The World Is A Ball

That’s what Plato says. For him the sphere is the most perfect form because it’s everywhere identical to itself and needs nothing. It requires no hands because there’s nothing out of it to grab. It has no use for legs because everywhere it could go is already within it. It doesn’t want eyes because there’s nothing to see out of it. Plato’s is an autistic world indeed.

It’s quite the contrary with balls, those paradigms, the favorite of children, so much that they keep us back in infancy, that golden age when everything is essential. Our first contact with perfection is the ball, which invites us to every probability. It’s the masterpiece of toys, from marbles to soccer balls. The balloon invites to every probability because its structure presages every possible path. The soccer ball is, then, the opposite of the Platonic world as long as it has nothing inside, except compressed air, a meager substance if we consider the increasingly unanimous attention it accumulates. See La vida es juego (‘life is a game’).

That portion of leather and wind causes stress, decisions of life or death, national euphoria or depression. Entire countries put their honor to roll upon them. And continents too, which is the reason why Venezuelans, as alien to soccer as they’re akin to baseball, uphold any South American team. The world is not inside the ball, as in the Platonic sphere, but it organizes itself around it. During the World Cup there’s no act that isn’t paced by the rhythm of the games and their results. For a country life comes to an end when its national team is eliminated from the competition; it loses for a while every sense of posterity. Or it invades all the future when it triumphs. It swings from glory to shame at every instant. The passion for soccer is manic-depressive. Life must begin again for every country, except for one — the winner. Sub-championship is worth nothing because nobody remembers runners-up. Baggio fails a penalty and his world falls apart, years of epic are stamped out, the country blames him of having failed the occasion in which it trusted him its entire history, since the War of the Gauls, including Dante and the Sistine Chapel. Imagine yourself there, before a prodigious goalie, with your national heroes, your Niagara Falls, your Tour Eiffel, your Beethoven, your Amazon river, all alone, depending on the disobedient rebounds of a leather bubble capable of all trajectories. You bet everything on a fine kick.

Twenty-two men dispute a balloon with a diameter of a few inches on which concentrate all the eyeballs in the world. There isn’t any press, Internet, television, radio, plaza, cafeteria or corridor that ignore the tiny sphere. Nobody works, or does it distracted by a globe obviously more important than any labor. Election campaigns stop, economic crises are postponed because everything must be decided in the minuscule geometry that redefines every symbolic topology.

How many sports are configured by the sphere? The scrupulous account has no importance. What’s crucial is that that form breeds many because it seduces with a fundamental wink that makes us run after it to dominate its slippery movement against other humans.

Those who manage to govern it will have the world at their feet.