I am somewhat reluctant to pick on her, maybe because of her team’s name, but today’s quotation in the NYTimes from a suddenly notorious college soccer player is exactly what I am on about, in this blog: “I look at it [the replay of her controversial, but mostly un-carded game] and I’m like, ‘That is not me.’ I have so much regret. I can’t believe I did that.”
Remember, way back in one of my earliest posts, I recounted the retrospective musings of two female college applicants, who had been caught doing the same antisocial deed. One made a sincere attempt to understand “what got into her,” to provoke her to violate her own [and society’s] code of conduct. The other simply offered the Werewolf Defense: in so many words, “I have no idea. That is not me.”
To which I would reply, were I speaking to either that long-ago applicant or to today’s Girl Gone Wild, “That is, potentially, all of us, kiddo. Especially if we are unwilling to ‘do the wolf-work’ of reviewing the regrettable event, until we come to understand what got into us [up our nose].” If you look up accounts of that fateful game, you will see several clues, as to what “got up the nose” of this young athlete. In one instance, which led to her most aggressive response, her opponent executed a crafty “crotch grab” [as one sports reporter terms it]. Let’s do the wolf-work, shall we? Ya got yer intrusion, possibly yer pain, and I would guess some humiliation goin’ on. Three precursors to anger, delivered in one, surreptitious movement, probably not visible to the ref. Maybe not even illegal, if seen. The point of this exercise in wolf-work is not to justify the player’s angry reaction, but to understand what prompted it. Not for you or me to understand it, sportsfans. For the suspended player to understand it, herself. So she doesn’t have to go through the rest of her life like a werewolf, crying “That is not me.”
How many of us find it totemic, that she was playing for the Lobos?