year at the Lloyd Center Mall in Portland, Oregon. Amanda Ross-Ho’s

was presented as part of Converge 45’s 2023 biennial program in conjunction with

, the artist’s solo exhibition with the Portland gallery ILY2.

Ross-Ho performed the Circle Eight–a basic building block of skating training—over and over again, turning what is typically confined to practice in intense repetition and void of entertainment value into a spectator event, making the private process public and inverting the unspectacular into spectacle. She traced this infinity symbol with her skates until she performed a version of it she deemed competent until it felt like her muscle’s memory of it was recovered. This was her first time on the ice in thirty years, and she did not practice before the performance.

“I was very shaky at first and very slowly accessed and remembered my body’s programming. I felt that whatever this process looked like was the performance,” says Amanda Ross-Ho,  reflecting on the piece. The artist wore an illusion skeleton suit—which also appeared in a scaled-up version as a textile sculpture at the gallery exhibition across town—and had her hair and makeup done specifically referencing Harding’s styling  at the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics, where a broken skate lace caused her to interrupt and dramatically postpone her performance. “The idea was to sculpt the three psychic traces of aging bodies, histories, and malls and create a perpetual image of mortality.

“Being intensely trained in a sport comes with the empowerment of specialized knowledge and a full understanding of how to cultivate long-term, sustained processes,” Ross-Ho responds to the question of what she carried into her artistic career from the one she had in the sport. “It is the process of learning how to build something. The experience of being an athlete taught me about having a ‘practice’ as an idea generally, which is a committed relationship based in a tradition but also about personal self-realization and an intense understanding of your body.”

Throughout the issue, our contributors contemplate spectacle, spectatorship, performance, and practice in their many manifestations.

writes about what happens when a sport contrives artistry to benefit the viewer.

On the pitch of the Premier League, as mediated by a screen in a pub, 

 the objective gaze of the Video Assistant Referee and what it takes away from the game.

a new book of photographs by Nick Karp documenting Game Changer Wrestling’s 2023 death match in Tokyo’s storied Korakuen Hall—and the lurid attraction of performed violence.

Finally, Cultural Counsel account executive and newly diehard basketball devotee 

Discovery

by affidavit

Summer 2024

Game Time