"Lucky To Be Here" by Georgia Cloepfil
Winner of the 2020 Breakout Writers Prize, Georgia Cloepfil’s “Lucky To Be Here” was published in our Winter 2020 issue. Her nonfiction debut, The Striker and the Clock, is forthcoming from Riverhead (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.).
In soccer, each position on the field is represented by a number. Ten for the attacking center mid, two for the center-back, nine for the striker. I wore the number on my back that coincided with my position on the field: seven, right wing. Seven is a prime number. Seven means the creation of all things. Seven is the union of the physical world (four) with the spiritual (three). There are seven oceans, seven continents, seven vertebrae in your neck. 777. Seven is a lucky number.
I wrote it at the start of emails to coaches, agents, friends, my parents. I practiced saying it to myself: I feel so lucky to have this opportunity.
To get a job overseas, a player signs a contract during either the summer or winter transfer window. One year an agent called when I was sitting on my bed at home. One year an agent called when I was at my temp job. An agent called when I was grocery shopping with my mom, when I was on a walk with my boyfriend. Opportunities came and went during these month-long periods as teams built their rosters. Often the window between signing a contract and leaving the country was only a couple of days. Hesitate, and the window would close.
Over the years, I became well practiced in the art of almost being somewhere, skilled at establishing a home in a short amount of time. I’d unpack in a hurry once I arrived in a new place. The rentals in which we were housed were sparsely furnished. There was always an IKEA coffee table and rug, a TV, a coffee maker. I came to know the few things that would make me feel more at home and, even if I was only going to live there for three months, I’d seek them out in my first week. A vase for flowers, a white comforter for my bed, a painting to hang on my wall. Each time I left I’d pack in my suitcase ground coffee, ten books, and three photographs: the Pacific Ocean, boyfriend, façade of my childhood home.
My first contract was in Australia where I lived in a shotgun house with a roommate from Sydney. In Lithuania I had a room to myself in a three-bedroom apartment. I lived with two teammates above an old couple who always offered us coffee, and sometimes alcohol, before our games. In Sweden I shared a two-bedroom with an American teammate. We played soccer with the refugees who lived with us in the housing development and they showed us where to pick blueberries in the surrounding forest. In Korea I lived with a roommate in a dorm on a manmade island in the Yellow Sea. When my roommate went home on weekends or days off, I opened all the windows and watched the tide recede quickly and dramatically, leaving boats stranded and large cargo ships stuck in the mud. From my room I could see their owners disembark and scour the ocean bottom for clams.
Sometimes I thought, This must be the easiest job in the world. It was so easy to get paid to run around, to kick a ball, to do something I loved. It was easy to travel for free, to wear a uniform every day (red top blue bottoms on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, navy top with black shorts on Tuesday, Thursday), to take extra naps. It was easy to tell people I play professional soccer the way it might be easy to tell people I am chasing my dreams, though I never said that because I couldn’t have been sure what it meant. It was easy to imagine doing this for one more year, one more year again, and then another. It was easy to motivate myself to train every day, even when I was tired or lonely, feet sore, turf burns on my knees. It was easy to hit the floor in the morning and, after a quick stretch, remind myself of my good fortune.
Fortuna, the goddess of fortune and personification of luck, is often depicted as blind or veiled. She is friend to randomness and fate. She tips the scales toward success or casts a shadow of tribulation. Sometimes she is painted as a ship’s rudder: she could go either way. She embodies the idea that we have no control over where we go, a truth that athletes try their best to combat with training, coaching, repetition.
Desire changed shape. Some days I wanted to be on the national team. Some days I was set on playing in Germany or Norway. Other times I just wanted play on a top team, no matter where it was. Some days I was satisfied to play anywhere, happy to love it still, happy that my body still worked the way it did. It was impossible to define success cleanly, impossible for success to mean the same thing to more than one person, or even to mean the same thing to me over time. The dream was shapeshifting. It was elusive and tricky. I followed it tirelessly. You can always get better. You can always improve, until you can’t anymore.
Sometimes I thought, This must be the hardest job in the world. It was hard to pack my bags at a moment’s notice, hard to quit without warning. It was hard to leave family, leave my boyfriend, leave team after team in the pursuit of better ones. Hard to handle bad agents, bad coaches, bad games. Hard to get out of slumps, to believe any of it mattered. It was hard to care about passing the ball with myself at 6 AM before work. Language barriers were hard, injuries were hard. It was hard to meet the eyes of people who said they were surprised I was still playing, hard to say my own age aloud to myself, 25, 26, 27. Hard to imagine who I would be when it was over.
In Australia I binge-watched Top Chef in bed between morning training and afternoon weightlifting. In one episode, the contestants are in tears talking about their late mentor, who continued to work in the kitchen even as ALS took over his body. They talk about how he showed up in the restaurant for pre-meal tastings though he could no longer lift a fork. He worked until he died. Their tears looked to me like ones of admiration, inspiration, aspiration. They would like to think they’d do the same.
In Sweden my roommate and I watched a documentary about a blind man who spent 21 days kayaking the Grand Canyon. He wakes up each morning to the roar of whitewater that he (with the help of guides) will have to navigate blindly. He never smiles when the camera is focused on him. Instead he is frozen in seriousness and seems to be in a constant state of panic. He explains that he hates when people tell him, Anything is possible. Barriers are real, he says to the camera. They are solid things, and they hurt. Still, in the end he climbs back up the riverside to float again down a rapid that had bested him, just so he can say he really did the whole thing.
In Lithuania I read Andre Agassi’s memoir Open. In the opening chapter he writes: Please let this be over. Then: I'm not ready for it to be over.
I kept a mental list of things that I would do when I finished playing soccer. Start long distance running, prioritize writing, tend to a garden, take cello lessons, cut my hair short and not worry about it fitting into a ponytail. I wondered what my body would feel like when it was all over. Everything that had given meaning to my life was hidden in my body.
At the end of each season I wondered if I would ever put on a jersey again. It was exhausting to live in such close proximity to the end of something, to have such familiarity with finality. The voice in my head—What else? What next?—increased in volume and frequency as time passed. A dream burdened by the knowledge of its own end: can we still call it a dream? Like all but a few, I would not have the luxury of a lucrative career in soccer.
My perpetually long-distance boyfriend, who had also been a college athlete, liked to remind me of an NCAA commercial: photos of students in lab coats, at long meeting tables, on farms. 98 percent of college athletes will go pro in something other than sports. I thought of the message written on the final page of my first high school English essay, handed back to me the day after I missed a penalty kick in the state championship: A girl who can write like this ought not to worry about goal-kicks.
I spent one night cyber-stalking athletes I had played with in college, trying to figure out where they ended up. I wondered how their presence on the field translated to their new lives, if they’d learned to utilize or to suppress this part of themselves, or if their soccer-selves were just gone, having disappeared after enough time passed. Lena, the mother of my high school team, who’d always had extra pre-wrap and a kind word, was going to be assistant director at a summer camp in her hometown. DB, who towered over everyone and always found herself in the right place to score goals, was a forecast analyst at a big company. Jade, the fiercest defender I knew, loud, powerful, and unforgiving on the field, was pregnant and getting married. She’d bought a house in the suburbs of Philadelphia.
Me, I kept two resumes, one for soccer and one for real work—that is, what I did when I was not playing, the jobs I looked for in moments of uncertainty and pause during my soccer career. Once, between seasons, my cousin offered to get me an interview at the company where he worked. When I followed up, he sent me a message asking me to change one thing: Can you move the soccer thing to the very top of your resume? They really like hiring athletes. I wondered what they thought they would get for certain if they hired an athlete, what they would get if there hired me. Competitive, hard-working, willing to sacrifice almost anything for abstract rewards. I wanted to tell him, I am not like most athletes. But I was not sure this was true. I took his advice, padded my resume with more soccer accolades, merged the two documents, and was offered the job.
When I came home from Sweden, I got a temp job four blocks from my house at the American Swedish Museum, putting stickers on all of the Christmas merchandise. I stood hunched over a wide table, timing myself, becoming more efficient at peeling, placing, sticking, peeling, placing, sticking, for 8 hours each day. I developed pain in my legs and back and they offered me a chair, but I knew I would be slower if I sat, so I declined. I worked up a sweat in the basement room. It was pathological.
There is no money in women’s sports, I told myself. There is no future. I should get a real job, make more money. I should settle down somewhere. I should move closer to my family. I should spare my body. I shouldn’t take soccer so seriously. I should acknowledge that I have wasted time.
I quit the temp job when I was invited to join a team in Seattle for preseason. A month later, in a meeting with the coach in his basement office in Memorial Stadium, I was cut from the roster. The field was ancient, its facilities crumbling. The walls exposed plumbing and cement. My laundry was still in the wash and I could hear the machines rumbling in the room next door. That is how quickly things come and go. My uniform from the previous night’s game was still mixed in with those of the rest of the team. I walked stunned into the laundry room and watched the mud-stained clothes slop in circles around and around. The kit manager waved as he left for lunch, said he’d see me tomorrow. I nodded my head even though I knew I would probably never see him again. I watched the laundry going around, said goodbye to my sports bra and socks. I grabbed my backpack and left without the rest. There was no reason to wait, and I did not want to interrupt.
This is all part of your journey, my trainer texted me after he heard the news. Let me know when you are ready to work on what’s next. I wondered where he thought I was going. If he knew, I wished he would just tell me.
It is the athlete’s prerogative to turn suffering into gold. To carry stories with her about coming up against obstructions, overcoming them, and being stronger for it. We are all on a journey. When something changes, it is a new chapter or a new beginning. A career has the arc of a story. An entire life nests in the arc.
In 2010 LeBron James left his home state of Ohio to play in Miami, Florida. In a letter to Sports Illustrated when he left he wrote that he was on a mission. Eventually, he came back to Ohio. I always believed that I’d return to Cleveland and finish my career there, he said. His story, like so many about athletes, is a Hero’s Journey. Invoking Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, James detailed to his fans the rites of separation, initiation, and return that Campbell wrote of in The Hero with A Thousand Faces. It was the kind of narrative that calls to mind Icarus, Achilles, ancient stories of failure, glory, and, ultimately, triumph. Campbell, incidentally, was also an athlete, an elite runner. For a time, he was one of the fastest half-mile runners in the world.
In a disappointed review of tennis player Tracy Austin’s autobiography Beyond Center Court, David Foster Wallace wrote that the book should have been about both the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality. But obsession with immortality is a spectator’s game. Halls of fame and records and medals and posters belong to fans. The job of the athlete is not to mythologize her own life. The job of the athlete is to navigate decay.
I met with a sports medicine doctor about some torn cartilage in my knee. I told him that I had to play the next week, that I just needed the pain to subside for a few months. Syringe in hand, the doctor asked, Do you want to be able to crouch down, to be able to pick up your grandchildren? I shook my head, said, No, told him, I don’t care. At the same time, I must have been thinking Yes, yes, yes. I do. He gave me what I asked for.
Sometimes the hero ascendant is not enough for the fan, either. In an article for the New York Times, Sam Anderson wrote about watching and re-watching videos of horrendous sports injuries. He described the fan as someone who wants to travel to distant realms of exhaustion, urgency, terror and joy that they themself cannot access. In this way, athletes are experiential astronauts. Kevin Durant’s Achilles, Gordon Hayward’s broken leg, Kurt Zouma’s ACL tear. There are compilation videos online: Worst Sports Injuries 2018-2019, Most Devastating Injuries of All Time. The videos have millions of views. Anderson’s theory about the sports fan’s fascination with these images, enjoyment of them, is that a spectator wants to see the athlete come into contact with the real. They want to know that the high drama of sport—that spectacle of humans going right up to the edge of possibility—is not just a meaningless distraction. It has physical stakes, it has consequences.
When I was offered the contract in Norway, it was to take the place of a teammate who had torn her ACL and would have to miss the rest of the season. Her name was Freja and she became a close friend. A week after we met, we went on a long hike together. She hadn’t had surgery yet, so she could still walk. By the time we got to the peak she was talking to me about the decisions that lay ahead of her: surgery, rehab, travel, recovery. We sat on a rock that looked out over Bergen. As we talked about her options, she massaged her knee. The city was green and compact and mingled with pockets of ocean. Norway was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. Finally, she said aloud what we both already knew: If I hadn’t gotten injured, you wouldn’t be here. Our opportunities so often come at someone else’s expense. Our fortunes are balanced on a weighted scale.
I had waited a long time to feel professional enough. In Norway I was playing in a top league. My teammates and I had the accommodations we needed. I had a contributing role on the team. We got paid on time, were flown on planes to our games, had lockers in our locker rooms where our jerseys were hung, our names etched onto plaques. Someone did our laundry for us; someone always refilled the snacks. I took a picture each time I saw my carefully folded pile of uniforms in the locker room before a game. The feeling that I would need proof, the feeling that it would all go away.
My dad watched my last ever professional game in Oslo. I limped through the first sixty minutes, slowly tearing a hamstring. Each sprint was increasingly excruciating. Each time I readied to run I told myself that I’d have no use for my body after this. I wanted to use it all up. By the sixtieth minute I was done. I waved up at him near the stadium’s heights as I limped off and took a seat on the bench. I still struggle to relearn that it is okay to save something for later.
After I stop playing, I see another doctor about the knee that has been bothering me now for years. Injections like the ones you were given can cause damage, he says. Many doctors would refuse to administer those injections to someone your age. I nod. I did know this, do know this. I am a different person now, I assure him, laughing. I try to balance my respect for this former self while demonstrating my newfound maturity. I have all the time in the world now. But back then, I tell him, I had to play. I can hear his patience wearing thin when he replies: And many sports medicine doctors would agree that there is no such thing in this world as had to play. It occurs to me that I might still be discovering the extent of my sacrifice, the ways in which my body has been damaged. I am still trying to teach it that I can be kind, I have to remind it that I know and respect its limits, that I want to live a long life together.
The phrase arrival fallacy is used to describe the illusion that once you have accomplished a goal, you will feel satisfied or at peace with where you are, that you will stop desiring. What really happens is that you become adjusted to your new state and a fresh disappointment creeps in. It is hard to distinguish between wanting, the idea of wanting, and the habit of wanting. Is there an end point? Not where one has played the best soccer, but where one has played enough? Throughout my career I sensed there was some threshold I hadn’t crossed, some door I hadn’t yet opened. Behind it, I imagined, was a room in which everything I desired took shape, a room in which I’d have arrived. I thought it would feel like being welcomed into a warm home, fireplace burning, the murmuring voices of everyone I admired. The word arrival is derived from the Latin arripare, to touch the shore after a long voyage. Arrival is an ending, a return. Arrival is coming home.
Landing in Bergen for my final season. The plane dipped down and I felt the shadow of a truth: my days were numbered. At times I really was overwhelmed by unmitigated gratitude. Ambition, negotiation, tough-minded feminism, these gave way to moments of childish joy. I was getting paid to do something I had loved since I was four years old. What else had I loved so unconditionally, for so long? I was so lucky to be here. From the plane I could see green islands scattered across the sea. I marveled at each tree as it came into view, a solid green mass soon recognizable as thousands of individual conifers. I saw soccer fields lit up from above, little beacons announcing themselves over and over again. Four lights and an unnatural green ringed by a track pulsing with activity, even at night when the streets had gone dark. Cars like ants, houses like boxes, people invisible, fields like beacons. The shape, the outline, called to me, still calls. We are here, we are still here.
Georgia Cloepfil’s nonfiction debut, The Striker and the Clock, is forthcoming from Riverhead (U.S.) and Bloomsbury (U.K.). Her other writing can be found in The Yale Review, The New York Times Magazine, n+1, Colorado Review, Joyland and Epiphany among other places. Select essays have been featured on Longreads, The Rumpus, and WBUR Boston’s Only a Game. She holds an MFA from the University of Idaho.
