Urizen on the Hudson?
By Benj DeMott
“You’re a bad organizer!” That was the last insult thrown at me as seven or eight young adults took over the 101st soccer field in Riverside Park last Saturday, pushing out more than twenty teenagers who’d been in the midst of a hot game.
The grabby few claimed to have a permit that gave them the right to the field. (No-one actually produced said permit but…) Strangers to each other (and everyone else), they’d signed up online, paying some third party a fee that supposedly guaranteed they’d have the 101st field from 4:50(!) to 7:00 p.m. I asked them to respect the kids’ game, proposing they find another space on fields a few blocks up in the park or find a way to meld into the ongoing match.
I wasn’t being a city busy-body (or aping that fabled Irishman—“Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?”). While the game was its own thing—the kids were reffing themselves, etc.—my son was on the pitch and I’d put out the call that led some of those teens to show up ready to play.
It wasn’t my first time getting a soccer party started in the park. Six or seven years ago I began keeping an email list of potential players and putting word out there’d be games on summer weekends. What’s now a little tradition in Riverside Park began further uptown in Cherry Park where me and a friendly parent from my block used to play small-sided games with our sons. Neither of us were soccer aficionados but it soon became clear our boys would dig regular summer pick-up games pitched to their age group. (Kids who’ve joined us once school’s out tend to play in one of the city’s official youth soccer leagues during the spring and fall. Our games are much looser affairs but we’ve still attracted some pretty serious players looking for off-season touches.)
Turnout varies at our Saturday kick-arounds. (Not that #’s per side are the best way to judge the quality of the emprise.) Yet we’ve come to expect newbies and/or one-offs will turn up when regulars don’t show. My son has been out of town a few weekends during the past few summers but, if memory serves, there’s been only one dog of a Saturday when we tried to get a game on and got no action—can’t recall if that was due to rain or heat…
Our luck has held chiefly because Riverside Park is a mecca for soccer players in the city. It ain’t about me. And even if I’m not the worst organizer, I’m surely a poor one and that’s what mattered most last Saturday when I tried to convince those meet-up yups to give the kids a break. A couple of the twenty-somethings wavered for a minute, wondering if they should act like all-is-permitted pricks, but once it was established nobody in (or for) the kids’ game had paid to play, an ill logic kicked in. I’m flashing on the face of one of those conflicted fellows whose expression changed radically after the subject of money came up. His bottom-line look—a sort of faux-aha! phizog—reminds me of Simone Weil’s insight: “Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate… It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.”
Weil’s distrust of deracinating dollarism anticipated the case for “commons” made by radical historians like Peter Linebaugh[1] whose new book, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, maps resistance to capitalism mounted on both sides of the Atlantic by contemporaries of William Blake (whom Linebaugh leaned on for his title). Linebaugh and other scholars have upheld a template for contemporary class struggles that dates back to the time of enclosures in Britain and Ireland—when money-men snagged fields and woods once held in common, turning those lands into private property (and devastating rural cultures).
Testaments to commons seemed right on time after I ran into those rentiers who hogged a public park like it was their private playground. I’m recalling just now how one interloper, who looked a little like a shrunken Conan—the comic, not the Barbarian—insisted top-down time/space management was necessary since “1.3 million people” live in Manhattan. In this millennial’s mind (made up in some suburban equivalent of Blake’s Urizen?), squeezing us out was all about efficiency not rapacity. He didn’t seem to notice his almost all-white group looked paler than the city, though his in-crowd of strangers may be the color of Manhattan to come.
But perhaps I’m being too doomy. Last Saturday’s bully moves didn’t faze our players who marched to another spot in the park and kept the ball rolling into the evening. Still, tiffs with Conan et al. seem inevitable if they mean to snatch the 101st field every weekend. Our run is only one of a number of pick-up games that flourish in Riverside Park. Down the line, it seems likely dollars and permits will put those games at risk. There may be no place for oases of multiracial, multicultural and multilingual play in a blander, managed Manhattan.
Note
1 Peter Linebaugh steered me to the thinker who helped me grasp how teams of underdogs sublated ruling ideas on Atlantic playing fields. Back in the late 70s, Linebaugh advised me to read C.L.R. James whom I’d never heard of. I soon came across Beyond a Boundary—James’ ode to Cricket where he tells how his sense of life was enhanced by the presence of one Mathew Bondsman who lived next door when James was growing up in Trinidad. Bondsman was said to be “good for nothing but Cricket”—he refused to take a job, declined to bathe, talked dirty, walked barefoot but “with bat in hand was all grace and style.” James’ youthful wonder at Bondsman’s way in the world suggests he was born to challenge all those who assume labor is the means to self-realization. His/Bondsman’s alt life lessons were probably in the back of my mind when I began trying to get our summer soccer games going. James taught me to take the search for fun seriously if not solemnly. Maybe I’ve passed that lesson on…
Free Kicks vs. Pay to Play
By Ben Khadim DeMott
Summer weekend in Riverside Park, the breeze coming in from the Hudson, the sun eased by the full trees arching above, and a soccer ball darting across a field. Sometimes gently caressed by the feet of the players, sometimes forced up in the air and sometimes played on the ground. The game mixes teen players, younger kids, with a couple adults. It’s fierce. Flying tackles and powerful shots rule. But just as everyone is feeling the flow, as positions are settling and the right footed players are moving to the left wing, it’s interrupted.
Riverside Park is home to the NYC soccer scene. Players from across the city, country and world race down to the soccer fields on 108th, 103rd, and 101st Streets. During the summer, once the midday heat passes, the fields are almost always full of futbolistas. Players are quick to make teams, normally shirts and skins, and within minutes a game has begun.
Each match at Riverside is different. There are pickup games where most participants don’t know each other. These games normally happen at 108th. At 103rd the best and bravest players go at it. Older teens, college-age athletes and middle aged vets compete hard in this game. At 101st, a group of much older folks gather on weekend evenings. This game is organized by the notorious Jerry, who sends out detailed email notices memorializing each weekend’s games. Jerry can be a curmudgeon, but all these games are open to all. You don’t even have to speak the language.
A flurry of different ones can be heard during games. From “andale” and “aqui” to “allez” and “pasar,” the advice from teammates is rarely in English. When foreigners join games, they tend to try to communicate in English at first but eventually return to the comfort of first languages. Tourists and emigres change up games and playing styles. Belgians speaking French, German, and Dutch all at once; Brazilians, dribbling so much it’s hard to tell they’re on a team; or Brits whose harsh accents (and harsh tackles) amp up competitiveness.
On the weekend the best pickup games normally last until the sun has set and the fireflies take to the field. But too often, pickup on the various fields is shutdown early. Groups of players, made up of either the unskilled and inexperienced, or older guys long past their prime, buy up permits for whole fields. These groups exclude much larger sets of players and quash better games. The players with permits/dollars push out younger people who can’t afford to pay for fields and take a less formal (though not less serious) approach to their sport. Pay to play ruins more organic, spontaneous games.
NYC Parks should serve as places that are free from New York’s obsession with money. Ads seem to define every street (and every MTA bus or train station). Money makes the city a tease and exclusory at the same time. Except in the parks where there are open fields, gardens, reservoirs, and pathways through woods—places where people aren’t defined by their bank accounts. When money comes into a natural environment (even if the fields are astro turf) things get bent.
Just last week the Times reported on “the gentrification of the interior west” where new billionaires have bought grand swatches of Idaho and Colorado, Montana and New Mexico. They’ve enclosed roads and lands there that had once been open to the public (though one pair of new landowners, the Wilkes brothers, have offered to let neighbors pass through their property if they’ll confirm they read the right reactionary websites).
My local experiences of “enclosure” on the Upper West Side seem paltry compared to what’s going on out West, but it’s clear that public space is under attack in New York too. I don’t have a clue about how to stop massive land grabs in the West, but fighting for a ban on privatizing soccer fields in Riverside Park should be doable.