What’s Beard Reading? (3.04: “Big Week”)
“Sport,” Trent Crimm says at the close of Season 3, Episode 2. “It’s quite the metaphor.” With these words, Crimm puts a fine point on what we’ve known about Ted Lasso all along.
The show succeeds because it uses soccer as a lens for something bigger — the human condition, relationships, our moral obligations, excellence, competition, the criteria for and the limits of success, and much more.
That’s not to say soccer in Ted Lasso is merely a vehicle for these subjects, of only incidental importance in itself. Rather, the broader questions the show explores are bound up with the intimate and personal, the particular and specific. Soccer, in other words, is the outworking of these crucial issues, the embodiment and realization of underlying truths, the field on which the characters bring them to fruition. Or, as Dani Rojas puts it, “Fútbol is life!”
All great sportswriters know this and seek to draw out those larger themes by digging deeper into their subjects. Grant Wahl, celebrated soccer journalist and author of The Beckham Experiment (Coach Beard’s read for last week’s episode), epitomized this approach in his decades long career. Many will recognize Wahl as the reporter who died unexpectedly and far too young while covering the World Cup in Qatar last December. Tributes to his work were quite moving, and by all accounts his work pushed soccer out of the shadows in American culture.
It’s fitting, then, that Ted Lasso dedicated Season 3, Episode 4 (“Big Week”) to Wahl. But the connection goes even further. Wahl, it turns out, was instrumental in shaping this year’s storyline for Trent Crimm who, as we know, has been given extraordinary access in what will presumably be Richmond’s Cinderella season. There are other parallels between Wahl’s work and the Lasso series, notably the disruption that Zava causes to the team’s cohesion and the cross-cultural conflicts large and small that are the show’s bread and butter. As the title of Wahl’s 2009 bestseller indicates, the focuses on David Beckham’s shocking move from Real Madrid to LA Galaxy and how this soccer phenom turned celebrity disrupted the sport and risked leaving “the glamour of European soccer to play in a country that has yet to fully embrace the sport,” as Amazon describes it.
It’s not so neat and tidy as the Beckham = Zava equation I’ve seen tossed around, but surely Trent Crimm is meant to channel Wahl. And just as Wahl faces squarely the economic disparities and special privileges afforded Beckham, so, too, does Lasso acknowledge that team members have lives beyond the pitch. The show is at its best when it explores the relationship between the two, in fact, and I think that whatever they gleaned from Wahl and his work only bodes well for what’s to come.
Additional links to articles about Wahl and The Beckham Experiment:
“Ted Lasso Dedicated an Episode to a Journalist Who Helped the Show Solve Trent Crimm” by Steve Greene
“Read This Book: ‘The Beckham Experiment,’ by Grant Wahl,” review by Mark Kirby
“Q & A with Grant Wahl, Author of ‘The Beckham Experiment,” by Jack Bell
Other Installments of “What’s Beard Reading?” (for Season 3):
Episode 1, “Smells Like Mean Spirit”
Episode 2, “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea”
Episode 7, “The Strings That Bind Us”
Episode 8, “We’ll Never Have Paris”
Episode 9, “La Locker Room Aux Folles”
