Richard II and Andrés Escobar

            In 1994, the US defeated Colombia 2-1, the first World Cup win for the US in 44 years. It helped the US to a glorious second round appearance in the first World Cup held on American soil.

            It was a marvelous victory. I was 16 when that game was played, and my soccer mania was at its apex. That day I had played soccer all afternoon at a camp run by a group of British players who were on the UW Green Bay Soccer team. And my dad and I were running clinics at elementary schools teaching basic soccer skills to kids aged 5-8 every morning, because we believed that American soccer could be better and we were doing everything we could to contribute. The next year Major League Soccer was launched in the US and expectations and execution by the men’s national soccer team has been on the rise ever since.

One of the goals in that match was an own goal accidentally knocked in by Andrés Escobar who was brutally murdered in Medellin after Colombia were eliminated in the first round, thanks to their loss to the US. Pele had previously predicted Colombia would win the entire tournament.

 

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe

That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow. (5:6)

 

            In Richard II the King of England is deposed and murdered and there are 8 plays which chronicle the fallout of this deed.

            Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) suspects that King Richard II was involved in the murder of his uncle, and he wants to get to the bottom of it. The play opens on his conflict with another nobleman, whom he accuses of being involved in the plot as well. The King – perhaps out of guilt – prevents these two nobles from satisfying their honor and dueling it out. Instead he banishes them.

            Bolingbroke’s father dies and predicts a lot of bad things in Richard’s future, and so Richard takes all of his property (which should pass to his banished son) and uses it to fund a war in Ireland. Richard is a terrible king, he is extravagant and wasteful and no one really likes him, but he’s the king, so what are you gonna do? Well, if you’re Bolingbroke, you raise an army and come back to England, and demand that he return your property and title and lift your banishment. And then you force him to abdicate the crown and you quietly have him murdered so that you can be king.

            Richard is put in a tough spot when he hears that Bolingbroke has returned with a big army, but his spinelessness is only matched by his eloquence when he turns on the pessimism:

 

No matter where – of comfort no man speak.

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. (3:2)

 

            But even though Richard sucks and no one is going to be sad that he’s no longer king, everyone seems to know that a king is anointed by God and deposing one treacherously is going to invite some divine reckoning. The Bishop of Carlisle prophesies:

 

The blood of English shall manure the ground,

And future ages groan for this foul act,

Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,

And, in this seat of peace, tumultuous wars

Shall kin with kin, and kind with kind, confound. (4:1)

 

            This proves true as there is civil unrest for the next many generations. Fathers fight against sons, sons against fathers and brother betrays brother one after another. King Richard himself warns Bolingbroke that he’s inviting bad times on England:

 

And though you think that all, as you have done,

Have torn their souls by turning them from us,

And we are barren and bereft of friends,

Yet know my master, God omnipotent,

Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf

Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike

Your children yet unborn and unbegot,

That lift your vassal hands against my head,

And threat the glory of my precious crown. (3:3)

 

            But Bolingbroke goes ahead, has the king and his advisers killed and starts the snowball rolling. At the very end of the play he expresses some regret:

 

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe

That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow. (5:6)

 

            Is he really full of woe? Probably. Every one wants to win honestly and to achieve a greatness that they deserve, but most of us will take victory however we can get it, which is dangerous.

            The universe finds a way to balance itself. And retributive discord is the weight of celestial choice.

The day Andrés Escobar was killed my family and I were going to Chicago to see the second round match between Germany and Belgium at Soldier’s Field when the news came over the radio.

There was a moment of silence before the game began, and later in the day my dad asked me: “If you could change it, so that the US loses that game, and Escobar doesn’t get shot, would you?” It seemed like a terribly unfair question, but I thought about it, and before I could answer, he said, “You shouldn’t have to think about it.”

            I used to have a T-shirt with a quote from Bill Shankly, a famous British Football manager that said: “Soccer isn’t a matter of life or death, it’s much more important than that.” Soccer players often say that a big game is a kind of war, and if they’re American they’re dutifully reprimanded for the insulting comparison. In other countries they’re more understanding of the extreme simile.

            We didn’t kill Andrés Escobar. I don’t think American soccer is under a curse or part of some cosmic balancing act as a result of what happened to him the way the usurping House of Lancaster is in the Shakespearean histories. So is it wrong to think that when the US does lose games that other innocent lives are saved? In the next World Cup we lost to Iran 2-1 in a brutal game in France. What might have happened if the result had gone the other way? Impossible to know.

A goal was stolen from us by bad officiating when we played Slovenia, but Slovenia is a tiny country. The repercussions of soccer victories there could be life-changing, nation-saving. If Colombia had won the World Cup in 1994, what could it have meant to the citizens of that troubled nation?

            Didier Drogba of the Ivory Coast, became the first African player to ever score a goal against Brazil in the World Cup yesterday. He is playing with a broken arm. It is said that he once prevented civil war in Ivory Coast by asking that an important match be played in the north, even though he is from the south of Ivory Coast. It is likely that he will one day run for president of his country much like George Weah of Liberia, 1995 World Footballer of the Year.

            Soccer is an important force in the world. At 16 I may have been reluctant to surrender the memory of Tab Ramos and Tom Dooley racing around the Rose Bowl with American flags draped over their shoulders for anything, even the life of someone I never met. But my dad helped me put that into perspective.

There are more important things than being kings of world soccer. If someone had taught Bolingbroke a parallel lesson, maybe England would have avoided a great bloody brouhaha for 86 years.

I guess no matter how hard we try, men have a tendency to take some things way too seriously.  

Andrés Escobar

2000: The Christmas of Our Discontent

My first full-time job after I graduated college was as a third shift security guard at Kenosha Memorial Hospital. Job responsibilities included monitoring the ER, ushering newly-deceased bodies to the morgue, and securing leather restraints on combative patients.

When you work third shift you feel like an incredibly boring vampire. There were days when I would go to sleep in the morning and not wake up until 9pm. Seasonal Affective Disorder in the house.

We had some serious characters come into that ER. One morning a drunk woman crashed her car into a public school and was brought in crying for shame, thinking she had hurt some children and that it was her son's school. She was too hysterical to hear us repeatedly tell her that it was Sunday and the only thing she’d hurt was her ‘85 AMC Eagle.

One night there was a head-on collision. In one car there were three illegal immigrants hopped up on coke and in the other car – I swear this is true – a neo-nazi and his girlfriend. He was covered in swastika tattoos and he was the only one involved in the crash without a scratch on him.

But Christmas Eve was the worst.

I have a large family and between divorces and other sporadic dramas, we're sometimes required to attend five separate Christmas celebrations. So that year, I went straight from the Christmas party with my extended family at the Grandpa Llanas house to work and then it was on to my mom’s right afterward for a quiet Christmas morning with my brother and sisters.

I was running on 2 hours of sleep in 32 hours when at around 3 AM Christmas morning a drunk woman came in to the ER. She’d fallen off her bartstool repeatedly in one of Kenosha’s hundreds of bars, so they called an ambulance for her, and she was pissed. We strapped her wrists and legs to the cart to stop her from punching the doctor, and then took turns standing guard over her. Here's a small sampling of the pleasantries that came out of her mouth for the next four hours:

“You f*%#$*g nerd, I know you want to f*@# me, you virgin c*#$%*@*ing f#*#%t.”

Her mascara and eyeliner were smeared into glops and blurs, but they seemed poorly applied in the first place, almost like stage make-up. I tried to imagine what kind of mood she had been in when she’d made herself up the night before. What did she think was going to happen when she got ready to get sloshed on Christmas Eve? Was it her plan to wreak havoc on the lives of innocent hospital security guards?

Maybe she meant to be a villain.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (1:1)

Richard III is a villain. Exhausted by the frivolities that his recently elevated brother enjoys as King Edward IV. Richard opens the play with the infamous declaration: “Now is the winter of our discontent” (1:1) and then lays bear his grievances. He’s a hunchback and ugly and everyone else has got lovers with which to frolic except for him. So to pass the time he's going to get his brothers to kill one another so that he can be king.

What’s amazing is that he talks like this about himself:

But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; (1:1)

As if he has no skills with the ladies. But in the very next scene he manages to win over the Lady Anne with nothing more than pretty words.

Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep

To undertake the death of all the world,

So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom. (1:2)

In Henry VI part 3, Richard kills Anne’s husband the Prince Edward. And then kills Henry VI, her father-in-law. But he tells her if she can’t forgive him that she should stab him in the chest. She presses the sword to his skin.

Nay, do not pause: for I did kill King Henry –

But ‘twas thy beauty that provoked me.

Nay now dispatch: ‘twas I that stabb’d young Edward –

But ‘twas thy heavenly face that set me on. (1:2)

She drops the sword and marries him.

Richard can spit some mad game. If he dedicated himself to amorous endeavors instead of bloody thoughts, things might have worked out for the house of York. A major misallocation of skills on his part. Overlooked talents.

The Tudors eventually emerge as the power in England, and as the victors they write the history. It’s widely believed that they slandered Richard’s character and that they were the ones who generated the image of him being a hunchback and a machievel. Portraits of Richard III were actually altered to make him seem ugly (one eye narrowed and his shoulder raised). 

Shakespeare based his character of Richard on the Tudor account, but it’s almost more interesting to think of him as being an attractive young man, a normal guy who just suffers from terribly low self-esteem. He thinks he’s deformed and inadequate, like the 40 Year-Old Virgin. He doesn’t know what he’s capable of until he applies himself. If only someone had kicked him in the ass before he started down the path to the dark side.

After I left the hospital that Christmas morning I stopped for a moment at Simmon’s Island. Lake Michigan was frozen and glazed with powdery snow. I walked out a little ways onto the ice. Never in my life have I trusted ice. Every year in Wisconsin or Minnesota someone falls through on some lake or river and drowns in freezing agony. And Lake Michigan is a wild body of water with a will of its own. When I was young its undertow regularly pulled unsuspecting kids out to sea in the summer months, leaving abandoned Huffy bikes on the shore near Pike's Creek like so much well-preserved flotsam. But still I walked out to what I deemed the precipice of security and stared at the sunrise.

Richard III's villainy may have been cosmically necessary. The houses of Lancaster and York feuded and killed one another for decades. It began with the unnatural murder of a king, and the imbalance in the universe (the winter of discontent) had to be righted. Richard was the final balancing factor. He finished off his traitorous, usurping bloodline by being traitorous and usurping, making way for the better men of the House of Tudor to rule over more peaceful days.

Villains emerge to kick us in the ass, to call into action the better angels of our nature. When we know what must be done, but are unable to progress, they secede, they rebel, they terrorize. They drive us out onto the thin ice, farther over the freezing water than we ever thought we should go. Because it's only there -- on the very edge of safety -- when all things are at risk, that we can see the empty dangers of the future. And we know that it's time to quit our crappy security job and write a damn play. 

Cause there's always going to be a drunken Tudor slut falling off a barstool who shows up to hurl insults at you. So you might as well let her insult something you're proud of, otherwise what the hell's the point of being out on the thin ice anyway?