The Goalkeeper’s
Guide to Absurdism

I have a complicated relationship with football. I like it best in short, intense bursts  like a World Cup every four years and then I forget about it almost entirely until the next one.

So it took a radio drama about Albert Camus playing goalkeeper to remind me why the sport is indeed the most beautiful of sports in the world.

Last week I listened to a BBC Radio 4 program called Goalkeeper's Guide to Absurdism, about Albert Camus, who was a goalkeeper for the Racing Universitaire d'Alger junior side before tuberculosis ended his playing days at seventeen. Camus later said that what he knew most surely about morality and the duty of man, he learnt from football.

After listenting to this radio drama, I can see why. A goalkeeper occupies a strange position in the metaphysics of a football match, most of the game is happening far away from you, out of your control, and your job is to stand there in the mud and wait, fully alert, for the one moment when it all comes crashing toward you and you have about half a second to decide what kind of person you're going to be. That's a great chamber for learning about the makings of a moral life. Most of it is waiting. The tests are sudden and short and you don't get a second chance at it.

This is also, not coincidentally, more or less the whole argument of The Myth of Sisyphus. The universe doesn't owe you a reason. The ball doesn't owe you a save.  Camus decided the response to a universe with no inherent meaning was not despair but effort in showing up, again, for the next cross into the box and the next attempt to make a change in the tiny spark that is your life.

I bring all this up because the World Cup is on right now, and my love for football has reignited again, and I feel like I am on a new change in my life. I never used to care for the sports, but I can see the beauty and philosophy in it.

So this World Cup, when I see Messi running towards the opposition’s goalie, I will be there with that goalkeeper and see him and feel for him a little more than I used to. He is, whether he knows it or not, living out a piece of philosophy that a sick young Algerian understood. The rock rolls back down. You walk down the hill after it.

You can listen to the whole episode below.