4/30/2023 0 Comments Gigi buffonIf you don’t project strength-if your back four don’t believe in you-you don’t get picked. To what degree do you conform, and to what degree do you rebel? What are the terms of entry? What scope is there for you to put your own stamp on things? How much are you compelled to embody its codes? All 17-year-old boys cultivate the tough guy persona-think of the incipient maskulinity of the inner-city amibovvered boys, ostentatiously displaying strength, usually as indifference (to be bothered is to show vulnerability, which makes you a soft touch)-and the 17-year-old Buffon, entering a Parma dressing room with Hristo Stoichkov, Fabio Cannavaro, Roberto Sensini, Fernando Couto, Tino Asprilla, Dino Baggio and Gianfranco Zola, had little choice but to do likewise. The ‘individual’ always emerges through socialisation, his integration into groups. Where in all that is the real Gigi? Where is the true self? But somewhere in all that, there we all are-you, me, Buffon, the Pope-trying to make sense of things: the events that happen to us, the events we help happen. Call them external and internal forces, if you like, or social and biological. Our most intimate personalities are just a negotiation between the supra-personal forces that shape our lives-from politics to peer pressures, technologies to taxation-and the sub-personal forces-hormones, urges, fantasies, neuroses, that nudge us along, acting in strange ways. Perhaps our personhood is just that: a performance for the Other, fuelled by our oddly insistent chemistry. The Latin persona, from which ‘person’ and ‘personality’ derive, originally meant ‘theatre mask’. I just couldn’t allow myself to go away for two or three months to get better.” Because every time after that, if I had failed with a save or whatever, I would have been reminded of that period. “The problem was if I had said: ‘I am going away for two months to get better’ I would have been finished. Given his reputation for invincibility, could Buffon admit he was depressed? He didn’t think so. It’s perhaps this fact more than any other that provides the most eloquent testament to his brilliance, the most succinct way of saying: Yeah, Buffon: pretty fucking decent, even if he’s never done it on an inclement Wednesday night in Stoke … Juventus knew it when they paid €53m (£32.2m) for his services in 2001, which still, 14 years of demented capitalist boom economics later, remains a world record fee for a goalkeeper by some €20m. Italy knew it from the moment he debuted for Parma at 17 years old and shut out the eventual champions’ Ballon D’Orsome forward line of George Weah and Roberto Baggio. ![]() If a tough guy goalkeeper with a penchant for ripping off his jersey to reveal Superman T-shirts one day admits he’s afraid of dying, would he be any easier to beat in a one-on-one? Is the aura he projects in order to psyche out his goal’s would-be assailants compromised by such a confession? Or, to reframe much the same question: how was it that Hartdog-he of the neck-bulging tunnel exhortations to “be fucking brave, lads”-failed to spook dinky little Pirlo from panenka-ing in his peno in Kiev that night? Bark worse than his bite?Įverybody knows Gigi Buffon is a great goalkeeper, perhaps the capo di tutti capi. Two and a half years later he's still playing. This was written for Issue 7 when it looked like Gigi was on the verge of retiring.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |