This is a lovely 'meander' of a post,Christopher! Ain't got the time to give it's full due, but one part reminds of 'coaching' basketball with high school kids in the 70's. There was a kind of movement rgwb - emanating from Berkeley,of course - in which folks were trying to reverse the super-star spectacle from overtaking  the love of playing  the game with one another. So, for example, when a kid, before going up for a shot  announced he was 'Michael Jordan' or whoever - essentially degrading or erasing himself- we would call him on it, and insist that he call himself by his own name.  We did other things, as well. Integrated the teams with men and women - not for equality sake - but to see how the female and male combinations would change the physical  interactions and kind of  play on the court.  Once I got a group of jazz muscians - a group called Circus that liked to do off-stage, environmentally centered outdoor, floating street events - to position themselves around
 the sides and ends of the court (for a 'full-court' game). I had the  naive assumption that the players would let their bodies and moves respond to the shapes of the music while they played. Ironically, it was just the opposite, the music made them run up and down the court at double speed until people quickly fell down from exhaustion.
 Now that was a spectacle!
 
 One last note re West Africa - where I taught in a Nigerian univsersity for a couple of years. With good students who wanted to study abroad for graduate school, I was often asked and happily wrote many letters of recommendation to help them along the academic route. Several went to England and the States, and many of those now have led distinguished careers in this diaspora (it is very hard professionally to go back). Which is why I get uncomfortable with the condescending, even when humorus,parroting of stereotypes of Nigerian hustlers. Under much of the 'hustle' is a real despair about living in a difficult post-colonial trap in which the West, and now the whole globe is, via particularly Oil Company exploitation on all levels, is utterly complicit.  So I tend to back away from those kinds of stories. Christopher I tell this not to degrade the value of your story of the young man, and your inter-action, but to bring another angle on it. 
 
 Stephen V
  http://stephenvincent.net/blog/

Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote: I once had an email discussion with a West African active in advance fee
frauds. After we'd got past all the zillions soon to be mine (he'd take 30%
or so but what the hell? I could afford it) and conceded that this was
rubbish, he told me that what he actually wanted was to become a
professional football player. He sent me photographs of a rather winsome
person, possibly himself, dressed in a blue sports shirt plus a rather
fetching pair of shorts with yellow piping. He was open to being funded, he
told me. Even a very small amount. If everyone gave just a little...

Second anecdote: I once possessed a very tiny snippet from an interview with
Ry Cooder (I'd recorded it by accident) in which he said, if I recall. 'What
people really want is just to see the artist get up there and blow his
brains out.' I'm interested in that 'just'.

From my perspective, the lad putting on an Arsenal shirt (logo: 'Fly
Emirates') to watch a televised match and the lad playing air guitar in his
bedroom are probably quite similar. The emulated performer is a protagonist
for a life more passively led. Which isn't to say either that aspiration and
the sense that someone's reach exceeds what you can grasp are necessarily
bad things or that there are no qualities in sport that don't go beyond the
scoresheet, including complex emotions. However, somewhere in all this
there's also a (political) tussle between *participation* on the one hand
and *representation* on the other in which the announced passivity of the
spectacle seems to be taking over. In crude terms, a shift from elitism
towards mass entertainment appears to have been matched by a comparable
shift from active participation towards passivity in the face of
representation. A bad thing representation, because it eats at the soul.

At any rate, now that I've skirted Debord, back again to D&G.

The sporting analogies to the emergence of  what D&G term 'minor literature'
seem to me quite odd, with the activities that actually constitute what we
call 'sport' rather less than centre stage. There's the Mexican wave, for
example: originally (1970s??) a sort of coming to of the consciousness
shared by the audience. Then there's the British tradition of heroic
failure, Eddie the Eagle, Tim Henman, as a sequence of wry commentaries, as
though from the side of the road, upon unending progress and success, which
is what is valued in sport:

'I remember, in fact, one gloomy afternoon,
Me, with my friend Culo di Gomma, a famous mechanic,
By the side of some road, contemplating America,
The decline in the horses, the increasing optimism.'
(Francesco de Gregori: Buffalo Bill)

Or there's Luther Blissett, Jamaican/English footballer who played for
Watford during the 70s and early 80s as it moved inexorably from the bottom
division onwards and upwards into the top. In 1983 he transferred to Milan
for a year or so where he suffered racist abuse and had his name
appropriated by fare dodgers, hoaxers, radical activists and eventually by a
number of writers, including those of the bestselling *Q*. In 2004 he
appeared on *Fantasy Football League* claiming to be 'Luther Blissett' as
well as Luther Blissett.

FWIW the Sky sports show *Soccer AM* either has (or maybe it had) a 'Luther
Blissett stand'.

I suspect I have written enough.

CW
_______________________________________________

'How to speak a different language and still be understood?
This is *communication* but we might call it politics, or we
might call it life.' (Judith Revel)