The career of high-profile U.S. women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe ended anticlimactically on Saturday night, as she was brought down by an Achilles injury six minutes into her final match. For her, the conclusion is obvious: There is no God. Per Fox News:
In the post-match press conference, Rapinoe said she was going to get the “Aaron Rodgers treatment” to try and recover from the injury. She said she’d reach out to him or whoever did his surgery.
“I’m not a religious person or anything and if there was a god, like, this is proof that there isn’t,” Rapinoe said. “This is f—ed up. It’s just f—ed up. Six minutes in and I eat my Achilles.”
From the video of Rapinoe’s remarks, it’s hard to tell if she is being facetious as a kind of coping mechanism, or being sincere. One hopes it is the former. Because the latter is a spiritually barren and personally decrepit way of looking at the world.
It’s a way I can at least comprehend, however. My own career as an athlete, such as it is, has been full of disappointments, setbacks, and even Rapinoesque freak injuries. I’m sufficiently superstitious that I’m afraid even to mention them, though I’m sure I’ll have more regardless. And I can’t say I’ve always been the best at dealing with them. We who train ourselves to be the best that we can be at a sport often become obsessive, even monomaniacal, pouring much of our life’s energy into the pursuit. When things are going well, it can quite easily feel that one has earned God’s favor, and that one’s success is proof of one’s alignment with Providence. The risk of this high is the corresponding low: that mishaps or misfortune are the result of some moral failing, or testaments to the cruelty and/or indifference of the universe. It’s especially raw when, after trying to subordinate so many variables to our personal control, we are waylaid by one we cannot. So I get this tendency.
Which is why I reject it. Rapinoe at least seems to be sincere when she claims not to be a believer. So she is probably unaware of the ancient conversations about theodicy: i.e., trying to explain why bad things happen. Many believers struggle with this as well but have enough faith in the workings of Providence to find meaning and purpose in even the most dire struggles and hardships. Tolle lege the Book of Job, Megan.
Even putting theology aside, however, there’s nothing uplifting about this way of reacting to adversity. By imagining all the world as revolving around one person, it is selfish. By viewing reality through only one prism (competitive athletics), it is obsessive. And by limiting its time horizon to a single event, it is stunted. In dwelling on this concluding calamity, Rapinoe sidelines the entire rest of her career, one full of events she surely considers triumphs. The very fact that she made it that far was an improbability. Countless other soccer players, many doubtless assured of their abilities and dedicated to the game, never made it even close to her level of renown.
It may not be the ideal ending, but such an experience is rare in life. Try as we might, there is much we can’t control. But we can control our attitude. Rapinoe’s flippant and narcissistic despair is a bad example for athletes everywhere. They ought instead to try humility, gratitude, and a belief that there are bigger things in life than a game, and even than oneself.
Megan Rapinoe Closes Her Soccer Career by Being a Bad Role Model
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14.11.2023
The career of high-profile U.S. women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe ended anticlimactically on Saturday night, as she was brought down by an Achilles injury six minutes into her final match. For her, the conclusion is obvious: There is no God. Per Fox News:
In the post-match press conference, Rapinoe said she was going to get the “Aaron Rodgers treatment” to try and recover from the injury. She said she’d reach out to him or whoever did his surgery.
“I’m not a religious person or anything and if there was a god, like, this is proof that there isn’t,” Rapinoe said. “This is f—ed up. It’s just f—ed up. Six minutes in and I eat my Achilles.”
From the video of Rapinoe’s remarks, it’s hard to tell if she is being facetious as a kind of coping mechanism, or being sincere. One hopes it is the former. Because........
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