My earliest memories of football are a bit fuzzy. Not so much because of the fallibility that comes with age, but rather, because the football was distorted from the start.
Back then, recording and watching a game after its debut was a more complicated process than setting your Tivo to record a season’s worth of games with a single press of a button. First, you had to find a video cassette with enough unused magnetic tape to record the whole of a game. The time-consuming process of rewinding a tape, previewing its content, and inevitably searching for another tape is an ordeal I wish on no one. Secondly, unless a football fan tended to his VCR long enough to press ‘Record’ just seconds before kick-off, they’d have to deal with the technical abyss that undermined setting a VCR to automatically record an event. With manuals that comically listed instructions solely in Japanese, the clock function was out of reach for most, while automatic recording was near-on impossible. Finally, a football fan had to pray that stoppage time was kept to a minimum, lest he wish to miss a portion of a game or record over a balmy Mediterranean vacation.
To paraphrase what my father said at the time, “It was a fucking disaster.”
With my family, things were a bit worse. I’ve never been sure of the exact circumstances, but somehow, my family came to enjoy the services of a VCR that didn’t record. Like Joey Barton without a mustache, there was something disquieting about the crippled machine. Sure, we could watch rental1 copies of Aladdin, but the VCR simply refused to live up to its name as a Video Cassette Recorder. We tried to fix it, honest, but a series of lost cassettes, service charges, and small fires eventually convinced us that we had to look elsewhere for a solution.
My father, the sensible man that he is, decided against taking the obvious step of investing in a new VCR. At the time, technology was still expensive, and besides, he said, we had something in the house that could do an adequate job: the trusted family camcorder. Just to be clear, the camcorder wasn’t of the petite, hand-held variety of the modern era. Rather, it was a monstrosity known to bruise shoulders and cause premature arthritis. For the next few years, we suffered the humility of placing a makeshift tripod with a mounted camcorder in the center of our living room and pressing record.
The quality was awful. Besides the occasional shadow caused by my mother passing in front of the camcorder, we also had to deal with colors bleeding into one another as well as indecipherable commentary. Regardless, I loved it.
In my eyes, the lack of of quality made the game all the more dramatic. Colors overwhelmed individual players, giving the appearance of 11 indistinguishable silhouettes per side. When a single player managed to do something so sublime so as to break through the fog, it was glorious. Charging runs from the back were accompanied by a supernatural glow. Laced-shots left a golden-hue in the ether. Desperate tackles upset the whole of the world, as blended shapes and colors made it impossible to tell who had gotten the worst of challenges.
The commentary was equally enchanting. The camcorder’s deficiencies turned monotonous talk into an unrelentingly hypnotic drone. Once drawn in, the lack of intelligible commentary required us to give our fullest attention to the action on the hyper-green pitch. Where announcers typically described players through inconsequential anecdotes, my father pointed out specific shadows on the pitch and explained their feats of greatness with a storyteller’s fervor. The reason we recorded games in the first place, my father never let his after-work exhaustion lessen his reverence for the game. Maradona’s impossible stroll through the English defense, the ease with which Socrates mocked opposition defenses, Hugo Sanchez’ audacious flips after slotting a shot home. My father made the players and teams and moments seem mythical; games seemed so fabulous that I occasionally wondered whether I was watching undecided match-ups, or a prepared stage show.
With time, my family eventually gave-in and purchased a functional VCR, and later, a Tivo. While the quality may be so superb that I can see individual blades of grass on the pitch, games lack a certain magic that was abound in my youth. Sure, I can make out specific players without too much squinting. And yes, the commentary sounds like words, rather than pulses. But sometimes technology can make things too clear, too definite.
Don’t get me wrong, football’s drama continues to fascinate me and draw me in, but I learned to love an ill-defined version of the game, and I pine for it.
Cassette Heroes
- Maxi Rodriguez
My earliest memories of football are a bit fuzzy. Not so much because of the fallibility that comes with age, but rather, because the football was distorted from the start.
Back then, recording and watching a game after its debut was a more complicated process than setting your Tivo to record a season’s worth of games with a single press of a button. First, you had to find a video cassette with enough unused magnetic tape to record the whole of a game. The time-consuming process of rewinding a tape, previewing its content, and inevitably searching for another tape is an ordeal I wish on no one. Secondly, unless a football fan tended to his VCR long enough to press ‘Record’ just seconds before kick-off, they’d have to deal with the technical abyss that undermined setting a VCR to automatically record an event. With manuals that comically listed instructions solely in Japanese, the clock function was out of reach for most, while automatic recording was near-on impossible. Finally, a football fan had to pray that stoppage time was kept to a minimum, lest he wish to miss a portion of a game or record over a balmy Mediterranean vacation.
To paraphrase what my father said at the time, “It was a fucking disaster.”
With my family, things were a bit worse. I’ve never been sure of the exact circumstances, but somehow, my family came to enjoy the services of a VCR that didn’t record. Like Joey Barton without a mustache, there was something disquieting about the crippled machine. Sure, we could watch rental1 copies of Aladdin, but the VCR simply refused to live up to its name as a Video Cassette Recorder. We tried to fix it, honest, but a series of lost cassettes, service charges, and small fires eventually convinced us that we had to look elsewhere for a solution.
My father, the sensible man that he is, decided against taking the obvious step of investing in a new VCR. At the time, technology was still expensive, and besides, he said, we had something in the house that could do an adequate job: the trusted family camcorder. Just to be clear, the camcorder wasn’t of the petite, hand-held variety of the modern era. Rather, it was a monstrosity known to bruise shoulders and cause premature arthritis. For the next few years, we suffered the humility of placing a makeshift tripod with a mounted camcorder in the center of our living room and pressing record.
The quality was awful. Besides the occasional shadow caused by my mother passing in front of the camcorder, we also had to deal with colors bleeding into one another as well as indecipherable commentary. Regardless, I loved it.
In my eyes, the lack of of quality made the game all the more dramatic. Colors overwhelmed individual players, giving the appearance of 11 indistinguishable silhouettes per side. When a single player managed to do something so sublime so as to break through the fog, it was glorious. Charging runs from the back were accompanied by a supernatural glow. Laced-shots left a golden-hue in the ether. Desperate tackles upset the whole of the world, as blended shapes and colors made it impossible to tell who had gotten the worst of challenges.
The commentary was equally enchanting. The camcorder’s deficiencies turned monotonous talk into an unrelentingly hypnotic drone. Once drawn in, the lack of intelligible commentary required us to give our fullest attention to the action on the hyper-green pitch. Where announcers typically described players through inconsequential anecdotes, my father pointed out specific shadows on the pitch and explained their feats of greatness with a storyteller’s fervor. The reason we recorded games in the first place, my father never let his after-work exhaustion lessen his reverence for the game. Maradona’s impossible stroll through the English defense, the ease with which Socrates mocked opposition defenses, Hugo Sanchez’ audacious flips after slotting a shot home. My father made the players and teams and moments seem mythical; games seemed so fabulous that I occasionally wondered whether I was watching undecided match-ups, or a prepared stage show.
With time, my family eventually gave-in and purchased a functional VCR, and later, a Tivo. While the quality may be so superb that I can see individual blades of grass on the pitch, games lack a certain magic that was abound in my youth. Sure, I can make out specific players without too much squinting. And yes, the commentary sounds like words, rather than pulses. But sometimes technology can make things too clear, too definite.
Don’t get me wrong, football’s drama continues to fascinate me and draw me in, but I learned to love an ill-defined version of the game, and I pine for it.