{"id":141628,"date":"2020-01-03T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2020-01-03T16:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=141628"},"modified":"2019-12-17T16:05:05","modified_gmt":"2019-12-17T21:05:05","slug":"they-think-they-know-you-lionel-messi-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/03\/they-think-they-know-you-lionel-messi-2\/","title":{"rendered":"They Think They Know You, Lionel Messi"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 6, but we\u2019re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Lionel Messi. Photo: David Ramos.<\/p><\/div>\n

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You\u2019re in one place, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You\u2019re in one place and you\u2019re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you\u2019ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on\u2014you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting\u2014is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate you. The pontificators and the screamers have their say. Some of us have no interest in you, but the simulacrum makes sure we know who you are. We parse from all of this what we consider pleasure: love, hate, indifference. You\u2019re standing in one place, one patch of grass on a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville, playing a game, which is to say doing your job, which is playing a game. A ball floats in the air toward you. You\u2019re in one place and you\u2019re in all possible places. Your name is stamped between your shoulder blades. You turn your back away from the ball.\u00a0We all know who you are. You balance yourself and focus. What you\u2019re about to do has no name.<\/p>\n

Read more >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our favorite poet\/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on\u00a0Lionel Messi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":457,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[60329],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2019"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThey Think They Know You, Lionel Messi by Rowan Ricardo Phillips<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Our favorite poet\/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on\u00a0Lionel Messi.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/01\/03\/they-think-they-know-you-lionel-messi-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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