“Obra de arte yo too”: Eduardo Mendicutti on soccer, glamour, and the “Beckham effect”

ABSTRACT

La Susi en el vestuario blanco (2003) is a fictional chronicle of life in the Real Madrid locker room, a privileged insight into the sanctum sanctorum of the world's richest soccer team. The hiring of Susi as glamour coach ostensibly aims to boost the competitive advantage of the galácticos in foreign as well as local markets (reflecting the reality of the club at the time). In Mendicutti's homoeroticizing gaze, it also serves to uncover the homophobic substrate reportedly still common in male team sports and teases at the anxieties of the players. This article explores the peculiar function of Susi as she sets the comic tone of the work and engages with the varied virilities before her. It examines the notions of “glamour” and “identification” both as tongue-in-cheek team objectives and as phenomena with wider relevance for the way spectators relate to sport and players relate to the world around them.

KEYWORDS:

• Homophobia
• humor
• Eduardo Mendicutti
• Real Madrid
• soccer
• Susi

Acknowledgment

This article is dedicated in memory of Brian J. Dendle.

Notes

1. Mendicutti's work has often been situated within the “camp” aesthetic by critics (see, among others, Ingenschay on Yo no tengo la culpa de haber nacido tan sexy). I have chosen to take this as read in the case of La Susi rather than attempt a close analysis that would inevitably bring into play contrasting understandings of what “camp” might be. As Sontag says, “[t]o talk about Camp is... to betray it” (275).

2. Gumbrecht is Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford. In his articles on team sports (“Epiphany of Form”; “Aesthetic Experience”), in Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, and in his more populist “self-help book” In Praise of Athletic Beauty, Gumbrecht is very consciously in dialogue with a range of cultural theorists whom he deems less than respectful of sport's singularity. Gumbrecht strives for a language and a renewed understanding of the sporting phenomenon that is respectful of sport's fundamental materiality. In so doing, he implicitly rejects, or at least seeks to balance, Jean Baudrillard's pessimistic conviction that sport can now be only consumed “rather than appreciated as play” (Global Game online), as well as Eco's similar and earlier views of sport as hyperreality (see, for example, “Sports Chatter” and “The World Cup and Its Pomps” from Eco's Travels in Hyperreality). Alexander Regier refers to Gumbrecht's concern with “finding a vocabulary for aesthetic, affective experience” (30), and of Gumbrecht's Production of Presence, he notes that “[f]amiliar figures that are singled out for criticism include Roger Caillois, Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu. They all attempt a detached analysis of sport as a phenomenon best described, respectively, as a form of the sacred, bodily subjugation, or as ways of social differentiation” (Regier 27–28). As an indication of the dearth of female voices talking and writing about sport in this area, all articles in the special journal number from which this quotation is taken are male-authored, and so, too, are the sport-related articles in Mendes and Rocha (eds.). The latter volume examines Gumbrecht's importance in the Lusophone context.

3. Susi is an alter ego, but she does also demonstrate a certain autonomy, referring on occasion to Mendicutti the journalist, e.g., “Bueno, yo espero que al menos no lo echen de este periódico por mi culpa” (La Susi 139).

4. Mendicutti explains Susi's genesis: “el personaje de la Susi está directamente inspirado en el personaje central y narrador de una de mis novelas. Esa novela es Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera y el personaje ‘La Madelón,’ un travesti bastante dislocado, pero con un enorme y admirable sentido de la libertad, de la dignidad, de la rebeldía” (“Buscando a la Susi” 45).

5. “[Q]uiero resaltar que la primera condición que yo puse, antes de comprometerme a escribir de forma habitual en el periódico, era hacerlo con absoluta libertad. Y jamás he sufrido ninguna presión, ninguna regañina – incluso en las ocasiones en las que me he equivocado gravemente, que las ha habido –, ninguna consigna, nada que pueda parecerse ni lejanamente a una censura, por parte del periódico” (“Buscando a la Susi” 44).

6. As part of his election strategy, Laporta had promised to bring Beckham to Barcelona, but when Beckham went instead to Madrid, he signed Ronaldinho from Paris Saint-Germain.

7. Florentino Pérez's men clearly had different priorities from those of the players; the subtitle of Torres's article is unequivocal in this sense: “Los ejecutivos del Madrid, contra lo que opinan los jugadores, desprecian al ídolo que no ficharon.”

8. Susi refers to Beckham using the Valencian term “ninot indultat,” which is the life-sized (or bigger) papier-mâché figure spared the bonfire on March 19 every year, the final day of the Valencian “Falles.” This allusion to the long history of constructing, and burning, three-dimensional caricatures underlines Mendicutti's grounding of La Susi in “Spanish” popular traditions (traditions extant in Spain), while simultaneously treating issues of global significance. At the same time, the metaphor of “being burned”—by unwanted media attention or as the result of professional ostracism—is underscored.

9. José Luis Pérez Triviño underlines this: “Hay pocos ámbitos sociales donde la imaginería homosexual esté más manifiesta que en el deporte, y en especial, el fútbol. Sin embargo, es el territorio machista por excelencia.”

10. The FA has an LGBT action plan within its equality brief, but its commitment to tackling homophobia in the game is much less high-profile than, for example, the campaign against racism. Similarly, the FARE Network (Football Against Racism in Europe), which is backed by UEFA, acts as an umbrella organization to counter all forms of intolerance, but it is largely unknown among soccer fans.

11. Feminism was an initial point of entry for critical studies in this regard. See, for example, Messner and Sabo, and Griffin. More recent studies are legion, but see Cashmore and the work of Jennifer Hargreaves, Daniel Burdsey, and Jayne Cauldwell.

12. Cashmore, for example, has written that “English soccer manifests an aggressive, almost virulent conception of masculinity that, it seems, it just can't shrug. Despite the global influences that have affected the way football is run and played since 1992, the essential manly character of the English game seems impervious” (144). This, paradoxically, is the tradition from which Mendicutti's glamour catalyst, David Beckham, is drawn. See also Giles Tremlett's article in the Guardian (online) for more on Beckham, and also on the “penya.”

13. The complete list is: sculpted bodies; suffering in the face of death; grace; tools that enhance the body's potential; embodied forms; plays as epiphanies; good timing. These are “phenomena that lie somewhere between performance and the act of judging it” (Praise 151).

14. The sketch can be viewed on YouTube.

15. See, for example, Lowe's blog in the Guardian.

16. See Crackòvia, various episodes, available via the TV3 website (www.tv3.cat). The magic mirror episode is available via YouTube.

17. “Winker” is wordplay on “winger” and an allusion to (what was perceived to be) Ronaldo's wink in the direction of England's Wayne Rooney as the latter was sent off against Portugal in the 2006 World Cup.