Steve Hamilton’s first-place Giants have just lost a game to the Cubs when Studs Terkel meets him at a Chicago hotel one evening in 1971. He’ll star in the seventh book of Working, Terkel's classic oral history subtitled “People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” in a cluster of interviews on “the sporting life.” A 37-year-old reliever on his fifth team, Hamilton speaks with a veteran’s disenchantment. Airplane travel only helps MLB stuff the schedule. Owners profess to act for the good of the game, but relocate teams to make a quick buck. The owners themselves are falling out of focus.
“The Yankees are CBS. The Giants are part of a land corporation. It’s impersonal,” Hamilton says. In the closing lines of the interview, his thoughts suddenly drift to a less-jaded place. “Recognition, fame—I think of all the time I stood outside my house in Charlestown, Indiana, a two-tone brick, and I threw a baseball where the different colors met. I hit it over and over and over again. We caught flies where it got too dark to see, just hours and hours and hours … that’s what most of us have done.”
On a family car trip between seasons, Georgia Cloepfil is asked to name the best feeling in the world, and she knows her answer instantly: scoring a goal. She can’t say much beyond that. The feeling eludes description. Abby Wambach, trying to access it in her memoir, wrote of a sensory “guillotine chop” the moment the ball hits the net. Wayne Rooney once likened it to coming up from underwater. “I worry that this severance is such an integral part of the experience that, each time I go to write about the joy of playing, I must be making it up,” Cloepfil writes.
Her new memoir, The Striker and the Clock, recounts the six years she spent playing professional soccer overseas. In 90-ish vignettes—the "-ish" because of halftime and stoppage time—Cloepfil circles this feeling, searching for its limits. The book’s as poetic as anything you’ll read on the early days of pro women’s soccer, on the joys and grim realities of an athlete’s life, on pain tolerance, on the art of sportswriting itself. I’m not so naive as to reduce all athletic careers to one battle between the corrosive force of capitalism and the pure feelings of goalscoring, or hucking a baseball where the two colors meet. But Cloepfil recognizes the apparent insensibility of these feelings just as well as she grasps their basic logic. Her writing helps readers understand why certain athletes, their brains and marriages falling apart, won't just retire.
For Cloepfil, unlike Tua Tagovailoa and Tom Brady, the feelings have never borne lucrative fruit, which is not to say they are any more sincere. “The life of a woman soccer player is scattered and obscure, a private endeavor experienced by only a handful of people at a time,” begins one vignette. I first encountered a version of these lines five years ago, in the magazine n+1, where portions of the book appeared as an essay. Until then, I had never seen the life of the woman athlete self-examined in writing. The subject fascinated me; it gave a number of labor fights in women’s sports their stakes. I was also at work on a story that required me to speak to retired women’s basketball players, and I heard them in Cloepfil’s writing. They had told me about coaches preying on players, about speaking unfamiliar languages in unfamiliar places. One described essentially a sting operation to get her first apartment from a racist landlord. “Women’s soccer is a lawless frontier,” Cloepfil writes, remembering a reneged-upon contract she signed in Australia. But the players I spoke with confessed that they had also traveled, found love, and felt the satisfaction of pursuit. They looked back on those years with an uneasy gratitude.
Dreams are like this—embarrassing to name, embarrassing to chase. I battled the shame of recognition while reading The Striker and the Clock because I do derive a sense of joy and gratitude from my work, a totally humiliating feeling made more humiliating by my employment at the QUIT YOUR JOB T-shirt factory. In one of the book’s last vignettes, when a motivational speaker tells Cloepfil’s assembled team to “remember that who you are is separate from what you do,” I think we’re meant to laugh.
All sports memoirs respond, whether directly or indirectly, to David Foster Wallace, the genre’s most famous critic. In “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” a review of the tennis player’s book, Wallace wrote that “blindness and dumbness” are not the price of an athlete’s gift, but its essence. The athlete autobiography thus inevitably disappoints. Cloepfil’s response is direct; she returns to his essay over and over in her book. “I want to believe that the internal life of an athlete can be complicated and verbose. I know my position is tenuous, often contradicted by the behavior of people whose lives revolve around sports,” she writes. “But I also believe that asking an athlete to speak on their performance after its conclusion is like asking the sculptor to play the piano about an exhibition. These are faulty grounds on which to judge either one.”
What Wallace sought from Austin was something more profound: an athlete confronting the chase for immortality, a chase threatened by the ironic “fragility and impermanence” of all competitive venues. Terkel, in his stunning introduction to Working, thought his subjects might be occupied by the same questions. When people Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Terkel wrote, they are talking about a “search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.”
This is not a wish Cloepfil shares or thinks to be true. Without some capital-L Legacy to mind, the kind built by Alex Morgan and revisited upon her retirement this month, she can be more clear-eyed. “But belief in immortality is only available to the spectator,” Cloepfil writes. “Halls of fame and records and medals and posters belong to fans. The job of an athlete is not to mythologize her own life. Instead she confronts mortality directly, unavoidably. The job of the athlete is to navigate unrelenting decay.” Perhaps this is why, for a memoir about playing on teams, her story can seem conspicuously lonely.
Cleopfil might instead subscribe to the first line of Terkel's introduction: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.” Her memoir, being about work, is a story of the violence a person will tolerate to chase a dream: the knee injections, the tight-fitting cleats, the contusions and concussions. “Sometimes I think of my body as an object; I think of all the things I have done to it,” she writes. Her grandfather, a neuroscientist, hoped she would stop playing. “But there is a difference between what our minds know and what our bodies compel us to do.”
Work’s rituals and indignities can seem especially silly when they are transposed outside a cubicle—say, to the soccer field. Hilary Leichter demonstrates this in her absurdist novel Temporary; one of the many temp assignments the protagonist takes is aboard a pirate ship. “Your résumé here says you can, quote, ‘totally handle seasickness,’” the first mate of human resources reminds her, disapprovingly, after she falls ill. The villains in women’s pro sports—bumbling federations, abusive coaches—so often engage in a familiar, unexceptional kind of villainy. The stories athletes tell in depositions, complaints, and memoirs are all stories you could hear in some form from Terkel’s waitress or the bank teller or the hospital aide or (my favorite) the nun-turned-organizer-turned-yogi who has been fired from 16 jobs. In every case, they have been made a little more vulnerable by their desires—to be liked, to be recognized, to be paid, to feel that feeling. Quit your job if you want to, but you might still crave it.
