I've posted often enough on the folly and the philistinism of those who look down, yea snootily even, on sport and all of us millions who get pleasure from it that you'll be able to understand why I can appreciate someone looking so far in the opposite direction - that is, upwards - that he can say this:
The Italian novelist Umberto Eco apparently suffered a crisis of faith while watching a soccer match with his father when he was 13 years old. Surrounded by thousands of passionate fans who were living and dying with their team, all that Eco observed on the field were "senseless movements" of the players that added up to nothing. It was a "cosmic, meaningless performance," he determined. This childhood experience forever linked soccer, in his mind, to the vanity of all earthly things. But he might have thought otherwise had FC Barcelona's Lionel Messi been on that field.
I have seen Messi play at Camp Nou, Futbol Club Barcelona's 100,000-seat stadium, which is again drawing packed crowds as the new season commences in Spain. Seeing what the diminutive Messi does with a ball while opponents hang onto him, beat him and kick him in their futile defensive tactics makes me believe that there is a beneficent God, and that every 15 years or so he places a sublime soccer player among us to ease our worldly pain and to remind us what beauty is. Pele, George Best, Maradona, Zidane and now Messi.
.....
He seems to defy the limits imposed on us by physics. He runs faster dribbling the ball than running without it. The ball seems to stick to his feet by some magnetic force. And he sees movements and possibilities on the field that render fans mute.
Even so, though I share something of the same impulse, I am bound to declare: steady on. Seeing Lionel Messi as evidence for a beneficent God isn't quite going to work, is it? If those vast evils of the world in which humankind is implicated aren't evidence against the very same thing, it's hard to see why Messi should count in its favour; especially if we consider the argument that evil is to be put down to the gift of human freedom. If evil, why not Messi also? But then maybe I'm taking this all too seriously.
