Sensible World of Soccer
“That new robot is great, huh? Sure made me look like a pile of crap!” -Futurama
I think that I am one of the cleverest and most well-read people around. You’ve probably noticed that I think this. It’s not difficult to think you are, or even to be, the smartest show in town when to be high-brow, as this world goes, is merely to know the names of the books you ought to have read. (Meooow! -Ed) It is not hard to spread and smear even a little learning, like jam, over the bready whiteness of one’s reputation. And people believe it because they are not interested enough to disbelieve it. So, there is my character in this piece; smug and smart and ever-so-pretty, accomplished like an Austen heroine. Enter stage left! A villainous, moustachioed, aristocratic foreigner; as per usual.
This one in question was an English teacher down doing a couple of months of supply work inbetween terms at his public school. Having immediately alienated himself from the sympathies of the school staff by being too clever by half, he flatteringly fixated on me as the only worthy recipient for his two months of erudite conversation and private tuition, two months during which I had my ass handed to me on a semi-daily basis.
I once played Jonathon Power, then the world number one, at squash. He did not try very hard, let me keep up a rally or two, even gave me a point, but still made me acutely aware of being stretched to the very limits of my abilities and found wanting. It was not like that with this teacher. I would still be reaching for the rabbit in my magic hat when he would blindside me with an author I’d never read, deflect my feeble ripostes with the Last Word on Orwell or G.M. Hopkins, and then, oh my, then the gloves were off! What followed was like a bugged and broken version of Mortal Kombat, an unbreakable, neverending combo of multi-hit Fatalities during which my only avenue for intercession was in deciding whether to come down face-first or arse-first on being sent spinning up into the air again. I remember the exact moment when my mind’s referee stepped in to call it off, the unanswerable observation that the best storyteller in any language was Isaac Bashevis Singer causing me to sink to my knees like a vanquished video game character with a despairing croak of “Oh no.” Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Lessons learned. Humility, acceptance, healthy handling of self-doubt, and one other. In all the time that we were talking, no-one ever seemed to realise, looking on, that I was being beaten like a bad dog, BAD dog! with a rolled-up newspaper. All suggestion was to the sincere effect that that sure was some high-falutin’ dialoguin’ going on there; and over time I realised that to the bystander, the eavesdropper, the pay-per-view crowd eagerly tuning in, there was no meaningful distinction to be made between what I was saying and what was being said to me; it was all like some supremely complicated finishing move from the WWE which is so intricate that you can’t tell who exactly is doing what to whom, only that it looks impressive and Jim Ross just shouted “Ooh, that’s GOTTA hurt!” So there it was. Not only had I been comprehensively pasted in my preferred field of human endeavour, but I had also discovered that most people were so monumentally uninterested in said field that they didn’t even realise I had taken said pasting. Much soul-searching.
The only thing I have ever been good enough at to be really good at -I mean, world championship good, if people had cared enough about it- was Sensible World of Soccer. What vast swathes of my adolescence were spent slicing open opposition defences with shuriken-sharp little passing triangles whilst listening to Sportsound on the radio! Elton John and The Who should’ve sung a song about me, I was that good. But no-one cared. The sad fact is that other peoples’ superiority tends not to be a source of inspiration but rather of helplessness and resignation. I do not understand at all how all those guys are better than me at the guitar, or painting, or Halo 3, so I don’t want to do any of those things anymore. And so, day by day, fewer and fewer people wanted to play Sensible World of Soccer until there was me, only me, champion in a world devoid of challengers.
Devoid of challengers. My heart is heavy that the only way I can think of empathising with people who are good at something is by recollecting my prowess at an old computer game. But at least, in the end, I can, y’know, I see what it must be like to travel eternally in search of someone who has sense enough just to recognise the incarnation, let alone to be a worthy adversary for it. No-one was ever worth my playing them at SWOS; yet I was always scared that someone would be. The twin horns, in short, of Life’s central and most vexing dilemma:
1) What if I never meet anyone good enough for me?
2) What if I do?